What DevOps is

For years, developers wrote code and threw it over a wall to an operations team who ran it. Developers wanted change. Operations wanted stability. Releases were rare, large and scary.

DevOps is the idea that the same team shares responsibility for building and running software. Small changes, shipped often, with automation and feedback at every step. It started as a culture movement around 2009 and is now how most software teams try to work.

You cannot buy DevOps. A team that installs a pipeline tool but still blames each other after outages has not changed much. The core habits are shared ownership, automating repeat work, measuring results, and learning from failure without blame.

The tools in this track exist to make those habits cheap: version control, automated tests and deploys, reproducible environments and good monitoring.

Job titles vary: DevOps engineer, platform engineer, site reliability engineer (SRE), cloud engineer. The work overlaps. You build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, manage infrastructure as code, run containers and clusters, set up monitoring, and help during incidents.

Increasingly the job is building an internal platform: paved roads that let other developers ship safely without being experts in infrastructure.

Google's DORA research has tracked software delivery for over a decade. Its key measures include how often you deploy, how long a change takes to reach production, how often changes fail, and how quickly you recover. Good teams do well on speed and stability together; they are not a trade-off.