The word DevOps is a combination of the terms development and operations, which is meant to represent a collaborative or joint approach to the tasks performed by application development and operations teams in an IT company.

In its broadest sense, DevOps is a philosophy that promotes better communication and collaboration between these teams – and others – within an organization. In its narrowest interpretation, DevOps describes the adoption of iterative software development, automation, and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance. The term also covers cultural changes such as building trust and consistency between developers and system administrators and aligning technology designs with business requirements. DevOps can change the software delivery chain, services, job roles, IT tools and best practices.

While DevOps is not a technology, DevOps environments typically follow common methodologies. Belong to them:

• continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools, with an emphasis on task automation;
• systems and tools supporting the implementation of DevOps, including real-time monitoring, incident management, configuration management and collaboration platforms;
• cloud computing, microservices and containers implemented in parallel with DevOps methodologies.

The DevOps approach is one of the many techniques used by IT staff to deliver IT projects that meet business needs. DevOps can coexist with Agile software development; IT service management frameworks such as ITIL; project management directives such as Lean and Six Sigma; and other strategies.

Some IT professionals believe that a simple combination of Dev and Ops is not enough, and the term DevOps should explicitly include business (BizDevOps), security (DevSecOps) or other areas.