The Phases of DevOps Lifecycle Management

Why DevOps?

The goal of every business is to make an impact and expand in scale and revenue. Businesses today heavily rely on software’s and technology. DevOps entered the business scene since over a decade and has continuously adapted and risen. The demands for new software to execute rapid product development in this fast paced business market has kept DevOps trending.

• This is evident from the fact that the Dev Ops market size valuation which stood at $ 3.62 Billion in 2018 is expected to attain $20.01 Billion by 2026. (Verified Market Research).

Devops consulting companies in India like Orion esolutions foster coordination and collaboration between the development and operations teams to work in tandem to meet the company goals.

Benefits of DevOps

The traditional software development approach faced many challenges. High costs, high chances of errors, late updates and feedback. The lack of synergy and communication between the related teams resulted in time and resource wastage with unsatisfactory outputs.

With the DevOps approach, companies can generate more efficient business results, be agile and respond to market situations faster. This fosters creativity and innovation leading to customer satisfaction. The other benefits include risk mitigation, enhanced security and trustworthiness.

What is DevOps Life Cycle Management?

DevOps lifecycle is a series of automated development processes or workflows within an iterative development lifecycle.

The DevOps lifecycle is a sequential step by step automated process flow from start to finish. It is depicted by the infinity loop, which implies continuous development at every stage. The left part of the infinity loop stands for excellence in software development while the right symbolizes the operations an deployment cycles.

The Phases of DevOps Lifecycle

DevOps is continuous where every step can have multiple iterations.

To implement DevOps and to build quality software, you should have a basic understanding of its phases. Devops consulting companies in India like Orion will offer you a structured approach to implement the phases while incorporating the best practices.

Let’s take a look at the seven phases of the DevOps lifecycle, so you can implement and manage it better.

1. Continuous development

This phases focuses on preparing the blueprint. The developers undertand the expectations and are in tune with the overall vision of the project. Planning and coding are the main elements in this phase. Stakeholder opinion and customer feedback are reviewed to chalk out the development process. This is broken down into smaller projects with defined release timelines.  This creates a cycle of continuous software development.

The development team uses version control tools at this stage. For example for source code maintenance they would use Git, JIRA, Mercurial, and SVN. They would use Ant, Gradle, and Maven to create the executable files to forward to the next component in the lifecycle. GiT and Jira are considered the most popular ones.

2. Continuous Integration

This stage involves all the steps to in unit testing, integration testing, code review, and packaging. The majority of changes to the source code take place at this stage. There is a continuous integration of functionalities and features. These are continuously developed and integrated into existing code. Developers also work on identified bugs and modify the source code accordingly.

Jenkins is one of the most popular DevOps tools used at this stage. Other tools include Bamboo, GitLab CI, Buddy, TeamCity etc .

3. Continuous Testing

The developed software undergoes rigorous QA and testing for bugs and other issues. A simulates test set up is created using Docker Containers. Automated testing enables developers to save time, effort and money.  If any bugs are detected, the project goes back to the integration phase for revisions. The QA process is crucial to ensure the functionality of the project and to meet the client’s demands satisfactorily.

Selenium, is one of the most used DevOps tools in this phase as it supports multiple platforms and browsers. TestSigma is an AI driven tool.

4. Continuous Monitoring

This is the operational phase. The application usage is carefully monitored to identify trends and recurring issues or system errors. Security issues are also addressed during this phase.

Splunk , Sensu, ELK Stack, NewRelic, are some of the prominent DevOps tools used during this stage.

5. Continuous Feedback

The improvements and modifications made in the earlier stages are analysed here. However, the feedback stage factors in the results and has a constant feedback loop between operations and development. Customer Feedback takes precedence to improve the current application and the release of updated versions. The DevOps tools used include Pendo and Qentelli’s TED.

6. Continuous Deployment

The new code is deployed and configuration management tools and containerization tools play an important role in this phase. They help ensure frequent and rapid execution and consistency across the production environment. Some of the popular tools deployed in continuous Deployment include Ansible, SaltStack, chef and Puppet.

7. Continuous Operations

Continuity is the core of the DevOps lifecycle. The development cycle get shorter and scheduled maintenances are undertaken. Organisation avail of automation of the release process, better versions and shorter time to market.  The popular tools used include Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.

Also Read: Custom application development services

Conclusion

DevOps has ushered in process for quality and continuous software development. Do you want to automate your development process? Are you seeking a customised DevOps solution to optimise your business value?

Orionesolutions is one of the leading Devops consulting companies in India. Orion experts can help an effective DevOps cycle through implementing DevOps best practices.