DevOps is a cultural practice that combines development and operations into a single team to deliver high-quality applications quickly, with a focus on breaking down silos and shared responsibilities across the application lifecycle. Azure Pipelines, a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) system, facilitates automated application deployment and maintenance by building, testing, and deploying code efficiently. It supports various tools, languages, and deployment targets, enabling continuous testing and automating build-deploy-test workflows. The Pulumi task extension for Azure DevOps integrates infrastructure deployment with application builds in the same pipeline, requiring a service connection to an Azure Subscription and use of the Pulumi CLI. Developers may not always configure pipelines themselves, but understanding the build and deployment process is crucial, and the Pulumi task extension is compatible with various CI/CD systems beyond Azure.