DevOps is a set of best practices around the software development lifecycle that aims to improve efficiency and value creation. Key aspects include collaboration between developers and operations teams, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), automated testing, observability, and automation. Some common anti-patterns to avoid are creating separate DevOps teams, relying on a single "DevOps hero," attempting to automate everything at once, chasing new tools without proper analysis, sacrificing quality for speed, neglecting continuous improvement, and overlooking documentation and information sharing.