This article is based on reporting originally published by FedScoop, covering a Red Hat Government Symposium panel on DevOps adoption in federal agencies.
The Problem With Defining DevOps
Buzzwords accumulate definitions the way software accumulates technical debt — slowly, then all at once. DevOps is no exception. When Red Hat’s Josh Ranoa opened his “Open Innovation: Make DevOps a Reality” panel at a Red Hat Government Symposium by asking each panelist to define DevOps, the audience got not one answer, but several — each emphasizing a different dimension of the same concept.
The panelists — all practitioners actively implementing DevOps within their respective federal agencies — did not fundamentally disagree. They simply each saw fit to highlight what mattered most from their own operational vantage point. That divergence is itself revealing: DevOps is not a single tool or process. It is a layered practice, and which layer you emphasize depends on where you sit in an organization.
A Baseline Definition
Amazon Web Services offers one of the most widely cited compact definitions: “DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity.”
This definition works well as a starting point because it captures the three essential ingredients:
- Cultural philosophies — shared ownership, blame-free retrospectives, cross-functional collaboration
- Practices — continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure as code, automated testing
- Tools — version control systems, build pipelines, monitoring platforms, container orchestration
Critically, none of these three elements works well in isolation. An organization can adopt every DevOps tool on the market and still fail to ship software faster if its culture penalizes failure or siloes its engineering and operations teams.
How Federal Practitioners Define It
DevOps as Organizational Culture
Steven Grunch, manager of enterprise cloud services at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), framed DevOps primarily as a cultural shift:
“I define [DevOps] as a culture of collaboration between different groups, whether that is the traditional developers and operations, or whether it’s between the business and IT organization. This idea that business and IT are two different things needs to change. We’re all trying to move in the same direction.”
Steven Grunch, USCIS
This framing is particularly relevant in government contexts, where organizational silos between program offices, IT departments, and procurement teams are often entrenched by policy, budget cycles, and years of institutional habit.
DevOps as Continuous Delivery
Simmons Lough, a self-described DevOps evangelist at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), zeroed in on outcomes rather than process or culture:
“I like to concentrate on continuous delivery. I kind of look at it as fast, frequent deployments to production without taking shortcuts.”
Simmons Lough, USPTO
The phrase “without taking shortcuts” is important. Continuous delivery is not about rushing code into production; it is about building enough automated testing and validation into the pipeline that deploying frequently becomes safe and repeatable. In a government context — where system outages can affect millions of citizens — this distinction is especially critical.
DevOps as a People-Centric Discipline
Jennifer Hoover, a digital services expert in the office of the CTO at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), offered arguably the most expansive definition:
“I always think of DevOps mostly as a people-centric focus. So many times I’ve been at conferences and panels and people talk about DevOps in a very technological way, where it’s focused on technology. But DevOps is so much bigger than technology. DevOps is about people, processes, technology — bringing that all together and then looping in innovation as part of that so we can move better and faster so we can deliver the mission for customers.”
Jennifer Hoover, DHS
Hoover’s emphasis on people is a useful corrective for organizations that treat DevOps primarily as a tooling problem. Automation pipelines and container orchestration platforms are means, not ends. Without investing in training, psychological safety, and cross-functional team design, even the best toolchain will underperform.
DevOps as Common Sense
Dave Gray, director of the division of infrastructure services at the Social Security Administration (SSA), got the biggest reaction from the audience with the most stripped-down take:
“I wish I could say that I thought of this myself, but one of my coworkers said ‘DevOps is really just another term for common sense.'”
Dave Gray, Social Security Administration
Reductive as it sounds, this framing has real merit. Many DevOps principles — communicate early, test often, ship small changes, fix problems before they compound — are things experienced engineers have always known to be good practice. What DevOps provides is a structured vocabulary and a set of proven practices that make those instincts repeatable and scalable across large organizations.
Why Government Adoption of DevOps Is Significant
Federal agencies operate under constraints that most commercial organizations do not face: procurement regulations, legacy infrastructure, strict security compliance requirements (such as FedRAMP and FISMA), multi-year budget cycles, and public accountability. These constraints make the case for DevOps both more complex and more compelling.
More complex, because adopting continuous delivery in an environment with long authority-to-operate (ATO) processes requires rethinking how security reviews are integrated into the pipeline — the concept sometimes called DevSecOps. More compelling, because the cost of slow, waterfall-style software delivery in government is borne directly by citizens who depend on those systems.
The fact that agencies like USCIS, USPTO, DHS, and SSA are actively discussing and implementing DevOps practices — not just evaluating them — signals meaningful momentum in federal digital modernization efforts.
Key Takeaways
- DevOps has no single canonical definition, but all credible definitions share core elements: collaboration, automation, continuous delivery, and feedback loops.
- Culture is as important as tooling. Organizations that invest only in CI/CD pipelines without addressing team structure and incentives will see limited results.
- Continuous delivery means safe, frequent releases — not cutting corners on testing or security.
- Government adoption faces unique constraints — compliance, procurement, legacy systems — that require adapting DevOps practices rather than copying them wholesale from commercial software companies.
- At its core, DevOps codifies common sense: communicate across teams, automate repetitive work, test early, and ship small incremental changes.