DevOps - What is it?

Nowadays, the DevOps issue has been much talked about in social networks and among IT professionals, but does everyone knows what DevOps really is? Unlike many people think, DevOps is not a tool or a beautiful word for the IT professional to put as a title in the Linkedin profile, DevOps is much more than that, it is far beyond a simple tool. DevOps can, in a very brief way, be classified as a culture, a methodology, as the acronym itself says, the involvement of two very distinct worlds (Dev = Development and Ops = Operations), as well as the process as a whole of areas such as governance and business.

We all know the extreme difficulty of managing an area such as Software Development, with its often daily releases and all the version control paraphernalia, upgrades in test environments, approvals and the much-feared production, and when it joins the Operations, and the entire flow of business processes involving clients, users, security, all these things can become a generalized mess. It was from this need to try to create an ideal world by uniting all of this and making all this process as a whole less painful, that was born DevOps, a methodology that involves good practices (many of them based on ITIL), professional awareness, agile development methodologies , automation of activities and tests, just to mention some of the characteristics of this powerful framework.

The implementation of the methodology is not something so simple, it requires a lot of changes, adaptations and commitment of the professionals involved, especially in large teams, it must be something to be worked on and to be searched gradually by the companies and professionals involved, it is far from being a magic wand which will transform the reality of Software Development companies, but it is entirely plausible to reach a stage where the risks and problems of putting a new version of a Software in production will be minimized to it's maximum.