The word `DevOps' was coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois, who became one of its gurus. As the terms suggests, development and operations are the key elements of the concept. Notably, DevOps isn't a process or a technology or a standard. Many devotees refer to DevOps as a `culture'-a viewpoint that New Relic favors. We also use the term "DevOps movement" when talking about topics such as adoption rates and trends for the future, and "DevOps environment" to refer to an IT organization that has adopted a DevOps culture.

An acute rivalry has existed between developers and system administrators, but both sides take

common grounds on the fact that their customers on the business side of the house frequently pull them in different directions.

While business users demand change-new features, new services, new revenue streams-as fast as possible, they don't shy away from demanding a system that is stable and free from outages and interruptions. Now this creates a problem where companies are stood to choose between delivering changes swiftly and dealing with an unstable production environment, or maintaining a stable but stale environment. Of course, neither is acceptable to enterprise executives. More so, neither allows a business to provide the best solutions it can to its customers.

Developers are willing to push out software as fast as possible-after all, that's what they are typically hired to accomplish. On the contrary, operations knows that rapid-fire changes without proper safeguards could destabilize the system, which goes directly against their charter.

DevOps was created to resolve this dilemma by integrating everyone associated with software development and deployment-business users, developers, test engineers, security engineers, system administrators, and sometimes others-into a single, highly automated workflow with a shared focus: rapid delivery of high-quality software that meets all user requirements while maintaining the integrity and stability of the entire system. In this edition, we dedicate our content to the DevOps domain and its players, who have acquired the very best practices to serve businesses with quicker time to market strategies.

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