DevOps is an ownership problem before it's a tooling problem

Ask five teams what DevOps means and you'll get five tool lists: GitHub Actions, Terraform, Datadog, Argo CD, whatever the last conference pushed. The tools matter less than the handoffs between them. Who approves a release? Who gets paged when it misbehaves? Who wrote the runbook, and has anyone opened it since?

This section covers the working agreements that keep production calm. We look at on-call rotations that don't burn people out, runbooks that fit on one screen, change reviews that catch risk without slowing every merge, and post-incident reviews that end in a fix instead of a blame thread.

It's written for engineers, and also for the founder or IT manager deciding how much process a five-person team really needs. The honest answer is usually less than a vendor will tell you and more than you have right now. When we recommend a practice, we'll say what it costs to run and what breaks if you skip it.