What Is DevOps?

How DevOps Works

DevOps bridges the gap between writing code and running it in production. Before DevOps, developers threw code over the wall to ops teams. DevOps makes both teams responsible for the full lifecycle — build, test, deploy, monitor.

Core DevOps practices: CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins), infrastructure as code (Terraform), containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), monitoring (Datadog, Grafana), and incident response (PagerDuty).

DevOps culture values: automation over manual processes, small frequent releases over big-bang deployments, shared ownership over siloed responsibility, and blameless postmortems over finger-pointing.

Why Developers Use DevOps

DevOps is how modern software teams operate. Every company shipping software uses some form of DevOps — automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments, and production monitoring. DevOps engineers are among the highest-paid roles in tech.

Key Concepts

• CI/CD — Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery — automatically test and deploy code on every push
• Infrastructure as Code — Managing servers and cloud resources through code (Terraform, Pulumi) instead of manual configuration
• Containerization — Packaging applications with their dependencies into containers (Docker) for consistent deployment
• Monitoring — Tracking application health, performance, and errors in production — Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana
• Incident Response — Processes for detecting, responding to, and learning from production outages
• GitOps — Using Git as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configuration

GitHub Actions CI/CD Pipeline

name: Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm test
      - run: npm run build
      - name: Deploy to production
        run: npx wrangler deploy

Frequently Asked Questions