In the beginning, there was devops: a new philosophy that aimed to break down the silos of software development and IT operations and combine both teams into a single group with shared responsibility.

Devops practices borrowed from agile development methodologies, insisted on continuous integration and continuous delivery, and helped make the era of cloud development possible.

Devops became so popular that it began to spawn other kinds of ops. Secops. Gitops. Cloudops. AIops. The list is growing, and can feel less like a movement and more like an arms race in jargon.

As Cameron Rimington, founder and CEO of IronPDF, puts it: “The ratio of ‘ops’ methodologies is just plain silly at this point — every couple of months a new one comes out that must be creating something of a race for new forms of appearing to be fresh.”

So what’s really behind all these labels? Does each mark a new practice, or are they just different names for the same basic principles? The truth is somewhere in between. Each “ops” term represents an approach to integrating software development, IT operations, and other functions — but the overlap is considerable. In this article, we aim to help you understand which ones actually matter for your work.

Why so many ‘ops’?

Devops is a broad movement toward automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement in IT and software development. When you see more terms that include the “ops” suffix, you should understand them as ideas that, as Graham Krizek, CEO of Voltage, puts it, “represent different layers of the same overarching goal. These concepts are not isolated silos but overlapping practices that support automation, collaboration, and scalability.”

But what about the specifics of each? Fergal Glynn, CMO of Mindgard, offers a useful taxonomy:

• The core four: Devops, devsecops, gitops, and cloudops. These are the practices most IT professionals will actually encounter.
• The specialized ones: AIops, MLops, finops, dataops, and others. Each of these applies the same general principles to narrower domains.

Glynn also offers a reality check: No one needs to master them all. “Most IT professionals usually specialize in two or three that match their role and the company needs,” he says.

The foundations: 4 ops you need to know

Devops, as noted, was the starting point. It’s a cultural and technical shift that brings development and operations together, breaking down silos to enable faster, more reliable software delivery.

As Milankumar Rana, software engineer advisor and senior cloud engineer at FedEx, explains, “devops is a way of thinking that brings together software development and IT operations to make working together easier and more efficient. It is all about automating tasks and using a CI/CD pipeline to speed up the development process.”

Devops has become the default assumption for how modern teams build and deploy software. Most of the other “Ops” flavors are extensions or specializations of its core principles.

Devsecops brings security into the mix of development and operations. “Devsecops builds on traditional devops by putting security into each step of the development process instead of just at the end,” says Rana. “This method makes everyone on the team responsible for security and automates security testing in the CI/CD pipeline.”

Gitops takes the principles of devops and applies them to infrastructure management. Instead of manually configuring systems, teams declare infrastructure in Git repositories. This adds predictability and reduces human error. As IronPDF’s Rimington puts it, “gitops can therefore be seen as another flavor of devops, with Git being the source of truth for deployments.”

Cloudops has emerged because so much infrastructure now living in the cloud, and teams need ways to describe the operational practices needed to manage it. This includes automation, monitoring, compliance, and cost optimization. Cloudops isn’t separate from devops so much as a domain-specific application of its principles. “If you work with cloud infrastructure,” says Glynn, “then you’d focus on devops, cloudops, and maybe finops.” (More on that last one in a moment.)

That’s just the start, however. From there, the list continues to grow:

• AIops uses AI to detect anomalies and automate IT operations.
• MLops manages the full lifecycle of machine learning models.
• Finops governs cloud costs and financial accountability.
• Dataops applies devops-style principles to data pipelines.

Some go further still. Rana points to “devsecprivacyops” and even “devsecprivacyAIops,” which combine privacy-by-design, regulatory compliance, and AI-powered operations. These may sound convoluted, but they illustrate the same basic tendency: taking devops principles and applying them to specialized contexts.

An ops reality check

At some point, the alphabet soup stops being helpful. IronPDF’s Rimington says that the overlap is so significant that most new “ops” terms are just marketing. “Cloudops and AIops are just extensions of devops, but applied to different kinds of infrastructure,” he says. “We concluded that a base knowledge of devops fundamentals, such as automation, monitoring, and collaboration represents 80% of what you need for any of the other shapes.”

Voltage’s Krizek makes a similar point. “While it is not necessary for every IT professional to master each one individually, understanding the principles behind them is essential for navigating modern infrastructure,” he says. “The focus should remain on creating reliable systems and delivering value, not simply keeping up with new terminology.”

In other words: you don’t need to collect ops like trading cards. You need to understand the fundamentals, specialize where it makes sense, and ignore the rest. Start with devops, add security if your compliance requirements demand it, and adopt cloudops practices if you’re heavily in the cloud. Beyond that, only bring in specialized ops when your work calls for it.

Rimington sums it up well. “Learn the normal devops stuff first and then if you ever need special tools roll them in,” he says. Don’t succumb to the temptation to use every ‘ops’ methodology at once—only those that you need right now — and grow from there.”

The bottom line: the alphabet soup will only keep growing, but you don’t need to slurp up the whole thing. Master the basics, understand the principles, and you’ll be ready to gain fluency in whatever ops comes next — if you need to.