What is DevOps?

This is a question I’ve been asked many times. And I’ve asked this question many times in an interview myself. Discussed this question with many friends and colleagues. And many different opinions were presented.

It is tool-a, tool-b, tool-c…
By far it is tooling that makes one a DevOps engineer. Just like having or swinging a hammer doesn’t make you a carpenter.

It is developing a application and maintaining it..
Because we write application code and we maintain it by hand or process that makes us DevOps engineers? Cleaning the glass of my house regularly doesn’t make me a glass cleaner for hire.

Where did this term DevOps come from? Is it a marketing slang that tied the words dev and ops together? Because people were searching people that could develop and do operational tasks?

In practice people that are classified as DevOps engineers are following the development practices to generate automated work. Workflows or pipelines that do the day to day operations. Making ops work “easy”, meaning they do not have to do it but a process does it.

Building software, packaging, testing and distributing it in a automated way. Keeping the process simple so it stays maintainable. Using the right tools for the right job. And all this while keeping security in mind. You could say DevSecOps. Another term invented to indicate that you do 3 things (Development, Security and Operations).

But what is in my opinion DevOps?

Dev(Sec)Ops is a mindset. To design, create and maintain processes to make things happen in a secure, autonomous and simple way.

We create stacks that do things for us. Either it build or deploys the application(s). But also we take care of vulnerability scanning of those applications. By leveraging the right tool for the right job. It’s quite hard to clean windows with a toothbrush. Rather use a telescopic window cleaning broom.