The key to success in today’s remote workplace environment is facilitating adequate understanding and coordination between your development and operations teams. DevOps bridges the gap between operations and development, and its lifecycle has numerous phases. It helps businesses save time and money while increasing the quality of their service and product delivery.
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What is DevOps Lifecycle?
The DevOps lifecycle is a unique application development methodology that consists of eight essential phases. It improves the application’s performance by employing an innovative technology that allows users to submit input during the development process. It is intended to replace all application development methods in the future because it is agile, scalable, and affordable.
This article examines the entire DevOps lifecycle, including all its phases and recommendations.
DevOps Lifecycle Phase 1: Continuous Development
Continuous development involves software planning and coding. This phase establishes the entire software development lifecycle to accelerate the development process.
This phase consists of identifying the needs of the projects, reviewing them with the project’s stakeholders, updating the product roadmap based on consumer feedback, and interpreting the project’s ultimate aim.
Once clients and teams agree on the business requirements, the development team begins the coding process and makes any necessary revisions. Using tools such as Jira, Mercurial, or GIT, helps developers maintain the code.
DevOps Lifecycle Phase 2: Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is when you integrate the updated code, or new features and functions. Consequently, this stage becomes the focal point for regularly incorporating new code features into the existing source code and addressing code conflicts caused by frequent modifications.
In addition, developers identify defects at each level through system testing and prepare the necessary tests for the subsequent stage.
Continuous Integration solutions such as Jenkins, CircleCI, and Buddy can assist in automating the CI pipeline.
DevOps Lifecycle Phase 3: Continuous Testing
Using Docker containers, quality analysts regularly test the software for errors and issues during this phase. The code is returned to the integration phase for correction if a bug is found. Some teams conduct the continuous testing phase before integration, whereas others conduct it after integration.
Additionally, automation testing minimizes the effort and time required to get reliable findings. Teams use technologies like Selenium during this stage. In addition, continuous testing improves the test assessment report and reduces the cost of delivering and maintaining testing efforts.
DevOps Lifecycle Phase 4: Continuous Deployment
During this phase, you release the complete code on production servers, making it among the most crucial stages of the DevOps lifecycle. Continuous deployment involves configuration management to ensure the proper and seamless deployment of code on servers.
Development teams deliver code to servers throughout the production stage and plan upgrades for servers, all while maintaining consistent configurations. In addition to facilitating deployment, docker tools ensure consistency throughout the development, production, testing, and staging environments.
For configuration management, tools like Chef and Ansible are beneficial.
DevOps Lifecycle Phase 5: Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring includes overseeing the application’s working functionality to assess the software’s effectiveness and identify system faults such as inaccessible servers or limited memory.
This phase enables IT teams to detect application performance problems and their underlying causes swiftly. If the team discovers severe issues, you put the application through the complete DevOps lifecycle again. However, in most cases, teams promptly fix problems at this step.
Tools such as Nagios and Splunk facilitate and simplify the continuous monitoring phase.
DevOps Lifecycle Phase 6: Continuous Feedback
Continuous feedback assesses and enhances the application’s source code. During this phase, you examine user behavior routinely after each release to enhance upcoming updates and deployments. Companies can obtain feedback using either an unstructured or structured strategy.
In the structural method, teams gather input using survey forms and questionnaires. In contrast, feedback is given in an unstructured manner via social media networks. This phase is critical for making continuous delivery possible in order to release a better version of the software.
Pendo is a good analytics tool for collecting consumer feedback and insights.
DevOps Lifecycle Phase 7: Continuous Operations
The final stage of the DevOps lifecycle is crucial for reducing periodic downtime, such as scheduled service. Typically, programmers must shut down the entire system to make the changes, which increases downtime and can lead to a significant loss for the business. Continuous functioning ultimately streamlines the method for launching and upgrading the application.
Using unit management systems like Kubernetes and Docker avoids interruptions as well.
These container management systems simplify application development, testing, and deployment phases across several settings. This phase’s primary objective is to improve the app’s availability so that functions can continue unhindered.
The Endnote
More and more businesses are adopting the DevOps lifecycle to streamline their software development processes. Teamwork between developers and the operations team is the primary focus of DevOps, as this is what will guarantee speed, collaboration, and the fulfillment of client needs.
At DEHA Vietnam, we provide a Secure DevOps Access solution to facilitate collaboration among your development and operations teams while assuring the highest level of DevOps security. Contact us if you like to learn more about our services.
