What Is DevOps and DevOps Lifecycle?

What Is DevOps and DevOps Lifecycle?

From early-stage startups to traditional enterprises, DevOps is making significant inroads into IT organizations everywhere. One research shows that 74% of successful companies have implemented DevOps at some point in their working lives. Let's talk about DevOps.

Keyword(s): devops, devops lifecycle

What Is DevOps?

The word "DevOps" was coined in 2009 by Mr. Patrick Debois, who became one of its gurus. Patrick held the first DevOpsDays event in Ghent that lit the fuse.

However, the seeds of DevOps were planted a long time ago. "DevOps" is a word made by combining "development" and "operations". It helps us understand what people mean when they say "DevOps".

DevOps isn't a process or a technology or a standard. Many devotees prefer to recall DevOps as a "culture".

We say "DevOps movement" when talking about how many people are using it and what might happen in the future. "DevOps environment" means an IT group that uses DevOps ideas. DevOps is a term that covers the ways to make software development faster. It includes processes, mindset, and culture that help to deliver updates and fixes more often.

DevOps emerged from a "perfect storm" of things coming together. Automation and improved tools have made agile processes and collaboration between development and operations necessary. Monitoring and provisioning are key components of this.

The failure of big ITSM/ITIL implementations also played a role. These factors brought together the three layers of the agile movement (principles, process, and practices) and sparked its growth.

DevOps means a lot of different things to different people because the discussion around it covers a lot of ground. DevOps automates and integrates software development and IT processes to speed up and improve software testing, building, and release.

DevOps is a new approach to IT. It focuses on fast service delivery, using agile and lean methods. The emphasis is on the entire system.

It is also characterized by operations staff making use of many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work.

"DevOps" includes all types of sysadmins, like systems engineers, administrators, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and others. "Ops" is a general term for all these sub-disciplines and job titles. "Dev" means developers, but it also includes everyone involved in making the product, like QA, Product, and other disciplines.

Version control is important for DevOps. It helps teams work together, divide coding tasks, and store code for easy recovery.

Modern software development methods help companies create better products faster. This gives them an advantage over competitors. It also improves their reputation and profits.

DevOps can help you build secure software quickly and efficiently. By following its practices, processes, frameworks, and workflows, you can minimize risks, ensure compliance, and reduce costs without compromising security.

Who's Adopting DevOps?

What kinds of companies are embracing DevOps? Many businesses are now using DevOps, not just popular web companies like Facebook, Amazon, Etsy, and Netflix.

Surprisingly, perhaps, enterprises are leading the charge with 80% reporting that they are adopting DevOps somewhere in their organization. Small and medium-sized businesses are also reaping the benefits of DevOps, with 70% saying they are using it. Significantly, there's a lot of evidence showing that company size by itself is no predictor of DevOps success. Even government and quasi-government organizations are embracing DevOps.

DevOps has something for everybody in the software chain. This methodology also involves business aspects, such as managers who make money from software and executives who focus on profits. Here are the groups that benefit from it:

  • Developers
  • Test Engineers
  • Product Managers
  • Product owners
  • Executives
  • System Administrators

The DevOps lifecycle

DevOps Lifecycle

Learning DevOps is not complete without understanding the DevOps lifecycle phases. DevOps is primarily implemented in application development for e-commerce websites, cloud-native applications, and other large distributed platforms. It consists of multiple phases that collectively become the DevOps lifecycle. The DevOps lifecycle includes seven phases as given below:

1. Continuous Development

In this DevOps stage, the development of software happens continually. The entire development procedure is isolated into little development cycles. In this way, it becomes easier for a team to accelerate software development and distribution procedure.

2. Continuous Integration

This stage is the heart of the entire DevOps lifecycle. Developers must commit changes to the source code more often in this software development practice. This helps catch bugs in the code early. Developers use tools like testing, reviewing, compiling, and packaging to create new code that adds more features to the app.

3. Continuous Testing

This phase, where the developed software is continuously testing for bugs. For constant testing, automation testing tools such as TestNG, Selenium, etc are used. These tools help QAs test many code-bases at once to make sure everything works correctly. In this phase, Docker Containers can be used for simulating the test environment.

4. Continuous Feedback

Continuous testing and continuous integration are the two crucial phases that ensure consistent improvements in the application code. Continuous feedback is a peculiar phase where these improvements are analyzed.

5. Continuous Monitoring

Monitoring the performance of an application is of key importance for application developers. In this phase, developers record data on the use of application and continuously monitor each functionality. Server not reachable or "low memory" are some of the common system errors resolved in this phase.

Continuous monitoring helps in sustaining the availability of services in the application. It also determines the threats and root causes of recurring system errors. Security issues get resolved and problems are automatically detected and fixed.

6. Continuous Deployment

In this phase, the code is deployed to the production servers. Also, it is essential to ensure that the code is correctly used on all the servers.

7. Continuous Operations

The last phase of the DevOps lifecycle is the shortest phase and the least complicated one. The purpose of continuous operation is to automate the process of releasing the application and the subsequent updates. Development cycles in continuous operations are shorter, allowing developers to ongoingly accelerate the time-to-market for the application.

DevOps has seven phases that optimize development from start to finish, including proposal, production, and delivery.

In the end, DevOps is a little tricky to define. DevOps is a collaboration between Dev and Ops teams.

They use DevOps values, rules, practices, and processes to improve product delivery speed. This ultimately benefits the end user. It removes silos and inflexibility.

DevOps as a service helps software developers and IT operations work together better by providing tools for collaboration.

That's it, at least for now. Learn about this methodology and how to use it in your company or team with our helpful post.

Have more questions? Call or email us anytime and we'll respond as soon as possible. No need to worry.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

  1. What is DevOps?
    DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) with the aim of shortening the system development life cycle and providing continuous delivery with high software quality. It's about bridging the gap between developers and operations teams to promote more efficient collaboration and communication.
  2. What are the main stages of the DevOps Lifecycle?
    The DevOps Lifecycle can be broken down into seven main stages:
    - Planning: Identifying the tasks, resources, and timeline for the next iteration of the software.
    - Coding: The development of software based on the defined requirements.
    - Building: Compiling the code into executable artifacts.
    - Testing: Ensuring the quality of the software by identifying and fixing bugs.
    - Deployment: Releasing the new version of the software into the operations environment.
    - Operation: Monitoring and maintaining the software in the production environment.
    - Monitoring: Keeping track of the application's performance and functionality to identify any issues.
  3. What is the main goal of DevOps?
    The primary goal of DevOps is to shorten the product development cycle while still delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives. This approach enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
  4. What are some common DevOps practices?
    Common DevOps practices include continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated testing, infrastructure as code, monitoring and logging, and incident response. These practices help improve communication and collaboration, increase efficiency, and reduce the time from development to deployment.
  5. What is the role of automation in DevOps?
    Automation plays a crucial role in DevOps. It reduces the time and effort required for repetitive tasks in the software delivery process, from code development and testing to deployment and monitoring. This allows teams to focus more on the tasks that require a human touch, such as decision-making and strategic planning. It also helps in maintaining consistency and reducing errors, leading to improved software quality and reliability.
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