DevOps: A Perfect Ally for Science Operations for Large and Distributed Astronomy Projects like Gaia

The Gaia Science Operations Centre (SOC) is an integral part of a large consortium responsible for the Gaia data processing task. Serving terabytes of processed data on a daily basis to other Processing Centres across Europe makes unique demands on the processes, procedures, as well as the team itself. This paper describes how we have embraced the DevOps principles to achieve our goals on performance, reliability and teamwork.