An introduction to DevOps

As development teams began to adopt Agile methods and deliver software features incrementally, they faced a challenge in delivering value from the outside. Operations teams, the ones that maintain the development and production platforms where code executes, often do not release new packages from the development teams as they emerge. Rather, operations teams insist on collecting features and deploying them in specified release windows to minimize the risk that a single new change would bring down the production environment. But instead of minimizing the risk, it compounds the risk by straining the time allowed for the release windows, with mismatched configurations between development and production environments and untracked manual intervention in production environments. Bundling releases into release packages also moved delivery away from small increments to larger monoliths that may diminish customer value.

At this point, it becomes necessary to view...