What is DevOps?

by Ankita Garg Software Developer

The first time I heard the term "DevOps" in real life was probably at a company I worked for a few years ago. An engineer who had been interviewed had been deemed "good from a devops certification course standpoint." I had assumed, somewhat incorrectly, that it was a phrase used to describe Operations personnel at the time. The engineer in question had been hired and had worked on "DevOps-y" tasks such as setting up a Jenkins CI pipeline, the CD infrastructure, and troubleshooting Ansible plays.

However, I had never felt anything but genuine excitement for all of the topics that fell under the umbrella of "DevOps," because these were concepts that my formal CS education had failed to teach me but were critical when it came to successfully running systems. Everyone I met seemed to be curious and excited about the new crop of tools that had been emerging to make the process of delivering software more reliable and robust than ever before.

Even now, the one thing that stands out about the local San Francisco meetups I used to attend is that there was almost never any pointless navel-gazing or platitudes and blather masquerading as thought leadership. On the contrary, there was always good content to look forward to, and I'd learned far more than I could have imagined about how to operate systems that I'd never learned in school or at work.