Software development can be risky due to factors such as differences between environments, inability to scale, vulnerabilities in supply chain, buggy code, and insufficient monitoring. However, DevOps practices offer opportunities to mitigate these risks through automation, speed, and efficiency. Strategies for reducing risk include leveraging containerization and infrastructure-as-code, ensuring a secure software supply chain, utilizing static and dynamic analysis, implementing effective monitoring and alerts, and incorporating feature flags. These strategies can help developers deliver safe, reliable, and secure software while minimizing disruption to end-users.