DevOps 101: What is DevOps and Why Should You Care?

Sharyl Jones
VP, DevOps

DevOps is a culture that is enabled by a set of processes and best practices that focus on the flow of work, continuous learning, and continuous improvement, through making work visible, enabling fast feedback, and cross-team collaboration.

These concepts are well documented in the DevOps handbook, The Three Ways of DevOps. “The Three Ways of DevOps describe the values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps, as well as the prescriptive steps.”

  1. The Technical Practices of Flow
  2. The Technical Practices of Feedback
  3. The Technical Practices of Continual Learning and Experimentation

There are many “definitions” of DevOps out there, however, from my experience working as a consultant in the field for many years, this is the definition that resonates with me as being most helpful and accurate because it describes the foundation and mindset required to drive the necessary actions and behavior changes that will unlock real business value.

With a strong foundation and mindset based on DevOps best practices, faster time to value is achieved for your customers. This statement is backed by 7 years of research performed by the DevOps Research and Assessment Organization DORA research program and reported in the yearly DORA reports. If you are not familiar, check out the latest reports.


At Indellient, we invest heavily in our DevOps practice to create foundational cloud transformation for our clients. We believe the outcomes of DevOps: velocity, resilience, automation, compliance, and rapid changes contribute to a competitive advantage, which is why we architect and implement DevOps culture and best practices that leap our partners forward and enable a cloud operating model.


Moving your data to the cloud unlocks your ability to deliver data-driven cloud services. Read our white paper that provides a practical guide to DataOps to help kickstart your journey.


About The Author

Sharyl Jones

As VP DevOps at Indellient, Sharyl oversees the delivery of DevOps services to ensure customer success. Sharyl leads a team of top DevOps Solution Engineers and supports initiatives centered on delivering professional services on-premises or in the cloud for medium and large-sized enterprises. She specializes in providing strategic leadership, guidance, and planning to help enterprises with their DevOps transformation. Sharyl's business experience includes: 25+ years of progressive experience in technology-related roles in dynamic environments | Deep understanding of all aspects of software development, architecture, including coding, testing, release planning, support | Over a decade of experience managing technical teams, mentoring, performance management and delivering results | 8+ years of experience taking complex projects from initial concept through final launch including web, mobile and distributed systems | Experience developing project management frameworks, software release processes and testing harnesses to deliver high quality software products | Evangelist for the 'shift to the left' - promotion of DevOps Culture and moving to the Cloud | Strong leader with a passionate drive in team motivation, Growth mindsets, culture first | Exceptional strategic thinker with the ability to analyze and creatively solve technical problems.