If your business has a website, an app or any software your team relies on, you may have heard the term DevOps and wondered what is DevOps, exactly. You have probably felt the frustration when a simple update takes weeks, or a small change breaks something that was working fine. The people who build the software and the people who keep it running often seem to work in different worlds, and your business pays the price in delays and downtime.
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices and tools that connects software development with IT operations. In plain terms, it helps the people who write software and the people who run it work as one team, so an organisation can build, test and release software faster and more reliably.
This guide explains what DevOps means in plain English, why the two sides need to work together, the practices that make it work, the challenges to expect and the practical first steps you can take.
What is DevOps, actually?
"DevOps" blends "development" and "operations". Development is the work of designing and writing code. Operations is the work of running that software day to day, keeping servers healthy, managing releases, fixing outages and keeping systems secure.
As Amazon Web Services defines it, DevOps is "the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity." Remember the three parts in that definition: culture, practices and tools. No single product covers them all. DevOps is a way of organising people and work, supported by technology.
Think of it like a small bakery. One person bakes the bread and another serves the customers. If the baker never talks to the person at the counter, they might bake forty loaves of a flavour nobody is buying, while the bestseller sells out by nine in the morning. When the two talk every day, the baker makes what customers actually want. Software works the same way. When the people who write the code and the people who run it talk every day, the software gets better faster.
In a traditional setup, developers write code and throw it over the wall to an operations team to deploy and maintain. The developers move on to the next feature while someone else deals with whatever breaks. DevOps breaks that wall down. Both groups share responsibility for the software, from the first line of code through to how it performs for real users.
Why development and operations need to collaborate
When developers and operations staff work in isolation, the same problems keep appearing. Developers are rewarded for shipping features quickly. Operations teams are rewarded for keeping systems stable. Those goals pull in opposite directions, so the handoff between them becomes a source of friction: delayed releases, finger-pointing over bugs, and slower fixes because nobody owns the whole picture.
For example, say you run a small online shop. Your developer finishes a new checkout feature on a Friday afternoon and hands it over. The person who runs the website deploys it, and on Saturday morning customers start reporting that their payments are failing. The developer says the code worked on their machine. The operations person says the live system is different from the test system. Meanwhile your customers are leaving, and nobody can agree on whose problem it is. That is what happens when the two sides work apart.
DevOps answers this with a shared goal: software that works well for the customer, delivered quickly and safely. Many teams merge developers and operations engineers into one group that owns the software's full lifecycle, writing, deploying, running and fixing it. Even where teams stay separate, they plan together and share responsibility for outcomes, so a failure is the team's problem, not someone else's.
The business payoff is straightforward. When the people who build software also help run it, they learn from real-world behaviour faster. A developer who sees how their code performs for real customers writes better code next time. When the people who run it are involved from the start, systems are designed for reliability rather than patched after the fact. Fewer surprises, faster fixes and calmer releases are the result.
DevOps practices in plain English: automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery
DevOps practices are the working methods that turn collaboration into a repeatable routine. The three most important are automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery. Here is what each one means in practice.
DevOps automation: DevOps automation means letting software do the repetitive jobs in the software-building process: compiling code, running tests, setting up servers and deploying updates. An automated step does the same thing every time, removing manual work error and freeing people up for work that needs judgement. A person might forget a step at five o'clock on a Friday. A script does not. This is narrower than general workflow automation, which is covered separately in this series. Here automation applies to building and releasing software, not to your invoices or holiday requests.
Continuous integration (CI): Continuous integration means developers regularly merge code changes into a shared central repository, after which automated builds and tests run against them. That is the definition used by AWS. Think of it like saving a shared document frequently. If five people edit the same document and nobody saves their work for a month, merging it all together at the end is a nightmare. If everyone saves little and often, problems surface early, while they are small, instead of exploding on release day when everyone's work collides. Continuous integration works the same way for code.
Continuous delivery (CD): Continuous delivery takes the idea one step further. Once changes are built and tested, they are also prepared for release to production, the live environment customers use. The software stays releasable, so deploying becomes routine rather than a risky launch every few months. Many organisations release small updates weekly or even daily. A small update is easy to understand, easy to test and easy to undo if something goes wrong.
Teams also monitor the live software closely, collecting data on its health and errors, and use that feedback to guide the next round of improvements. Monitoring is like the dashboard in your car. You would not drive for months without glancing at the warning lights, and you should not run software without watching how it is performing either. When the numbers show something is slowing down or failing, the team knows about it before customers start complaining.
How DevOps can support more reliable software delivery
Releasing more often leading to fewer disasters may sound counterintuitive, but small, frequent releases are easier to test, easier to understand and easier to roll back. A failed release touching a handful of changes is a quick fix. One bundling months of work is a crisis.
Say your online shop needs a new delivery option added at checkout. In the old way of working, that change might sit in a queue for three months, then go live at the same time as a new design, a price change and a security update. If something breaks, nobody knows which change caused it. With continuous delivery, the delivery option goes live on its own, on a Tuesday, in a small update. If it breaks, the team knows exactly what changed and can roll it back in minutes.
Automated tests catch mistakes before they reach customers, and automated deployments follow the same steps every time, so manual-setup surprises disappear. When a human deploys software by hand, the steps depend on who is doing it and what kind of day they are having. When software deploys software, the steps are the same on Monday morning and Friday evening.
