DevOps is a software development methodology that blends traditional engineering practices with automation in order to increase speed and quality, leading to higher customer satisfaction rates and lower churn rates.
DevOps involves creating an environment in which developers and operations teams collaborate effectively to share responsibilities, work efficiently together, and shorten handoff times so software can more quickly get to production.
Version control is an integral component of DevOps that allows engineers to share their code with fellow members of their team, merge changes into one central repository without overwriting each other's work, and contribute directly to faster software development while decreasing risks during release cycles.
Continuous integration is another key component of DevOps, where engineers merge their work multiple times during development into a central source code repository, which reduces risks such as changes being merged twice while encouraging collaboration amongst engineers.
DevOps uses various tools, including configuration management, test and build systems, application deployment, version control and monitoring. These enable DevOps practitioners to automate the entire DevOps cycle - significantly decreasing both effort and costs associated with developing and delivering software applications - as well as managing lifecycle of products, ensuring operational availability and manageable resources. Cloud-based DevOps tools offer continuous delivery capability as well as usage-based accounting allowing easier resource tracking.
