How do you use DevOps practices to boost your deployment speed?

Quick answer: DevOps speeds up deployment mainly by breaking down silos between development and operations and tightening the continuous integration/continuous deployment loop, so code reaches production as quickly and safely as possible instead of queuing behind manual handoffs.

Is it DevOps? Well, DevOps is primarily about breaking down silos — communication, and CALMS (continuous integration and deployment is part of that, but I prefer CALMS as the wider term) — and it's about getting code to where it needs to be deployed and working as quickly as possible. Its main purpose is to shrink the gap between developers and operations, and the smaller we can get that gap, the less handover, the smoother the deployments. You can start deploying stuff once every hour, or even quicker, if your coders are fast enough.