DevOps is a completely grass roots self organized IT movement. It's origins come from the furstrations of working in an IT organization that promotes a siloed IT culture. This is where business people make requests, programmers turn that into code, and operations deploys it and ensures that it continues run.
This seems on the surface a good seperation of responiblity. However in reality this cause a number of serious problems.
- Ownership is lost.
- Context is lost. Why is this important?
- Severed communication.
DevOps promotes breaking down this idea of a siloed IT organization and to think of your organization as a single cross functional entity. Some of the cultural norms you will find in a DevOps IT culture are.
- Empathy
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Trust
- Continous Learning
A common misunderstanding is that DevOps is tools. It's important to keep in mind that it's not tools that make a DevOps culture. However tools play an important part in helping bridge divides between different groups. Automation helps free your self or other team members labor or error prone tasks. Configuration as code to codeify knowledge and give developers a familar interface to self service IT changes. Aggragation of logs and metrics into central repositories.