DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations teams that previously operated independently of each other in separate silos. DevOps unifies the processes and workflows of development and operations, providing a shared infrastructure and toolchain, organized around the concept of pipelines. It is a collaborative approach in which each team learns about the processes used by other teams, allowing them to work together to improve quality and efficiency.
As organizations adopted DevOps, development teams built their pipelines using multiple tools, and had to customize and integrate them. Whenever a new tool was added or a new requirement introduced, the pipeline had to be rebuilt. This was inefficient, and the solution was to bundle pipeline components in containers and manage them with Kubernetes.
A container is a unit of software that packages all the code and dependencies needed to run an application or service in any software environment. By creating a modular infrastructure based on microservices running in containers, organizations can create flexible, portable pipelines, which can be set up and duplicated with low effort. A container orchestrator like Kubernetes helps manage a large number of containers as part of a cluster, automating many aspects of their lifecycle.