Before delving into the topic, we need to get a clear definition of what DevOps is. The term itself is a combination of development and operations, describing the strong bond that developers and operations people need to form in order to truly succeed.
– DevOps – A Software Architect's Perspective (Bass, Weber, Zhu for Addison-Wesley 2015)
The term DevOps was first coined by Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois in 2008. As you can see, DevOps cannot be considered new anymore. The idea has been around for some time and has matured and grown. Still, many IT people, developers and operations alike, have not yet seen DevOps in action, let alone embraced a DevOps mindset.
Even though many people throw DevOps into the same bucket as agile development, it is not the same thing. A strong DevOps culture supports agile projects, but DevOps not a project management technique. Companies that have adopted agile development can improve their throughput by fostering a DevOps culture in their entire organization.
Like many IT buzzwords over the years, DevOps is also regularly picked up by senior management on conferences or in talks with peers. Many don't understand that DevOps is a cultural and transformative change that cannot simply be dictated top-down but needs to come from the bottom up. Developers and operations people need to embrace DevOps willingly, otherwise the opposite of a strong bond between Dev and Ops is likely to happen.
Despite the many benefits of a DevOps culture, there are also some constraints that we need to keep in mind. In industries that require regulation or that operate at a very slow pace with long lead-times for their products, adopting DevOps might be a challenge or may not even be desirable at all. Still, the cultural change introduces benefits such as improved communication between departments that even highly-regulated businesses can benefit from.