In traditional environments, the development team and the IT operations team work in silos. The development team gathers requirements from business owners and develops the applications. System administrators are solely responsible for operations and for meeting uptime requirements. These teams generally do not have any direct communications during the development life cycle and each team rarely understands the processes and requirements of the other team.

Each team has its own set of tools, processes, and approaches that are redundant, and sometimes, efforts are conflicting. For example, the development and quality assurance (QA) teams can be testing the build on a specific patch of the operating system (OS). However, the operations team deploys the same build on a different OS version in the production environment, causing issues and...