The term DevOps is an artificially created word and joins development and operations together in one term. In a traditional IT environment, two or more different teams perform those two disciplines. One team is responsible for developing the applications and their patches and fixes. The operations department is typically responsible for running the application and providing the required environment (physical or virtual infrastructure, networks, storage, and so on).
Typically, such environments are VMs with some kind of OS installed and the necessary addition to support the application. In case of Java, they would have the required binaries ready, so the developer can start using the environment to run the Java code.
Although this is working for years, it is a very static approach and can lead to some handover issues between the teams. An IT admin might not know the application in greater detail and therefore can only follow the developer's requirements in installing needed software...