What is DevOps? Explain its core principles and goals.
DevOps is a cultural and engineering practice that unifies Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) to deliver software faster, more reliably, and at scale.
Goal — shorten the feedback loop between writing code and running it in production.
CALMS pillars — Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing.
Core practices — CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, monitoring & observability, automated testing, blameless postmortems.
Outcomes (DORA metrics): faster lead time, higher deployment frequency, lower change failure rate, faster recovery (MTTR).
DevOps is not a single tool, role, or team — it's how teams build, ship, and operate software end-to-end.
Don't recite a textbook definition. Frame DevOps as a culture-and-practice combo that breaks the dev-vs-ops wall, then mention the CALMS pillars (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing).
Bonus points for connecting it to the four DORA metrics — that signals real production experience.