DevOps represents a profound change from the way most IT departments have traditionally worked: from siloed teams and high-anxiety releases to everyone collaborating on uneventful and more frequent releases of higher-quality code.

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Most of us longtime system administrators get a little nervous when people start talking about DevOps. It's an IT topic surrounded by a lot of mystery and confusion, much like the term "Cloud Computing" was a few years back. Thankfully, DevOps isn't something sysadmins need to fear.

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When I was growing up, my father always said, "Work smarter, not harder." Now that I'm an adult, I've found that to be a core concept in my career as a DevOps engineer and manager. In order to work smarter, you've got to have good tools and technology in your corner doing a lot of the repetitive work, so you and your team can handle any exceptions that occur.

This excerpt is from the book, 'DevOps Troubleshooting: Linux Server Best Practices' by Kyle Rankin, published by Pearson/Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0321832043, Nov 2012, Copyright 2013 Pearson Education, Inc.