Term
DevOps
A way of working in which software development and operations cooperate from the start and deployment, testing and monitoring are automated. It gets changes to users faster and with less risk of outages.
Updated
What it means
DevOps is a way of working and a culture in which developers (development) and the people who run systems (operations) work not separately but as one team responsible for software from writing the code to running it in production. The aim is to deliver changes more often, in smaller steps and reliably.
The technical foundation is automation: CI/CD automatically builds and tests every change and deploys it first to a staging environment and then to production. Infrastructure is described as code, so a server or database can be recreated identically, and monitoring flags problems before users notice them.
DevOps builds on agile management: where agile shortens the path from requirement to finished code, DevOps shortens the path from finished code to the user. Instead of big releases once a quarter, small changes ship, sometimes several times a day.
How it works in practice
For a company having a web application, online store or internal system built, DevOps is worth asking the supplier about: how it deploys changes, how fast it can roll back a faulty version, how it measures availability and who is alerted if the system goes down at night.
Financially, DevOps changes the cost structure. Less manual work in deployment and fewer outages save money, but automation, tools and cloud infrastructure carry monthly fees. In a project budget they are best shown separately rather than hidden in development hours.
The cost of building software and automation may, if the conditions are met, be an intangible fixed asset, while ongoing operation and tweaks are expenses. When accounting for IT projects we therefore assess what is new functionality and what is mere maintenance.
What to watch out for
DevOps is not a tool you can buy. Companies often buy licences and services while teams keep working separately and changes are still deployed by hand on Friday evening. Without changing responsibilities and adopting the habit of small, frequent steps, the tools only bring bigger bills.
Fast deployment without tests and monitoring increases risk rather than reducing it. If technical debt keeps piling up and automated tests are missing, every quick change can break something. Speed makes sense only when an error can be detected and rolled back just as quickly.
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