Dev versus Ops – how to define DevOps

Viktor Farcic: Moving on to a more general subject, how would you define DevOps? I've gotten a different answer from every single person I've asked.

Sean Hull: I have a lot of opinions about it actually. I wrote an article on my blog a few years ago called The Four-Letter Word Dividing Dev and Ops, with the implication being that the four-letter word might be a swear word, akin to the development team swearing at the operations team, and the operations team swearing at the development team. But the four-letter word I was referring to was "risk."

To summarize my article, in my view, the development and the operations teams of old were separate silos in business, and they had very different mandates. Developers are tasked with writing code to build a product and to answer the needs of the customers, while directly building change into and facilitating a more sophisticated product. So, their thinking from day to day...