OP here, and I'll try to answer this myself. For me, DevOps is about communication. This is a little different from the common "DevOps culture" response. How d

OP here, and I'll try to answer this myself. For me, DevOps is about communication. This is a little different from the common "DevOps culture" response. How do different people and different teams communicate for the shared goal of moving software from a developer-facing world to a customer-facing world? This generally means "deployment", a handoff of some sorts, and copying the software from development to production environments. How is this communicated? How does the producer know what to tell the consumer so the consumer can deploy to a new environment? How does the consumer communicate what they need to know? In more traditional environments, this means meetings and written plans and tickets. Details are written by humans, for humans. In a "DevOps" environment, the communication is via automation. The steps to deploy are fully programmed; only configuration data varies between environments. This way, development and operations teams are speaking a common, formal language. Vagueness and interpretation are banished. The plain meaning is there, in the configuration. The deployment itself becomes configuration! Humans only need to be involved to provide go/no-go approvals. Of course, that's not everything. But that's what matters to me. When development and operations stop communicating with words, and start communicating with formal, machine-readable configuration, a language free of opinion and interpretation.