DevOps is a buzzword that's been aroud for quite a few years now, without a solid or consistent definition. Often, I've found, people will define DevOps in terms of whatever they're doing, instead of defining it as a general practice.
In the simplest terms, the name DevOps suggests this is a combination of Development and Operations, and in practice, it seems that is part of the intent. However, it's not so simple to replace your system administrators by letting your programmers build and manage systems on the side. Nor is it advisable to fire your programmers and hope that you system administrators can simply pick up all the coding required for a given project.
The central idea behind DevOps is rapid development, testing, and deployment of software. This often comes up in the context of CI/CD, or Continuous Integration/Contnuous Deployment (or Delivery). CI/CD is a process that is intended to streamline and speed the development and deployment of code through a software development lifecycle. DevOps is the set of tools and practices used to implement a CI/CD pipeline. You can leverage DevOps in many different scenarios without using CI/CD. For example, you can use DevOps principles to test system configuration changes, system upgrades, alternative web servers or Content Management Systems (CMS). However, it would be difficult to develop a CI/CD Pipeline without DevOps.
This course will delve into the tools commonly used in DevOps practices, and give you an understanding of the tools that are available and the basics on how to use them.