DevOps Life Cycle – The Entire Process with Step by Step Phase

The software and development industry today is well aware of the one or two mix-up words DevOps (Development and Operations). But the understanding of DevOps will remain incomplete without knowing the proper Life cycle of DevOps. So, getting involved in DevOps online course and acquiring proper knowledge and skill on this, would always be an added advantage for the developers who are willing to make their career in this field. So, let’s start with the details of DevOps along with its requirements in the software industry.

Before going to start about the DevOps Life cycle, let’s have a look at the waterfall model and agile methodology for software development:

Waterfall Model – The Waterfall model is a sequential process in the development of a system or you can say in the software which follows a top-down approach. It is a linear and straight forward model. The waterfall model has various phases like Software Design, Requirement Definition, Testing, Implementation, Integration, Deployment and Maintenance.

The Development organizations who are using Waterfall Model, have to spend a lot of time to get their product right because unless you complete any particular phase, you would not be able to proceed to the next stage. Also, the software can only be delivered after the completion of the final phase. 

Such type of Model is only suitable which had stable requirements means the requirements would not change with time. But in today’s world, it is quite tough to maintain because requirements keep on changing from time to time. So, it is a little drawback of the Waterfall Model.

Agile Method: Now, the next one is the agile methodology of the software development department. It is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development as well as testing throughout the software development life cycle of any project. Both the development and testing can run simultaneously unlike the Waterfall model. While the approach of agile methodology brought agility to development, it was lost on Operations that would not come up to speed with agile practices. 

However, with the above two models, we can see that there is a lack of collaboration between Developers and Engineers which is ultimately slowing down the development process and releases. Software companies realize the need for collaboration between the teams to provide faster delivery of software which ultimately gave birth to the DevOps. DevOps enabled continuous software delivery in a faster process.

What is DevOps:

DevOps is a combination of two words – Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops). DevOps is the way of allowing a single team to manage the entire application development life cycle which is development, testing, implementation, integration or deployment and operations. The main purpose of DevOps is to cut down the system’s development life cycle while delivering features, fixes and updates normally in close configuration with business objectives. 

So, we can say that DevOps is a software development approach through which superior quality software can be developed quickly in a more trustworthy and reliable way. It consists of different steps like continuous development, integration, continuous testing, deployment as well as continuous monitoring. 

DevOps Life Cycle:

The whole step by step process of continuous development, integration, testing, deployment and continuous monitoring constitute the DevOps lifecycle. So, let’s have a look at each phase of the DevOps Lifecycle:

Continuous Development: It is that phase of the life cycle where –planning and coding of the software are required. The vision of the project was decided during the planning phase and the developers started developing the code for the application. There are no DevOps tools that are required for planning but there are so many tools that are required for maintaining the code. The code can be written in any language but should be maintained by using the Version Control tools. Maintaining such code is termed Source Code Management. Some of the famous tools are Git, Mercurial, JIRA, SVN, and CVS. Also some more tools like Maven, Ant, Gradle can also be used in this stage for packaging or building the code into an executable file which can be forwarded to the next phases. 

Continuous Testing: In this stage, the developed software is continuously tested to check the bugs. For this automation testing tools like TestNG, Selenium, JUnit, etc. are used. It will allow QAs to test several code-bases thoroughly in parallel to endure that there will be no flaws. Automation testing saves lots of time, labor, and effort for executing the tests instead of doing it manually. 

Continuous Integration: It is the main part of the entire DevOps cycle. It is a software development practice where developers need to commit changes to the source code more frequently, maybe on a weekly or even daily basis. Every commit is then built which will allow early detection of problems if they are present. Building code not only includes compilation but also code review, integration testing, unit testing, and packaging. As there is a continuous development of software, the updated code is also required to be integrated continuously in a smooth way with the systems to reflect the new changes to the end-users. 

Continuous Deployment:  In this stage, the code is deployed to the production servers. It is also important to check that the code must be correctly deployed on all the servers. The Configuration Management Tool and the Containerization tools help in achieving the Continuous Deployment process. Configuration Management is the act to establish and maintain consistency in any application’s functional requirements and performance. Containerization tools are playing a vital role in the deployment stage. It helps in maintaining consistency across the environments where the application will be developed, tested, and deployed. 

Continuous Monitoring: It is an important step of the DevOps Lifecycle where you have to continuously monitor the performance of the application. In this stage, any important information about the usage of the software is being recorded. This information is then proceeded to check and recognize the proper functionality of the application. Any kind of system errors like server not reachable, low memory etc. will be sorted out in this phase.

All the DevOps LifeCycle stages are carried out in a loop in a continuous way till you achieve the desired product quality. So, to know about the entire cycle, DevOps training in hyderabad from a well-reputed institute is necessary with practical in hand knowledge so that you can apply it to your present organizations or to those companies in which you are willing to join.