DevOps is a collection of best practices and working methods for the software development process with the ultimate goal to shorten and optimize the development lifecycle and support practices such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD). In today’s business environment, DevOps teams and site reliability engineers must be able to deliver features and updates with a high-frequency rate, delivering short turn-around times while maintaining the stability of the production environment.

Central to the DevOps culture and philosophy is the idea that cross-functional product teams, equipped to both develop and run their software features, should be the ones to deliver them. This notion is captured by the common DevOps mantra: “You Build It, You Run It.”

In the past, software developers would build a new feature and pass it on to an IT operations team to determine how to test, run, support, and maintain the feature. In DevOps, a cross-functional product team is expected to manage features from conception to production with input from developers and IT Ops. This eliminates knowledge silos between software development and IT Ops teams and leads to lower downtime, and faster releases with fewer bugs.