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What is DevOps?

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Overview

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, technical practices, and tools that foster integration, collaboration, communication, and automation between technology operations and software development teams in order to improve the quality and speed of software.

DevOps is founded upon a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement. With OpenText™ DevOps Cloud, teams cut friction and risk to deliver secure, high-quality applications faster. By uniting developers and operations in a shared ownership model, DevOps meets the demands of modern, AI-driven, cloud-native delivery.

DevOps, Evolved

DevOps is more than a set of tools; it's an integrated approach to software delivery that addresses the complexities of modern, cloud-native architectures and AI-driven workflows.

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DevOps

How did DevOps originate–and why was it needed?

DevOps was born from the practice and propagation of agile software development. Since the agile methodology speeds up the development process and throughput velocity, there was a need to alter the structure of project teams to accommodate this new reality. As agile culture took root, it became clear that having the software development and IT operations teams working separately was counterproductive and inefficient.

DevOps practices automate deployment pipelines and produce faster feedback to improve efficiency, predictability, maintainability, and security. It brings developers into the production environment, gives them deeper insights into the infrastructure and gets them more involved in application lifecycle management.

This evolution continues with the rise of AI and machine learning. DevOps has expanded to incorporate new practices that manage the full lifecycle of AI models, ensuring they are developed, tested, and deployed with the same rigor as traditional applications. This includes:

  • AIOps: Using AI to automate IT operations tasks like incident management, anomaly detection, and root cause analysis.
  • MLOps: A specialized discipline of DevOps focused on streamlining the machine learning lifecycle, from data prep and model training to deployment and monitoring.

Core principles of DevOps

While DevOps implementations vary, several core principles remain central to its success:

  • DevSecOps: Security is a shared responsibility from the start. This principle, often summarized as "shifting left," means that security practices—such as code analysis, vulnerability scanning, and compliance checks—are integrated into every phase of the development lifecycle, not just at the end. By identifying and fixing security issues early, teams can build more secure applications, prevent costly breaches, and avoid last-minute delays.
  • Continuous integration (CI): Developers merge code into a shared mainline multiple times a day. This practice has been enhanced with AI-powered code analysis tools that detect potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in real time, long before they hit production.
  • Continuous delivery (CD): A process where all code changes are automatically prepared for a release to production. This has evolved to include automated progressive delivery techniques like canary deployments and blue-green deployments, which allow teams to release features to small user segments before a full rollout, minimizing risk. 
  • Continuous testing (CT): Quality is no longer a separate, post-development phase. It's a shared responsibility. This includes automated security testing and performance testing integrated directly into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that quality and security are "baked in" from the start.
  • Continuous monitoring (CM): Given the complexity of modern, distributed systems and microservices, continuous monitoring is non-negotiable. Modern observability platforms provide a complete picture of an application's health, from code performance to user experience. These tools provide real-time feedback loops that help teams identify and resolve issues before they impact the end user.

DevOps lifecycle: Phases and teams

The DevOps lifecycle is not linear; it's a continuous loop of feedback and improvement. It brings together cross-functional teams and is often visualized as an infinity symbol ♾️ to represent this continuous flow.

  • Plan: This phase involves everyone—from product managers and developers to operations and security. It focuses on defining features, user stories, and requirements. The team collaboratively plans the software release to ensure everyone is aligned from the start.
  • Code: The development team writes the application code, committing their changes to a shared repository.
  • Build: The CI process automatically compiles the code, runs unit tests, and packages it into a deliverable artifact. This phase is highly automated to ensure consistency and speed.
  • Test: The team uses automated tools to perform various tests, including unit, integration, and security tests. Operations and security teams provide test data and environments, while developers write test cases, making quality a collective responsibility.
  • Release: The CD process automatically prepares the application for deployment to production. The team determines the release frequency based on business needs.
  • Deploy: The operations team uses automation to deploy the application to the production environment, which can be an on-premises data center, a public cloud, or a hybrid setup.
  • Operate: The operations team manages and maintains the application in production. This phase also includes monitoring infrastructure, managing incidents, and ensuring the application's stability.
  • Monitor: In this final, yet continuous, phase, teams use monitoring and observability tools to gather real-time data on the application's performance, user behavior, and security. The feedback from this phase is fed back into the Plan phase, creating the continuous feedback loop that is the heart of DevOps.

By adopting these principles and leveraging modern tools, companies can transform their software delivery, turning chaos into clarity and driving tangible business outcomes.

The benefits of a modern DevOps approach

Organizations that embrace a mature DevOps approach achieve significant benefits, including:

  • Faster, More Reliable Releases: Automation and integrated pipelines enable rapid and frequent deployments, allowing businesses to respond to market demands and customer feedback with unprecedented speed.
  • Enhanced Security and Compliance: By shifting security "left" into the development process (DevSecOps), teams can proactively address vulnerabilities and ensure compliance, reducing risk and building trust.
  • Improved Collaboration and Efficiency: DevOps breaks down organizational silos, fostering a culture of communication and shared responsibility that leads to greater developer and operational efficiency.
  • Scalable Innovation: With streamlined processes and automated workflows, teams are freed from manual tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation and delivering value to the customer.

By adopting these principles and leveraging modern tools, companies can transform their software delivery, turning chaos into clarity and driving tangible business outcomes.

Scale DevOps practices across all your environments

OpenText™ DevOps Cloud empowers enterprises to scale DevOps across hybrid IT—automating and orchestrating continuous delivery pipelines from mainframe to mobile, and providing actionable insight to securely deliver high-quality software faster. By automating delivery pipelines and embedding AI-driven insight, we help teams deliver secure, high-quality software faster.

Our platform-first approach meets you where you are, integrates your toolchain end to end, and removes constraints step by step with AI-driven insights, 250+ integrations, and end-to-end lifecycle visibility that unify even the most complex toolchains. DevOps with OpenText means you can innovate with confidence, at enterprise scale.

Smarter DevOps

With OpenText™ DevOps Cloud, teams cut friction and risk to deliver secure, high-quality applications faster

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