Introduction to DevOps

Introduction to DevOps #

DevOps is the practice of improving how teams plan, build, secure, release, and operate software.

At its core, DevOps combines:

  • Culture: shared ownership across engineering, operations, and security
  • Practices: CI/CD, feedback loops, automation, incident learning
  • Tooling: version control, pipelines, containers, IaC, observability

Why DevOps matters #

Modern software businesses compete on speed and reliability. DevOps helps teams:

  • Ship features faster with lower risk
  • Improve service availability and performance
  • Reduce manual work through automation
  • Build confidence through repeatable delivery systems

The DevOps lifecycle #

  1. Plan – define goals, requirements, and measurable outcomes
  2. Code – build with quality, security, and maintainability in mind
  3. Build – automate packaging and artifact creation
  4. Test – validate functionality, security, and performance
  5. Release – promote safely using controlled deployment strategies
  6. Deploy – deliver to production with rollback and observability
  7. Operate – keep systems stable, secure, and cost-efficient
  8. Monitor – turn metrics, logs, and traces into fast feedback

Core principles #

1. Automation first #

Automate repetitive, error-prone tasks:

  • infrastructure provisioning
  • environment setup
  • test execution
  • deployment and rollback

2. Small, frequent changes #

Deploying smaller batches lowers blast radius and speeds recovery.

3. Shift-left quality and security #

Catch defects and vulnerabilities early in development, not in production.

4. Observability as a default #

Treat metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards as part of product quality.

5. Continuous improvement #

Use postmortems, retrospectives, and delivery metrics to improve systems and team workflows.

Common DevOps metrics (DORA + reliability) #

  • Deployment frequency
  • Lead time for changes
  • Change failure rate
  • Mean time to restore (MTTR)
  • Availability and SLO attainment

DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering #

  • DevOps is the broad operating model and culture.
  • SRE applies software engineering to reliability objectives.
  • Platform Engineering provides internal products that improve developer velocity and consistency.

These are complementary, not competing approaches.

Where to go next #