DevOps aims to break down barriers between development and operations teams through collaboration, automation, and integration. Traditionally, these teams operated separately and communicated poorly, leading to delays in deploying code changes. DevOps promotes integrating development and operations, automating infrastructure changes, and monitoring systems to enable faster delivery of features and fixes while maintaining quality and stability. Adopting DevOps practices can provide benefits like faster time to market, better ability to respond to customer needs, and improved release quality, but also requires changes to culture and processes that may be challenging for some organizations.