DevOps involves collaboration between software developers and IT professionals to automate the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims to allow building, testing, and releasing software rapidly and reliably. DevOps tools like Chef can be used to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration at scale. Chef recipes can be used to install and configure packages like Apache. Cookbooks help organize recipes and make them manageable. A Chef server acts as a central repository for cookbooks and node information.