DevOps is a cultural and engineering movement that brings together software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) teams — historically siloed — to work collaboratively toward the shared goal of delivering software faster, more reliably, and with better quality. DevOps is not a job title, a tool, or a methodology in the strict sense — it is a set of practices, cultural norms, and technical capabilities that enable continuous delivery.
Core DevOps practices
Continuous Integration (CI): Developers merge code changes to a shared repository frequently — multiple times per day. Each merge triggers automated tests that validate the change, catching integration problems early rather than at the end of a sprint.
Continuous Delivery (CD): The software is always in a deployable state. Every commit that passes automated tests is automatically deployed to a staging environment and can be deployed to production with a single action (or automatically in Continuous Deployment).
Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is defined and managed as code — enabling reproducible, auditable environment creation and eliminating the "works on my machine" problem.
Monitoring and feedback: Production systems are continuously monitored, with feedback flowing back to development teams. Incidents trigger postmortems that drive improvements to the software and the deployment process.
DevOps in regulated Indian enterprises
Adoption of DevOps in Indian banking and financial services has been slower than in technology sectors, primarily due to: (a) the perception that RBI's change management requirements are incompatible with continuous deployment; (b) legacy mainframe-centric architectures; and (c) risk-averse organisational cultures. In practice, DevOps and RBI compliance are compatible — GitOps-based continuous delivery with automated testing and full audit trails satisfies change management requirements more rigorously than traditional manual change management processes.