DevOps aims to shorten development cycles, improve quality, and provide quicker time to market by unifying software development and IT operations. It facilitates collaboration and automation to reliably deliver high-quality software. Key DevOps practices include continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) through automation; infrastructure as code (IaC) to provision resources through code; automated testing for quality; and monitoring and logging for visibility. Deployment pipelines further streamline deployments through automated, multi-stage processes from code commits to post-deployment checks.