In traditional environments, the development team and the IT operations team work in silos. The development team gathers requirements from business owners and develops the applications. System administrators are solely responsible for operations and for meeting uptime requirements. These teams generally do not have any direct communications during the development life cycle and each team rarely understands the processes and requirements of the other team.

Each team has its own set of tools, processes, and approaches that are redundant, and sometimes, efforts are conflicting. For example, the development and quality assurance (QA) teams can be testing the build on a specific patch of the operating system (OS). However, the operations team deploys the same build on a different OS version in the production environment, causing issues and delays in the delivery.

DevOps is a methodology that promotes collaboration and coordination between developers and operational teams to deliver products or services continuously. This approach is constructive in organizations where the teams rely on multiple applications, tools, technologies, platforms, databases, devices, and so on in the process of developing or delivering a product or service.

Although there are different approaches to the DevOps culture, all are about achieving a common goal. DevOps is about delivering a product or service in the shortest amount of time by increasing operational efficiency through shared responsibilities. DevOps helps to make delivery without compromising on quality, reliability, stability, resilience, or security. In this chapter, you will learn the various following components of DevOps:

• Introducing DevOps
• Understanding the benefits of DevOps
• Understanding the components of DevOps
• Introducing DevOps in security 

• Combining DevSecOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD)
• Implementing a CD strategy
• Implementing continuous testing in the CI/CD pipeline
• Using DevOps tools for CI/CD
• Implementing DevOps best practices 

By the end of this chapter, you will learn about the importance of DevOps in application deployment, testing, and security. You will learn DevOps best practices, and different tools and techniques to implement them.