A Comprehensive Guide to DevOps Life Cycle and Its Process

Quick Rundown: Do you know the DevOps market is expected to reach $25.5 billion by 2028? If you are interested in implementing DevOps, this comprehensive guide is written for you. From its essential practices to the tools that make it a breeze, it covers everything. Don’t miss out and read on to learn how you can capitalize on DevOps benefits and ensure high-quality software delivery.

DevOps represents development and operations, which includes various processes, tools, and concepts. It enhances a development organization’s ability to deliver effective services and applications. DevOps principles empower developers to add swiftness to their development practices and offer standout services to the client to help them stay ahead of the competition.

With DevOps software development, it is ensured that the IT teams collaborate effectively and efficiently to speed up the development process for quality services and applications. The team members focus on collaboration, automation, rapid feedback, and iterative improvements to obtain high-quality outcomes.

So, if your company is just beginning to use DevOps and wants to automate the development workflow but isn't familiar with the DevOps lifecycle and its stages, you have landed at the correct place. With the help of some concrete insights, we will explain the end-to-end lifecycle of DevOps in more detail here.

Let’s dive deep!

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What is DevOps Lifecycle?

When working with the DevOps workflow, the development and operations teams are no longer isolated with their individual work approaches. It is all about two teams coming together to achieve a singular goal. Under the DevOps architecture, the engineers work around the application management aspects. Starting from development and testing to final deployment and operations, this group of engineers attends all of the phases.

The DevOps lifecycle involves continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD). This means that software changes are integrated and tested continuously throughout the development process, and deployed to production as soon as they are ready. By automating and streamlining the software development and delivery process, DevOps aims to improve collaboration, reduce errors, and speed up software delivery.

Cloud computing and containerization play an important part in the DevOps SDLC. These DevOps technologies, among others, have made it incredibly easy to deploy and manage software products at scale, hence, speeding up software delivery, and focusing on the collaboration between devs and ops teams.

Does DevOps Really Need a Lifecycle?

DevOps needs a lifecycle to ensure that the entire development process runs smoothly and maximizes efficiency. Each stage has its own set of tools, processes, and practices that enable teams to continuously work together and deliver high-quality software.

The lifecycle is important for multiple reasons. First up, it offers a framework for software professionals to work in order, helping you make sure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same objectives. This can reduce confusion and miscommunication, with projects delivered on time and on budget.

Secondly, it helps developers ensure that quality is integrated into the software development process from the very beginning. By running testing and quality assurance at all the phases of DevOps lifecycle, teams can catch and fix issues early on, before they become more difficult and expensive to fix.

Finally, gathering data and feedback at each stage helps teams identify areas and make improvements as they need. This leads to constructive and efficient software development and delivery, even as technology and business need to over time.

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DevOps vs. Traditional SDLC: What’s the Difference?

There are notable challenges that come up with the traditional SDLC, including:

• Coordination is lacking between the involved members in the development cycle.
• New tools eventually make the coding faster, but at times the operations team fails to cope with these rapid changes.
• Production servers might need some tuning or tweaking over time at the operating system or database level.
• Developers don’t get access to production servers to check the performance of an application.

Traditional SDLC fails to fill the gap between operations and developers teams. Thus, such challenges will have an adverse impact on the schedule, reputation, and overall cost of the development company.

The DevOps process flow comes with an ideal solution for all these challenges through its product management lifecycle. DevOps services and solutions to bring the operations and development teams together to speed up the deployments with the utmost quality. Development under the lifecycle of DevOps is also specified as “near real-time development.”

It adds flexibility to the entire process, as you automatically deploy the application once the developers implement the change. With this, organizations can reduce human intervention across various areas of development.

Key DevOps Principles and Practices to Follow

DevOps lifecycle operates on specific principles that add value to the development process. Take a look at the fundamental DevOps principles and practices your team needs to follow:

• Creating production-style systems for both testing and development environments.
• All deployments made must be frequent and iterative.
• Ensuring a repeatable and reliable process of development.
• Continuous monitoring and validation of the operational quality of an application or product.
• Implement amplification for the feedback loop.

Different DevOps Lifecycle Phases

The life cycle of DevOps works consistently, from the planning to the monitoring stage. To help you understand what the development and operations team do in each of these phases, here’s a brief breakdown of the entire DevOps workflow:

Phase 1: Continuous Development (CD)

Continuous development in DevOps lifecycle phases comprises overall coding and planning of the software. In this phase, the team will outline the entire lifecycle of the software. Hence, this will speed up the overall development process in the following steps.

At CD, project managers will gather all of the specific requirements of a project and discuss them with the stakeholders. Efforts will be made to understand the core objective of the project. Once the team and stakeholders agree on the business needs, the software development team will start with the coding efforts.

Phase 2: Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration is the second most important part of all DevOps SDLC. Here, the developers work on the updated code or try to integrate the additional functionalities and features into the application. This step is the main aspect of adding new code functionalities to the existing source code. As a result, all conflicts within the current code will be resolved due to the rapid changes.

