What is DevOps?
DevOps collapses the wall between development ("change fast") and operations ("stay stable") into one culture with shared ownership: you build it, you run it. Its practices — continuous integration and delivery, infrastructure as code, automated testing, monitoring, blameless postmortems — exist to make deployment boring and recovery fast.
The measurable signature (DORA metrics): deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore. Elite teams deploy daily and recover in minutes; the point isn't speed for its own sake but small, reversible, observable change.
Worked example
A bank's release used to be a quarterly weekend event with a war room and rollback prayers. After two years of DevOps investment — pipeline automation, canary deployments, on-call developers — the same platform ships 30 times a week in slices so small that when one misbehaves, the blast radius is a feature flag, not a weekend.