DevOps vs CI/CD: Demystifying the difference between the two

While DevOps and CI/CD are often mentioned in the same breath, they serve distinct yet complementary purposes in modern software development.

Whether you're building a new development pipeline or improving an existing one, understanding how DevOps culture and CI/CD practices work together can boost your team's software delivery performance.

We'll walk through the key differences between DevOps and CI/CD, explore how they complement each other in practice, and share actionable steps to implement both effectively

Sections:

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DevOps is a cultural and technical movement that emphasizes collaboration, automation, and shared ownership across development and operations teams to improve software delivery speed and reliability. At its heart, DevOps brings together "Development" and "Operations" in a transformative shift in how teams work together.

[DevOps emerged around 2007-8](https://www.atlassian.com/devops/what-is-devops/history-of-devops#:~:text=The DevOps movement started to,of dysfunction in the industry.) in response to a then-prevalent challenge: Friction between software operations and software development. Borrowing an analogy from John Willis, think of traditional tech companies like restaurants:

• Developers are the chefs creating the dishes
• Operations teams are the servers bringing them to customers.

Just as a restaurant struggles when kitchen and wait staff don't communicate well, software teams face similar challenges when development and operations work in silos.

This Dev versus Ops divide was once the biggest bottleneck in software delivery. Now, it is very difficult to determine who was the exact first company to start bringing these two worlds together — but we know of a few who were definitely early.

Netflix was one of the companies that pioneered DevOps practices – this was back in 2008, after a database corruption caused a three-day outage (you can imagine how stressed everyone would have been!). If you've ever heard of Netflix's "chaos monkey", it's a tool that intentionally causes failures in their production environment, to test their ability to respond to these failures; it's part of a broader practice they call "chaos engineering".

Another example is when John Allspaw and Paul Hammond showed the industry a better way at Flickr, demonstrating how teams could deploy code ten times daily — a rate that seemed impossible when most companies celebrated monthly releases. Their approach, later termed "continuous delivery" by Jez Humble, broke down the wall between development and operations, creating truly integrated teams. This breakthrough sparked the DevOps movement, fundamentally changing how we build and deliver software today.

So what exactly is involved in DevOps?

DevOps transforms how organizations deliver software by bringing together culture, practices, and tools to help teams ship better code faster. According to AWS, there are six essential practices that make this possible:

1. Continuous integration: A software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run.
2. Continuous delivery: A software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production.
3. Infrastructure as Code: A practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control, and continuous integration.
4. Monitoring and logging: Enables organizations to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the experience of their product’s end user.
5. Communication and collaboration: Practices are established to bring the teams closer and by building workflows and distributing the responsibilities for DevOps.
6. Security: Should be a cross cutting concern. Your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and related services should be safeguarded and proper access control permissions should be set up.

DevOps has evolved since its inception, and more recently the term "platform engineering" has been used as a synonym. As a term, ‘platform engineering’ more explicitly describes the ‘how’ in achieving the original purpose of DevOps.

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Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and/or Deployment (or CI/CD) are two of the pillars of DevOps:

• Continuous Integration (CI) is about how team integrate their code changes frequently.
• Continuous Delivery (CD) is a way for teams to deliver updates reliably to users, by releasing and deploying code.

CI/CD is one of the practices recommended by DevOps and was created around the same time. However, it is not exclusive to DevOps and can be implemented independently. CI/CD creates a reliable path for code to move from development to production through automated testing and deployment. If a piece of code passes all the tests, CI/CD could mean that it would be in the hands of users within minutes – so this practice can dramatically speed up time to customer value.

CrowdStrike outlines the 3 key parts of CI/CD:

1. Continuous Integration

During this first phase, we validate code changes through automated checks. The steps are:

• Code Commit: Developers push their changes to version control
• Build: The CI server automatically compiles code and runs initial analysis
• Automated Testing: Changes go through unit tests and integration tests
• Quality Gates: Code analyzers check style and potential issues
• Artifact Creation: Successfully tested code gets packaged into deployable artifacts

2. Continuous Delivery:

Once code passes initial checks, we ensure it works in a realistic environment:

• Staging Deployment: Changes get deployed to an environment that mirrors production
• Comprehensive Testing: Teams run performance, security, and user acceptance tests
• Approval Gates: Some organizations add manual checks for sensitive changes

3. Continuous Deployment (optional):

For teams practicing continuous deployment, successful changes automatically flow to users:

• Production Release: Changes that pass all checks deploy automatically
• Active Monitoring: Teams watch for any issues in production

For teams not using Continuous Deployment, they would manually trigger the release of changes from the repository to production.

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While DevOps and CI/CD work hand in hand, they serve different purposes in modern software development. CI/CD can be considered as a facet within DevOps practices.

However, to prevent confusion, let's break down their key differences:

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DevOps and CI/CD create a powerful partnership in modern software development. While DevOps builds the cultural foundation of collaboration and shared responsibility, CI/CD provides one set of technical tools to make that culture thrive.

It's like having both a great team strategy and the right equipment to execute it perfectly.

Research from DORA (formerly the "DevOps Research and Assessment") shows the key metrics of high-performing teams. These metrics show how teams are doing at implementing DevOps practices, including CI/CD.

The DORA metrics are:

• Change Lead Time: The time it takes to go from first commit to code successfully running in production.
• Deployment Frequency: How often an organization deploys code to production or releases it to end users.
• Failed Deployment Recovery Time (Formerly Mean Time to Recovery): The time it takes to restore service when a deployment causes an outage or service failure in production (whereas previously Mean Time to Recovery also included uncontrollable failure events such as an earthquake disrupting service).
• Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that result in degraded service or require remediation (e.g., that lead to service impairment or outage, and require a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, or patch).
• Rework rate: This fifth metric was introduced later in 2024, and together with Change Failure Rate provide an indicator of software delivery stability. Since it's a newer addition, there aren’t any established  benchmarks yet and so this metric tends to receive less focus.

This data-driven approach helps teams measure their progress and identify areas for improvement.

The most successful organizations don't treat DevOps and CI/CD as separate initiatives — instead, they use CI/CD practices to reinforce their DevOps culture, creating a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.

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To improve your engineering performance across both your DevOps and CI/CD practices, teams use Multitudes. Multitudes is an engineering insights platform which seamlessly integrates with your existing development tools like GitHub and Jira, providing a comprehensive view of your team's delivery performance.

With Multitudes, you can:

• Automatically track DORA DevOps metrics, including Change Lead Time and Deployment Frequency, without manual data collection
• Gain clear visibility into work patterns, helping you distinguish between feature development, bug fixing activities, and out of hours work.
• Receive timely, automated Slack nudges with evidence-backed suggestions for improvement

Our clients ship 25% faster without sacrificing code quality.

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