Phase 3: Continuous Testing

Once the code is developed, it will be examined or tested at this step in the DevOps lifecycle. The QA team will test the software for all possible issues or bugs to ensure the software meets the client’s requirements. Software QA testers use Docker containers for this purpose. When the analysts find errors, they return them to the integration stage for added modifications.

Phase 4: Continuous Feedback

Continuous feedback is the phase where all the added improvements to the old source code are analyzed for performance. The developers have the feasibility to measure the outcome of all the modifications integrated into the final product. The customers who have already tested these changes in the application can also share their experiences during this phase.

In most cases, this specific phase of the DevOps life cycle changes the entire development process. The assigned team assesses the feedback thoroughly to begin working on the required changes.

Phase 5: Continuous Monitoring

One of the most important phases of the DevOps lifecycle is consistently monitoring performance. Developers will record data on how people use the application and how each functionality works. Some common errors the developers witness upon continuous monitoring are server or memory problems. They look forward to rectifying those errors immediately to avoid downtime for the software.

With this approach, hiring DevOps engineers will help you implement the DevOps application lifecycle management. Moreover, it also ensures that all of the services within the application are available for customers to use. It detects the root causes of any persistent system errors and finds any possible threat to the security aspects of the software.

After all the issues are identified and fixed in this phase, the software is rerun through the above DevOps lifecycle phases to confirm the resolutions.

Phase 6: Continuous Deployment

It is the phase where the final code for the software will be deployed onto the main production servers. This phase includes hassle-free product deployment and configuration management. Moreover, developers in this phase can ensure smooth and accurate deployment without impacting the software’s overall performance.

The code is finally released onto the servers, and the development team then schedules the updates. The entire configuration remains constant for DevOps steps within Continuous Deployment. Teams prefer using the DevOps lifecycle tools for containerization to ensure consistency within the development, staging, testing, and production approaches.

Phase 7: Continuous Operations

The final phase of the DevOps development life cycle is critical for ensuring high uptime and timely software maintenance. Under this stage, the launch & release processes are automated, and errors are spotted immediately. Thus, this phase, among all of the DevOps lifecycle stages, contributes a lot towards developing between software versions.

The team will ensure that you don’t lose out on business opportunities due to frequent downtimes.

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DevOps Lifecycle Diagram

Here is the DevOps lifecycle diagram for a clear understanding of all the synchronized phases involved in it:

Best Tools to Manage DevOps Lifecycle Phases

To help you better understand the significance of this concept and overcome potential DevOps challenges, here are some of the lifecycle DevOps tools that are widely used in each phase of the lifecycle:

• Discover - Jira Product Discovery, MURAL, miro
• Plan - Jira Software, Confluence, slack
• Build - Kubernetes, docker, Terraform, puppet, CHEF Progress, Ansible, Bitbucket, GitLab, GitHub
• Continuous Delivery - Jenkins, AWS, circleci, Bitbucket, SonarSource
• Testing - Zephyr Squad, XRAY, mabl, snyk, MEND, VeraCode, StackHawk
• Deployment - Jira Software, Bitbucket, AWS CodePipeline
• Continuous Operations - Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Opsgenie, Statuspage
• Observation - AppDynamics, DataDog, slack, splunk, New Relic, Opsgenie, pingdom, Nagios, dynatrace, sumo logic
• Continuous Feedback - GetFeedback, slack, Jira Service Management, pendo

How to Implement the DevOps Process?

So, if you need to respond faster to business needs and want to get into a data-driven culture, then it’s time you implement the DevOps workflow into your software development practices. The steps you must follow for the same are:

• Discuss the DevOps initiative with your team.
• Develop your overall DevOps strategies, such as the use of tools, methods, and approaches.
• Containerize all of your applications.
• Integrate your development infrastructure with CI/CD pipelines.
• Automate the tests and align your QA team with the developers.
• Constantly monitor the performance of the application.

Radixweb as your DevOps Services Partner

Radixweb has been a pioneer of modern DevOps practices. We adhere to each stage of the DevOps lifecycle to build robust software products that support the project vision and organizational mission of our client.

You can hire proficient DevOps developers from our network and work with us as your one-stop hub for your quality software development needs. We have a highly competent development team that ensures:

• Flawless delivery of software solutions
• Reduced costs of the overall project
• Enhanced customer satisfaction
• Complete transparency with clients
• Use of quality tools and methodologies

So, get in touch with our team of DevOps consultants today, and you shall get a proper understanding of our approach to the DevOps process and lifecycle. Specify your requirements, and we will set a clear roadmap to meet your requirements.

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ConclusionSo, this briefly explains all steps in the DevOps lifecycle. It is an efficient development culture that ensures quality production and release. It integrates automation and maintains continuity, using effective collaboration between the DevOps teams for enhanced UX. Suppose you are a new developer and are about to work on the DevOps lifecycle or approach. In that case, this article will be a prominent guide for you to relate to your practical implementations. Not just quality development, but you will also be ensuring high-end security for all of your software solutions. The adoption of this technique is increasing in the modern era, as its benefits are pretty evident. In the future, it will be more prominently used in developing dynamic applications and even in static web pages.