17.1 DevOps culture and process

Q1. What is DevOps in one minute?

A culture and set of practices that shorten the path from idea to running software by combining development and operations ownership, automation, feedback (metrics/logs), and small frequent changes — not "only Kubernetes."

Q2. CI vs CD vs deploy vs release?

CI continuously integrates and verifies changes (build/test). Continuous Delivery keeps artifacts production-ready, often with a human gate. Continuous Deployment auto-deploys every green main build. Deploy puts an artifact on an environment. Release makes a feature visible to users (sometimes later via flags).

Q3. What is CALMS?

A mnemonic: Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing — reminds interviews that tools alone are not DevOps.

Q4. DevOps vs SRE vs Cloud engineer (junior view)?

Titles overlap. DevOps often emphasises delivery pipelines and platform enablement; SRE emphasises reliability/SLOs; Cloud engineer emphasises cloud architecture/services. Ask the employer what the team actually owns.

Q5. Why not only "it works on my machine"?

Different OS packages, env vars, and versions. Containers and IaC reduce drift; CI proves changes on a clean runner.