What is DevOps Lifecycle? Devops Lifecycle Phases Plan & Measure

What is DevOps Lifecycle?

DevOps defines an agile relationship between development and operations. It is the process practiced by the development team and operational engineers together from beginning to the final stage of the product. Understanding DevOps is not complete without understanding the DevOps lifecycle phases. The continuous DevOps lifecycle includes seven phases as given below.

• Continuous Development
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Testing
• Continuous Monitoring
• Continuous Feedback
• Continuous Deployment
• Continuous Operations

A lot can be achieved with the right implementation of DevOps lifecycle, making the production of apps more effective and secured. The fact is that DevOps is the future of production lifecycles that ensures maximum operational efficiencies for the largest global enterprises and this trend will continue to grow in 2020 too.

DevOps – A Buzz or Reality?

In today’s marketplace, there is a need for rapid product development based on the customers feedback and requirement to respond quickly to market shifts. It is no longer suitable to wait for one year to add more features in the next release which in turn also creates extra pressure on the IT team to release a new version swiftly.

The DevOps movement arouses out the critical need here for organizations engaged in continuous development and responds more quickly to the changes. “DevOps” is the software development approach that synthesizes development and operations to achieve agility.”

Gartner believes that DevOps is the culture of practices that supports the agile movement, continuous development, continuous integration, infrastructure changes, continuous delivery etc. Agile movement has always embraced the engineering practices and DevOps automation is now an even more important part of those engineering practices.

DevOps seeks to optimize the development processes not for the one stage but for the complete delivery chain across the entire software delivery lifecycle from the proposal for a new product to the development and deploying it into production.

The goal of agile software development is to deliver a working piece of software at the end of each iteration. DevOps naturally extend this definition and deploys new software versions frequently that are almost continuous. With continuous development, the fragile pieces of a software program are improved or weeded out that contributes to greater reliability and maximum quality.

DevOps Lifecycle – It is all about “continuity”

There are a total of seven phases in the DevOps lifecycle – Continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, continuous feedback, continuous deployment, and continuous operations. Let us discuss each of the DevOps lifecycle phases below.

Read: Docker Basics - Docker DevOps Tutorial for Tomorrow’s Developers!

1). Continuous Development

(Plan application objectives and Code the requirements)

In the first phase of DevOps lifecycle, you should plan your application objectives that must be delivered to the customer.

Once you are sure of application objectives, start with the project development. It includes activities like code generation and putting the same to the next phase. As DevOps follows the continuous development approach, work may carry out on the existing code by using continuous feedback in the development and operation scheme.

2). Continuous Integration

(Plan Tests and Build the product)

The continuous integration process automatically starts after development. It includes several steps like the planning of tests that will be carried out in the next phase, understanding the code to produce the desired outcome as needed in the initial project documentation. Continuous integration is the seamless process in DevOps that leads to the next phase in an efficient manner.

3). Continuous Testing

(Verify the product for actual usage in a live environment)

Testing process checks the actual use of an application in the DevOps. Beta testers produce results while still ensuring that application can have its intended use in a live environment. The testing process gives more information about different aspects of an application that in turn is sent to the development process to improve the application.

4). Continuous Monitoring

(Monitor the product output and find the problem areas)

The monitoring phase is the operational phase in DevOps where key information about application usage is recorded and carefully processed to find out trends and identify the problem areas. It enhances the operational efficiencies of a software product that may occur in the form of documents or produce massive data about application parameters when the application is in a continuous use position.

5). Continuous Feedback

(Improvise the current product and helps to release new versions quickly)

Read: Ultimate Guide to Mastering Docker Interview Questions in 2023

The application performance is improved consistently by analyzing the final outcome of the product. The continuous feedback is an important phase of the software application where customer feedback is a big asset to improve the working of the current software product and release new versions quickly based on the response.

6). Continuous Deployment

(Ensures product is deployed with maximum accuracy)

The deployment process is performed in such a way that any changes made in the code should not affect the functioning of high traffic website.

7). Continuous operations

(Automate release process with shorter development cycles)

All DevOps operations are based on continuity with complete automation of the release process and allow organizations to accelerate the overall time to market on an ongoing basis.

It is clear from the discussion that continuity is the critical factor in DevOps removing the abundant steps that often distract the development, take it longer to detect issues, and producing a better version of the product after several months. With DevOps, you can make any software product more efficient and increase the overall count of interested customers in your product. Let us see how businesses are benefitted through DevOps deployment.

DevOps adoption enables businesses to Revive the Pace

DevOps is a practical and valuable asset for organizations because of its numerous measurable benefits through continuous integration and continuous delivery without compromising on the quality of software products or services. Here is the list of benefits why businesses should adopt DevOps to revive the pace.

Improved Customer Experiences

DevOps is a culture of principles defining collaboration between development and ops team to produce the faster result in development cycles, reply on cost controls, and timeliness improves ROI.

Digital Transformation

DevOps is a strategy of successful digital transformation for every industry using technology innovations and industries are able to deliver digital solutions at maximum speed or quality.

Breaking down silos

The DevOps incorporation breaks down common barriers and reduces unnecessary supplicate work too. DevOps increases collaboration among team members from all disciplines responsible for product development or delivery and ultimately results in more stable business environments.

Read: The Jenkins Pipeline Is So Famous, But Why?

Easy detection of defects

With the intervention of DevOps collaboration, modular programming, and iterative development, code defects are detected and resolved much quicker than your expectations. It enables maximum efficiency and chances of product failure become negligible.

Faster Development Cycles

With DevOps collaboration and automation features, improvements are achieved in the shorter development lifecycles and make sure that products can be released reliably at the right time.

When you know why businesses should implement DevOps lifecycle, you should have a DevOps partner to understand its advantages and use cases. An expert DevOps team can assist you to fasten the application development and delivery. So, DevOps was a buzz in the technical marketplace till yesterday and industries are implementing DevOps at a high rate today. Companies that practice DevOps are able to perform far better than those who do not practice the same.

Conclusion

DevOps is an excellent way of carrying out the application development that significantly improves the application performance for business and allows end-users to directly contribute to the application development process by sharing relevant feedback from the operational phase. It is a methodology that we will continue to see in the future as the top option for developing dynamic apps that evolves constantly to meet tough business challenges.

With the increased DevOps adoption, job options are getting wider for DevOps learners. To make yourself a proficient DevOps resource, you should prepare yourself for the practical aspects of the technology and learn how to implement the same in the job field.

FaceBook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Pinterest Email