The 2025 Guide to DevOps

Authors

Michael Goodwin

Staff Editor, Automation & ITOps

IBM Think

Ash Minhas

Manager, Technical Content | AI Advocate

IBM

Mark Scapicchio

Editor, Topics & Insights

IBM Think

DevOps is a software development approach that combines and automates the work of software development and IT operations teams to accelerate delivery of secure, high-performance applications.

Traditionally, development and IT operations practiced separately from each other in distinct silos. DevOps outlines a development process and an organizational culture shift that fosters coordination and collaboration between these two functions, with a shared set of tools and practices. It automates an agile development cycle in which small chunks of new code are added to the code base at frequently intervals (usually at least once per day) and then integrated, tested, and deployed to production. 

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Introduction

Get an overview of DevOps terminology, principles and processes, and learn how DevOps combines and automates development and IT operations practices to accelerate software delivery.

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The DevOps lifecycle

Explore the stages of the DevOps lifecycle—continuous integration, testing, delivery and deployment—and explore the tools and practices that support it.        

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Infrastructure as code (IaC)

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is a DevOps practice that automates the provisioning and management of IT infrastructure by using configuration files rather than manual processes

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Microservices

Microservices is a cloud-native architectural approach in which a single application is composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller services. Experts describe microservices as optimized for DevOps methodology and dependent on DevOps for success.

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Containers

Containers are executable units of software that package application code along with its libraries and dependencies, allowing code to run on traditional IT or cloud infrastructure.

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Container orchestration

Container orchestration automatically provisions, deploys, scales and manages the lifecycle of containerized applications. Developers use container orchestration to streamline agile or DevOps workflows. Today, Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration platform.

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Observability

Observability is the ability to understand the internal state or condition of a complex system based on knowledge of its outputs. It plays a crucial role in maintaining the availability, performance and security of modern software applications and systems.

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Site reliability engineering (SRE)

SRE combines DevOps and traditional IT operations to solve customer problems, automate IT operations tasks, accelerate software delivery and minimize IT risk. It supports resiliency, redundancy and reliability in the DevOps cycle and deals with the day-to-day implementation of software programs

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IBM DevOps

What is DevOps?

Andrea Crawford explains what DevOps is, the value of DevOps, and how DevOps practices and tools help you move your apps through the entire software delivery pipeline from ideation through production. Led by top IBM thought leaders, the curriculum is designed to help business leaders gain the knowledge needed to prioritize the AI investments that can drive growth.

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