DevOps Basics
What this domain covers
The DevOps Basics domain tests whether you can define DevOps, explain where it came from, and relate it correctly to Agile, Lean and ITSM. Questions often ask for the best definition or for the business outcome DevOps targets, rather than tool names.
Core concepts
- Definition. DevOps is a culture and set of practices that unify software development and operations so that services can be delivered faster and more reliably. It is not a role, a team name or a single tool; DevOps engineer is a common industry label but not the definition the exam wants.
- Shared ownership. The same team owns the service from commit to production and is accountable for its reliability.
- Origins. Lean and Agile shortened feedback at the team level; DevOps extends that feedback into operations and production. Cloud and virtualization made environments cheap and reproducible, and web-scale companies showed the model could work.
- Relationship to Agile. Agile improves how work is planned and built; DevOps improves how it is delivered and run. Agile without DevOps can stop at potentially shippable.
- Relationship to ITSM. DevOps does not abolish ITIL. It replaces slow, manual change control with automated, risk-based controls and smaller changes. ITIL 4 explicitly incorporates DevOps ideas.
- Business value. Faster time to market, lower change failure rate, shorter recovery time, less rework and better customer feedback.
Worked example
A team releases monthly and 40% of releases are rolled back. The basics response is not to buy a pipeline tool. First measure lead time and change failure rate, then pair developers with operations for on-call, reduce batch size to weekly, and automate environment creation. Reasoning: the constraint was release confidence and cross-team handoff, so the fix is ownership and smaller batches; tooling only supports that change.
Traps that cost marks
- Defining DevOps as automation or a toolchain. Culture and measurement are part of the definition.
- Claiming DevOps replaces Agile or ITIL. It complements both.
- Assuming DevOps is only for startups or only for cloud-native systems.
- Confusing a DevOps team with DevOps as an organizational capability.