The DORA programme, DevOps Research and Assessment at Google Cloud, has surveyed tens of thousands of professionals on what drives delivery performance. Its 2023 survey found collaborative teams achieved 30% higher organisational performance, yet only 31% of organisations could deploy on demand and just 18% reached change lead times under a day. That means roughly seven in ten organisations still cannot deploy whenever they need to, and more than four in five take a day or longer to get a change live. Elite performance is achievable but takes sustained investment (DevOps.com, DORA).
What DevOps is not
Three misconceptions are worth clearing up before you go any further.
Not a single tool or product: Many tools support DevOps practices, including version control, automated testing, deployment pipelines and monitoring. But buying a tool does not make an organisation "do DevOps". A team can buy the most expensive deployment software on the market and still throw work over the wall. Tools help. Culture and practices do the heavy lifting.
Not a guarantee: DevOps does not guarantee a particular outcome. It improves the odds of faster, more reliable delivery, but results depend on implementation quality, people and the organisation's starting point. It is an approach, not a promise. If someone tells you a tool or a method will guarantee results, be sceptical.
Not just for technology companies: Any organisation that builds or maintains software, from retailers to healthcare providers, can benefit from tighter collaboration between the people who build its systems and the people who keep them running. If your business depends on software, even software someone else built for you, the way your teams work together around it matters.
Common challenges when adopting DevOps
Adopting DevOps is genuinely hard, and honesty about the obstacles helps an organisation prepare. Here are the four challenges that come up most often, and what helps with each one.
Culture: Culture is the biggest challenge. Moving from siloed teams to shared ownership requires real behavioural change, and change meets resistance. People who have worked one way for years do not change overnight. DORA's research consistently names culture one of the strongest predictors of performance. It cannot be skipped. What helps is starting with a small team that wants to try, giving them real ownership, and letting their results make the case to everyone else.
Skills: Skills come next. DevOps asks developers to understand operations and vice versa, so organisations must invest in training, mentoring and sometimes new hires. A developer who never thought about servers needs time to learn. An operations engineer who has never written a test needs time too. What helps is pairing people up so they learn from each other on real work, rather than sending everyone on a training course and hoping for the best.
Processes: Processes need reworking too. Manual approval chains, separate budgets and quarterly release schedules all fight the DevOps model, and realigning them takes deliberate effort. If every release still needs three signatures and a monthly change meeting, automation will not speed anything up. What helps is mapping the current process with both sides in the room and removing the steps that exist out of habit rather than need.
Legacy systems: Finally, legacy systems are a practical obstacle. Older systems were built before automation was practical, and retrofitting them is slow and expensive. Most organisations start DevOps on newer projects and modernise the rest gradually. That is a sensible approach. You do not need to rebuild everything at once, and trying to do so is a good way to stall the whole effort.
Practical first steps for an organisation exploring DevOps
You do not need to transform your whole business at once. Start small and practical:
- Get the two sides talking. Map how a release happens today with both sides in the room. The map usually reveals quick wins. You might find that a release waits two days for a sign-off nobody actually needs. Write the steps down, agree on what is slow or confusing, and fix the easiest problem first.
- Pick one pilot project. Choose a small, low-risk service to try DevOps practices on first. A pilot lets teams learn without betting the business on an unfamiliar way of working. A good pilot is something real enough to matter but small enough that a mistake will not cause serious damage, such as an internal tool or a minor part of your website.
- Automate one thing. Start with the most painful manual step, often testing or deployment. One success builds confidence for the next. If testing takes a whole day of clicking through screens by hand, automating that one job can free up hours every week and show the team what automation is worth.
- Adopt version control and CI basics. If the team is not sharing code through version control with automated builds and tests, that is the foundation everything else rests on. Without it, continuous integration is not possible, and every release stays a manual scramble. Get this in place before you worry about anything more advanced.
- Measure what matters. Track release frequency, change lead time, failure rate and recovery time. These match DORA's four measures, and they show whether your efforts are working. If you are releasing more often, getting changes live faster and recovering from failures more quickly, DevOps is working. If the numbers are not moving, something in the approach needs adjusting, and the numbers will tell you where to look.
- Invest in the culture, not just the tools. Give the pilot team real ownership and make sure leadership visibly backs the experiment. Without cultural support, the tools will not stick. A team that is told to collaborate but still judged only on shipping features fast will go straight back to the old way of working.
A good place to start is the release that causes the most complaints. Ask both sides which step they dread, and fix that one first.
The Bottom Line
DevOps brings software development and IT operations together through shared culture, collaborative practices and smart automation. Continuous integration and continuous delivery make releases smaller, safer and more routine. But DevOps is a way of working, not a product, and culture, skills, processes and legacy systems all need honest effort to make it stick.
For most organisations the right move is modest: pick a pilot, automate the biggest pain point, measure the results and build from there. The aim is not overnight transformation. It is a team that learns from every release, and delivers a little better each time.
Sources
- https://aws.amazon.com/devops/?nc1=f_dr
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/introduction-devops-aws/introduction-to-devops.html
- https://DORA.dev/research/2024/dora-report/
- https://devops.com/latest-dora-report-highlights-importance-of-devops-culture
