Providing self-service capabilities

Before DevOps, virtual machines or hosting environments were often requested from operations, by developers manually or through ticketing systems. Provisioning was done manually by operators, which could take days or sometimes even weeks.

Self-service capabilities means that environments are no longer created manually, but through self-service API's that operations teams make available to developers.

This way, developers are fully able to create and destroy environments on their own. They can create and test changes on their own and send them off or schedule them for automated deployment.