DevOps is a set of practices making developers responsible for the full lifecycle of their software: building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and operating it in production. This breaks the traditional wall between development and operations teams.

Historically, developers handed code to operations who ran it. The teams had conflicting incentives: developers wanted to ship new things; operations wanted stability. This produced slow releases, blame-shifting when things broke, and communication gaps that made debugging production issues painful.

DevOps aligns incentives by making developers run their own code. Technical enablers are CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment, infrastructure as code for reproducible environments, and observability tooling so developers can diagnose production issues. The cultural shift matters as much as the tooling: ownership and access are required, not just automation.

This shows the ownership model: developers write code, deploy it via pipeline, and own the running system via observability access.

Traditional (slow, blame-shifting):
Developers → Ops (hand off) → Deploy and support → Developers

DevOps (fast, shared ownership):
Developers → Deploy → Monitor → Fix (same team)
           ↑ CI/CD pipeline ↓ Observability