Ever since its conception in 2009, the term DevOps has acted as a significant part of IT and technology culture. The term was birthed as a combination of –– you guessed it –– developer and IT operations teams. It’s defined as a “combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity.”

DevOps began as a tool to be able to simultaneously address the processes of both software development and IT operations, rather than having them exist as completely separate, siloed units. The unity of development and operations teams can have benefits. According to IT Pro Portal, “there is a continuous loop of improvement, development, testing, and deployment. Rather than the Dev and Ops being in opposition, they are pulling forward in the same direction. These efforts can result in the continual release of necessary feature changes or additions.”   

Successful DevOps thus gives companies the opportunity to streamline their front- and back-end processes and work towards digital transformation under a unified front. Enterprisers Project suggests that “DevOps culture and methodology prizes speed, experimentation, and collaboration, all happening on cross-functional teams”, as teams are often in charge of automating “processes that historically have been manual and slow” to continually improve apps.  

Additionally, the tools involved in DevOps can facilitate things like better team collaboration, a more stable operating environment, increased time to market, and more time to innovate.