Patrick Debois coined the term "DevOps" in 2009 by combining "development" and "operations" to refer to a collaborative way for software teams to develop and deploy applications. DevOps stresses communication, collaboration and integration between developers and IT operations. It utilizes automation and treats infrastructure as code through stages of planning, creating, verifying, packaging, releasing, configuring and monitoring applications. While DevOps is a cultural practice, cloud computing provides remote servers and services that can support DevOps goals and be a tool to enable frequent deployments.