Mental BoundDevOps is not a single job title or a tool you install. It is the idea that the people who build software should share responsibility for running it — with guardrails, not heroics. That means automated testing and deployment, observable systems, blameless postmortems, and infrastructure defined as code so environments are reproducible.
Practices associated with DevOps include continuous integration, trunk-based development, feature flags, and tight monitoring of latency, errors, and saturation. Security shifts left: threat modeling and dependency scanning happen during development, not only before audits.
Adopting DevOps is a gradual maturity path. Teams often start with basic CI, then add staging parity, automated rollbacks, and service-level objectives. The payoff is shorter lead times, fewer failed changes, and faster recovery when incidents occur — without sacrificing the stability users expect.