Development Operations (DevOps for short) combines several practices on management and development. It is born and raised by some of the best practices in manufacturing such as lean manufacturing, but also has roots in the agile infrastructure and manifesto used worldwide by several technology (but also other lines of business too) companies. It also has some values from Toyota manufacturing. As the agile infrastructure requires constant deliveries or functional prototypes, one of the main features of DevOps includes continuous delivery (wait for other blog posts on CI/CD using Ubuntu and Git).
DevOps is a way of continuously delivering products, unlike Agile, DevOps combines different staff areas that also include management and other IT areas. It is more than just a methodology, it is a set of philosophies, cultures and practices that when put together create DevOps. The main focus of DevOps is CI/CD, and they are key elements in software companies. CI/CD refers to the capability of building projects as soon as they have been committed to a repository. This allows for instant build times and instant delivery to the client.
As DevOps is all about automation and continuous deliveries, monitoring and logging is a key principle and a common practice in DevOps environments. Tools like these allow for quick access to errors or obstacles present in the deployment pipeline.
Recommended Readings
The Agile Admin has a section dedicated to DevOps which shows what is and what is not DevOps.
Amazon Web Services provides several tools to implement DevOps in an agile environment. AWS has services to auto build products, and also manage monitoring and logging processes. This article shows a general overview of DevOps with Amazon Web Services.
Finally, a nice book written by Gene Kum, Patrick Debois and John Willis on this topic is The DevOps Handbook, a complete book on how to implement DevOps and/or spot failures on an active DevOps environment. It is available on Amazon (physical and Kindle versions).
Software Quality and Testing 