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glossary

DevOps

A culture and set of practices that unites software development and IT operations, using automation, CI/CD, and shared ownership to ship reliable software faster and shorten feedback loops between code and production.

In depth

DevOps emerged as a response to the traditional wall between developers who write code and operations teams who run it. Instead of handing software over a fence, DevOps teams share responsibility for the entire lifecycle: building, testing, deploying, operating, and improving. The approach leans heavily on automation, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and automated testing, so that changes move from a developer's laptop to production quickly and safely. Equally important is the cultural side: blameless postmortems, small frequent releases, and measuring outcomes with metrics like deployment frequency and change failure rate. DevOps is not a single tool or job title but a way of working that reduces friction between writing software and operating it. Most modern practices such as SRE, GitOps, and platform engineering build on DevOps foundations.

Why it matters

Organizations that adopt DevOps ship features faster, recover from failures sooner, and have fewer change-related outages. The DORA research program has repeatedly shown that elite DevOps performers deploy far more often with lower failure rates. For engineers, DevOps skills are among the most in-demand in the industry.

Real-world example

example.txt

A retail company moves from quarterly releases to daily deployments. Developers push code to Git, a CI pipeline runs tests and builds a container image, and an automated pipeline deploys to staging and then production behind feature flags. When a bug slips through, the team rolls back in minutes and runs a blameless postmortem to fix the pipeline gap.

Tools related to DevOps

JenkinsGitHub ActionsDockerKubernetesTerraformAnsible

Interview questions

  1. What is DevOps and how does it differ from traditional software delivery?
  2. Explain the four DORA metrics and why they matter.
  3. How would you design a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application?
  4. What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?
  5. Describe a time you automated a manual operations process. What was the impact?
  6. How do blameless postmortems improve team culture?