After taking time to step back and refine my skills, I’ve been reflecting on how our industry is changing. With the rise of generative AI, intelligent assistants, and new approaches to delivering value, the role of software engineering is evolving. We are shifting from measuring success by lines of code written to the outcomes we deliver for organizations and their customers. Against this backdrop, I want to revisit one of the most important disciplines in shaping that future: DevOps.
DevOps in Plain Terms
DevOps is not a new concept within the Software Development industry, the groundwork being laid in the early 2000s. The term DevOps originated in 2009 by Patrick Debois, which took a look at how we deployed code using the same waterfall method we developed code using. When Agile and Lean methodologies started to focus on smaller cycles and quicker value, our deployment practices couldn’t meet the need to accomplish this. There needed to be greater collaboration between the development team and operations team as there was a wall, with more features being delivered, more releases, it became increasingly difficult to manage the chaos that followed.
The early principles of DevOps were the breaking out of adding Continuous Integration (CI) and a new distributed source code version control system, Git. The other big change in the software delivery process that happened in the early stages is identifying and creating automation where it was possible. These few optimizations shifted the industry, because small teams that worked across the traditional lines of development or operations and the increased automation allowed for faster delivery with increasing stability as they grew and develop their practices.
The early successes in these practitioners showed that adoption of automation created a speed to market that gave them a competitive edge. These smaller companies were able to get started with smaller teams and less resources, developing their business as the tech and industry giants from today. Utilizing these tool sets with the advent of Generative AI and other intelligent assistants gives solid guardrails while ensuring you and your teams are delivering with more ease, creating less cycle time to see the value of the experiments of the future.
Why DevOps Matters for Leaders
For years, DevOps was treated as a buzzword within IT, rarely spreading across the broader organization. That’s changing. Leaders now recognize that implementing and maturing DevOps practices isn’t just about pipelines, it’s about long-term organizational health.
I want to take a minute and break down some of what an organization can get when you spend the time and energy into developing and implementing a DevOps strategy wholistically. These are some ways in which DevOps drives business outcomes:
- DevOps Empowers Engineers and Accelerates Delivery.
Empowered teams deliver faster and safer. Studies show DevOps reduces deployment failures by 68% and enables changes to be delivered up to 200x faster. Automation of build, test, and deployment can shrink release cycles by 90%, freeing engineers to focus on innovation. - DevOps Strategy Guards Against Vendor Lock-In.
The important thing when building a strategy is focusing on flexibility over entanglement. DevOps is about empowering teams to build with modular, tool-agnostic practices. The is so you can pick what you need today and can switch tomorrow with a lower cost to transition. Using open-source CI/CD tools, container orchestration layers, multi-cloud Infrastructure as Code like Terraform, and other tools that fit your immediate need. - DevOps Embeds a Safety-First Mindset.
Using a standard DevOps workflow reduces risk with ensuring consistency. A benefit of moving to implementing a DevOps strategy is in the simplicity of building automation that will test your system automatically, allowing you to ‘shift-left’. What this means is before you touch building a feature, you know what you are testing because your requirements will define testing, which means automation for different tests can shorten cycles which will have fewer bugs, reducing cycle time to actually deliver value. - DevOps Improves Morale and Retention.
To improve your developer experience, building a DevOps strategy is a cornerstone to this. Teams that are embedded with DevOps report a 61% higher satisfaction, which is from increased confidence that they are able to deliver quality results, quicker and with less frustration. The other benefit here is that it reduces burnout from your team, because there is less toil work and more value driven development since there is less manual work and more automation, keeping your talent focused on where it creates the maximum value. - DevOps Maturity Unlocks Cost Savings and Depth.
Early DevOps adoption brings speed and quality. Mature practices unlock cost optimizations through dynamic environments, automated scaling, and smarter testing strategies. Start simple, then build depth
In short: DevOps is about automating the ability to build, rebuild, and evolve your IT ecosystem. Early maturity is about speed and safety. Later maturity brings cost savings, reduced infrastructure overhead, and robust testing that lets you ship in days, not weeks.
What DevOps Means for Engineers
One of my earliest career milestones was leading a migration from Subversion to Git, while also automating our deployment process. The system essentially ran itself 90% of the time, freeing me to grow as a software engineer. I honed my coding skills, deepened my design sense, and eventually stepped into strategic contributions, all thanks to understanding how software is built, deployed, tested, and monitored at scale.
There are countless DevOps tools, each with strengths and trade-offs. What matters most is understanding the concepts behind them. In future posts, I’ll unpack each area in more depth, but here’s a starting point:
DevOps Fundamentals Overview
| Concepts | Why It Matters | Getting Started (Free Resources) |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous Integration (CI) | Catch issues early by merging code into a shared repo frequently | GitHub Actions Learning Path |
| Continuous Delivery (CD) | Automate deployment readiness for consistent releases | (Same as CI) |
| Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | Provisions infrastructure like code: versioned, repeatable, reliable | GeeksforGeeks DevOps Tutorials |
| Automated Functional Testing (AFT) | Validate application functionality without manual effort | Selenium WebDriver Docs |
| Contract Testing | Ensure services communicate reliably as producer and consumer | Microsoft’s Consumer-Driven Contract Testing |
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a foundation. The real key is learning how you learn best. Start with the principles, then pick tools that help you deliver value. Understanding the “why” makes it much easier to explain to leaders why investments matter—and how outcomes are achieved.
What’s To Come
This series will continue every other week, dropping Wednesday mornings. Next time, we’ll dive into CI/CD pipelines—what leaders need to know, and how engineers can get started. My goal is simple: to provide practical insights that bridge strategy and execution, helping teams and leaders alike unlock the real potential of DevOps.
References
AppRecode, Measuring DevOps ROI Strategies for Demonstrating Business Value
Hutte.io, DevOps Statistics 2024