Before DevOps, software developers relied heavily on sequential, manual processes like the Waterfall model, where distinct phases—coding, testing, deployment—kept teams separated and extended delivery timelines. This rigid structure often led to inefficiencies, delayed releases, and misaligned priorities between development and operations, prompting a rethink toward more integrated, collaborative approaches.
DevOps grew out of the need to bridge development and operations, starting as an idea to speed up software cycles in the early 2000s and becoming standard practice today. Fueled by the push for agility and better tools, it’s now the go-to for delivering fast, dependable software that keeps organizations competitive.
Among the benefits, successful DevOps adoption drives faster, more dependable software deployment and delivery, increased operational efficiency and reduced security and compliance risks.
This flourishing IT philosophy can transform an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at pace and scale. As well as a tech phenomenon, it’s now a strong career prospect, accessible to a broad spectrum of IT professionals. But DevOps rapid rise to the top has meant many organizations and professionals occupying the IT space need to get to grips with it—and fast.
In this blog, we’ll help you kickstart your DevOps journey, examining the meaning of DevOps, its technologies, and how it can help solve common business challenges.
What is DevOps?
DevOps—the unification of development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams—is a software development methodology that integrates and automates processes between development and IT teams through a combination of cultural philosophies, tools and practices. This approach is all about team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration and technology automation. An effective DevOps approach empowers organizations to build and deliver applications and services faster and more efficiently, driving both speed and quality in deployment.
Fundamental technologies and processes
At a distance, there are three main stages: build, test and deploy to reflect the natural order – i.e. build the code, then test and deploy it. However, if we look more closely, we will find more layers are attached to these three stages. All in all, there are nine key stages that you need to know. They include Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release or Deployment, Configure, Monitor, Protect, and Manage.
The stages operate in an ongoing cycle, with security woven into every stage of the process. When security is not an afterthought and runs throughout the process (as in a DevOps approach), issues, vulnerabilities and bugs are dealt with as they occur.
Key DevOps technologies you should understand
When discovering all you need to know about DevOps, you can’t fully understand it without reading up on the technologies that contribute to its success. Here are some of these key technologies in more detail.
- Source Code Management (SCM)
SCM is used to track modifications to a source code repository. It plays a crucial role in easing the organisational burden of growing development costs. It tracks a running history of changes to a code base, which helps resolve conflicts when merging updates from multiple contributors.
Code is separated and managed into projects and groups of projects. An individual developer checks out existing code or adds code to what’s there and the SCM tool identifies conflicting edits to the same code and flags it for resolution. It’s a process which enables many developers to work on one project, ultimately increasing the speed of software updates.
- Continuous integration (CI)
Continuous Integration (CI) is a core DevOps practice that keeps development fast, efficient, and reliable. It focuses on automating the integration of code changes from multiple developers into a shared project, ensuring that new code is consistently built, tested, and validated.
With CI, code changes are merged into a central mainline where automated tools quickly verify their accuracy through builds and tests. This early and continuous feedback loop helps teams catch security vulnerabilities and errors much sooner in the development lifecycle—reducing risk and simplifying fixes.
By combining automation with regular testing, CI enables faster iteration, smoother collaboration, and increased overall efficiency, laying a strong foundation for high-quality software delivery.
- Continuous delivery (CD)
CD is a software development process typically paired with CI to form a chain of processes for software development, deployment and feedback loops called a CI/CD pipeline. Once code has been tested and built as part of CI, CD is the next part of the process. It runs the final stages to check code is ready to deploy and can cover everything from provisioning the infrastructure to deploying the application to the testing or production environment. This approach means that development teams produce and test code in short but continuous cycles. It encourages more incremental updates and enables teams to build, test and reliably release software quickly and at any time.
- Automated testing
Automated testing is a process that certifies software is functioning appropriately and meeting requirements before it is released into production. Building it into the CI pipeline is critical for fast and high-quality delivery as it enables your teams to release higher quality code more frequently. With this in place, security issues are detected earlier, enabling your teams to deploy with confidence.
- Shifting security left
A shift left approach in DevOps incorporates security into the end-to-end automation. Often referred to as DevSecOps, shifting left integrates testing and the security review process earlier in the software development lifecycle. DevOps integrates security into your CI pipelines, testing code continuously. In doing so, your teams can deal with security issues as and when they arise, as opposed to at the end of the cycle as under the traditional software development model.
- Feedback
Feedback is an invaluable piece of the puzzle that’s essential for improving your overall DevOps process and user experience. A DevOps feedback loop is easy to navigate through rapid iterations and collaboration. It provides access to data that’s clear and easy to manage, so feedback is easier to incorporate and deliver improvements. Automating feedback is key, as it ensures quick information collection and distribution amongst the team. Teams can go forward and deliver updates in an efficient manner.
Problems solved by DevOps
Now let’s examine how DevOps works in the real-world by looking at some of the problems it can solve.
- Faster production cycles and increased value for customers
The constant, growing demand for new features from end users means to stay competitive businesses need to keep up with demand through enhanced and reliable services and products. Therefore, quality and time to market play crucial roles in whether a business is successful in staying competitive.
DevOps accelerates the production process through automation and closes the gap between the two formerly separated teams. With a shorter production cycle and automation of deployment pipelines, DevOps aids team productivity and encourages innovation. Plus, as a result of continuous testing and learning throughout the entire DevOps lifecycle, we see a reduction in errors and better operational efficiency – delivering value faster to customers. - Increased productivity equals better customer satisfaction
Consumer expectation is high in today’s fast-paced environment. The expectation is to deliver reliable services and fresh updates in the least amount of time. With that in mind, it’s difficult to imagine how spending months testing a new product or feature fits in in a competitive environment.
With DevOps you can test and prepare for production much quicker through automation and deployment of smaller fragments of code. Testing smaller features continuously and making incremental changes to applications helps identify what’s working faster and earlier in the cycle, which simplifies the production process and reduces the delivery time. - Reduced costs through faster time to market
In principle, through substantial culture change and investment, DevOps will reduce development time and multiply the number of releases per year. By accelerating new features’ time to market, companies can be more responsive to their customers’ needs and compete on innovation. Furthermore, process automation and continuous testing and improvement reduces downtime and increases security and compliance, resulting in lower operations costs. - Improved quality through test automation
With continuous testing throughout the entire production process, your teams can integrate customer feedback and test smaller fragments of new code alongside the current version. This helps speed up the processes of implementing new features and making security updates to existing products. - Improving problem resolution Successful DevOps thrives on close collaboration and a strong sense of shared responsibility. When development and operations teams communicate and work together seamlessly, they solve problems faster, build higher-quality code, and deliver more reliable applications. This alignment also minimizes organizational friction, creating a smoother, more efficient workflow.
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