Written by Leonardo Leite
on 

What is DevOps? Our DevOps definition

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Even though the DevOps movement has been discussed for nearly a decade, DevOps still lacks a widely accepted definition. By consolidating the most cited definitions of DevOps in the academic literature, we crafted our definition:

“DevOps is a collaborative and multidisciplinary effort within an organization to automate continuous delivery of new software versions, while guaranteeing their correctness and reliability.”

This definition was accepted by the ACM Computing Surveys journal, a very reputable academic journal in our field, within our Survey of DevOps Concepts and Challenges.

There is a current trend in the industry of adopting DevOps as a role, the “DevOps engineer” [1]. But our DevOps definition is according to the original spirit of the DevOps movement, which was about breaking down the silos (“DevOps is a collaborative and multidisciplinary effort within an organization”). This spirit was portrayed, for example, by the novel The Phoenix Project [2], authored by a prominent figure of the DevOps movement. Our definition is also in accordance with a shared view in the literature that closely relates DevOps to continuous delivery (“to automate continuous delivery of new software versions”), evidenced by the title of the seminal paper on DevOps “Why enterprises must adopt DevOps to enable continuous delivery” [3]. Finally, our definition is also aligned with more recent developments that face the fact that it is not enough to deliver faster, but also that reliability is paramount (“while guaranteeing their correctness and reliability”), such as the discussion presented in the Site Reliability Engineering book [4].

[1] Waqar Hussain, Tony Clear, and Stephen MacDonell. Emerging trends for global DevOps: A New Zealand perspective. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Global Software Engineering, ICGSE 2017.

[2] Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. IT Revolution Press, 3rd edition, 2018.

[3] Jez Humble and Joanne Molesky. Why enterprises must adopt DevOps to enable continuous delivery. Cutter IT Journal, 2011.

[4] Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google runs production systems. O’Reilly, 2016.