Evolution of DevOps:

Until just before 2000, most software was developed and updated using waterfall methodology,
a linear approach to large-scale development projects. Software development teams would
spend months developing large bodies of new code that impacted most or all of the
application. Because the changes were so extensive, they spent several more months
integrating that new code into the code base.
->Next, quality assurance (QA), security and operations teams would spend still more
months testing the code. The result was months or even years between software releases,
and often several significant patches or bug fixes between releases as well. And this “big bang”
approach to feature delivery was often characterized by complex and risky deployment plans,
hard to schedule interlocks with upstream and downstream systems, and IT’s “great hope” that
the business requirements had not changed drastically in the months leading up to production
“go live.”
->To speed development and improve quality, development teams began adopting agile
software development methodologies, which are iterative rather than linear and focus on
making smaller, more frequent updates to the application code base. Chief among these
methodologies are continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI/CD. In CI/CD smaller
chunks of new code are merged into the code base every one or two weeks, and then
automatically integrated, tested and prepared for deployment to the production environment.
Agile evolved the “big bang” approach into a series of “smaller snaps” which also
compartmentalized risks.

->DevOps culture leads to DevOps practices that are geared toward streamlining and
improving the development lifecycle, to reliably deliver frequent updates, while
maintaining stability.