Even as DevOps adoption continues to accelerate in both large enterprises and web-native organizations, confusion lingers about what exactly the term means. Is DevOps a culture, a movement, an approach, a philosophy, or some amalgam of several of these things? Or does DevOps mean different things to different people? 

DevOps is a set of practices that works to automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams, so they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. The term DevOps was formed by combining the words “development” and “operations” and signifies a cultural shift that bridges the gap between development and operation teams, which historically functioned in silos.  

At its essence, DevOps is a culture, a movement, a philosophy.

It's a firm handshake between development and operations that emphasizes a shift in mindset, better collaboration, and tighter integration. It unites agile, git, continuous delivery, automation, and much more, to help development and operations teams be more efficient, innovate faster, and deliver higher value to businesses and customers.

How can a business organization move ahead in the competitive market and become more efficient in delivering the best features to the end-users in the set time? Well, here are some of the prime benefits a company can enjoy after adopting the DevOps way of working:

1. Ensure faster deployment
   Faster and more frequent delivery of updates and features will not only satisfy the customers but will also help your company take a firm stand in a competitive market.
    

2. Stabilize work environment
   Do you know that the tension involved in the release of new features and fixes or updates can topple the stability of your workspace and decreases the overall productivity? Improve your work environment with a steady and well-balanced approach of operation with DevOps practice.
    

3. Significant improvement in product quality
   Collaboration between development and operation teams and frequent capturing of user feedback leads to a significant improvement in the quality of the product.
    

4. Automation in repetitive tasks leaves more room for innovation
   DevOps has greater benefits when compared to the traditional model as it helps in detecting and correcting problems quickly and efficiently. As the flaws are repeatedly tested through automation, the team gets more time in framing new ideas.
    

5. Promotes agility in your business
   It’s no secret that making your business agile can help you to stay ahead in the market. Thanks to DevOps, it is now possible to obtain the scalability required to transform the business.
    

6. Continuous delivery of software
   In DevOps methodology, all of the departments are responsible for maintaining stability and offering new features. Therefore, the speed of software delivery is fast and undisturbed, unlike the traditional method.
    

7. Fast and reliable problem-solving techniques
   Ensuring quick and stable solution to technical errors in software management is one of the primary benefits of DevOps.
    

8. Transparency leads to high productivity
   With the elimination of silo(ing) and promotion of collaboration, this process allows for easy communication among the team members, making them more focused in their specialised field. Therefore, incorporating DevOps practises has also led to an upsurge in productivity and efficiency among the employees of a company.
    

9. Minimal cost of production
   With proper collaboration, DevOps helps in cutting down the management and production costs of your departments, as both maintenance and new updates are brought under a broader single umbrella.

Cloud native applications are independent services, packaged as self-contained, lightweight containers that are portable and can be scaled (in or out) rapidly based on the demand. By encapsulating everything into a container (such as a Docker container), you isolate the application and its dependencies from the underlying infrastructure. This allows you to deploy that containerized application in any environment that has the container runtime engine. What’s important about Kubernetes container orchestrations is that they manage the lifecycle of the containers. Cloud native apps are often delivered via a DevOps pipeline that includes continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) toolchains. CI/CD pipelines are important for automating the building, testing, and deployment of cloud native applications.

The benefits of cloud native application are:

• Independence: Their architecture makes it possible to build cloud native applications independently of each other. This means you also can manage and deploy them individually.

• Resiliency: A well-designed cloud native application is able to survive and stay online even in the event of an infrastructure outage.

• Standards-based: For interoperability and workload portability, cloud native services are often based on open source and standards based technology. This helps reduce vendor lock-in and results in increased portability.

• Business agility: Cloud native applications enable flexible deployment options across the network, and are also smaller than traditional apps, which makes them easier to develop, deploy, and iterate.

• Automation: Cloud native applications use DevOps automations features and enable continuous delivery and deployment of software changes that get released on a regular basis. Additionally, developers can use methodologies like blue-green and canary deployments to make improvements to the apps without any disruption to the user experience.

• No downtime: Thanks to container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, you can deploy a software update with essentially zero downtime.