What’s the relationship between DevOps and Continuous Delivery? This is the question DevOps Engineer Michael Murad was asked in an Ask A Dev episode produced by Mashable.

I like the way Michael responded. He started by saying that to answer that question, you first need to understand what exactly DevOps is.

DevOps connects development, quality assurance, and technical operations in a way that ensures the whole software development lifecycle runs like a well-oiled machine, that there are clear roles and responsibilities, and well-defined inputs and outputs.

Before this role of DevOps really came to be a thing, you had your developers on one hand and your operations team on the other hand. In the traditional software development model, the developers would take their completed source codes to this wall that separated operations and development and would then take it throw it over and then just forget about it. With this model, both the development and operations team needed to be knowledgeable about what the other person was dong. That turned out to be really inefficient.

DevOps replaces that barrier in between operations and development smoothing out the process of taking that completed source code and creating market ready software

One of the method that enables us to do this properly is continuous delivery. Continuous delivery as a development practice that requires developers to integrate their code into a shared repository multiple times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build that allows the teams to detect the problems early and then fix those problems. Continuous delivery is crucial in today’s market, customer preferences are continually changing, competitiveness is at an all-time high and devices are always being introduced into the market, and you know everyone wants the latest and the greatest device. The quicker you able to release code every day, the quicker you will in return be able to achieve all these things.

DevOps has been a journey towards sound engineering and delivery principles, it starts with breaking down silos and mapping out the entire delivery pipeline so it can be optimized. Continuous delivery is simply the process but DevOps is the bigger cultural shift that will lead to more efficient companies.