DevOps Lifecycle: 7 phases explained in detail with examples (2023)

When transitioning from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, Netflix recognized the need for a new approach that could help keep its massive cloud infrastructure running smoothly. That's how Netflix got to know DevOps, and we all know what a huge success it was.

First Moloch introduced himselfcontainerizationEstablish consistency across multiple environments. Then developed its container management toolTitoto manage and streamline the process. In addition, it also built a toolchaos monkeyto automate the error, which undoubtedly helps the company maintain application performance even if a specific AWS service goes down.

With thousands of microservices, production changes, and millions of customers, how can Netflix deliver a seamless experience to all customers? By adopting the DevOps culture withcontinuous improvement. There are many real-life examples that show how corporate values ​​are strengthened by fully embracing the DevOps culture.

If your organization is just starting out with DevOps and you want to automate your development workflow, but you're not familiar with the DevOps lifecycle and its stages, you've come to the right place. Here we are going to delve into the DevOps lifecycle and its phases in detail with some real examples.

But first you need to know what DevOps really is.

DevOpsit is a work culture that focuses mainly on collaboration, communication and integration between development teams. It was primarily introduced to address the disconnect between development, operations, andquality controltimes. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important for organizations to adopt DevOps practices, not just for continuous software development and smooth operations, but also for high-quality delivery for successful product delivery.

Ultimately, DevOps is a new approach that companies are using to develop, deploy, and maintain software products. But how is this new methodology taking over the entire IT industry?

Let's shed some light on DevOpslifespan.

The DevOps lifecycle is a set of automated development processes or workflows within an iterative development lifecycle. Follows a continuous approach; therefore, its life cycle is symbolized in the form of an infinite loop. This loop shows the collaborative and iterative approach throughout the application lifecycle, consisting of tools andstacks of technologyfor each level. The left part deals with software development and testing. On the other hand, the right side of the infinite loop represents the deployment and operational cycle.

Let's briefly review how the DevOps lifecycle works at each stage.

1. The plan:In this phase, teams identify business needs and gather end-user feedback. You create a project roadmap to maximize business value and deliver the desired product at this stage.
2. Code:Ocode developmentoccurs at this stage. Development teams use some tools and plugins such as:gitto simplify the development process, which helps them avoid security vulnerabilities and poor programming practices.
3. Build:In this phase, once the developers completed their task, they pushed the code to the shared code repository using build tools like Maven and Gradle.
4. Test:Once the build is ready, it is first deployed to the test environment to conduct various types of tests like user acceptance testing, security testing, integration testing, performance testing, etc. with tools like JUnit, Selenium, etc. to ensure the quality of the software.
5. To share:The build can be deployed to the production environment at this stage. After the build passes all tests, the operations team plans releases or deploys multiple releases to production, depending on business needs.
6. Insert:In this phase, infrastructure as code helps build the production environment and then releases the build using various tools.
7. To work:The version is already active and ready for customers to use. The operations team takes care of configuring and deploying the server at this stage using tools such as Chef.
8. Monitor:In this phase, the DevOps pipeline is monitored based on data collected about customer behavior, application performance, and so on. Monitoring the entire environment helps teams find the bottlenecks that are hampering the productivity of development and operations teams.

Like usAs already mentioned, everything is consistent with DevOps - from planning to monitoring. So let's divide the entire lifecycle into seven phases where continuity is the focus. Each phase of the lifecycle can go through the projects multiple times until it is completed.

Here is an ultimate guide to explain the 7Cs of DevOpslifespan.

1. Continuous development

This phase plays a central role in defining the vision for the entire software development cycle. It mainly focuses on project planning and coding. In this phase, project requirements are collected and discussed with stakeholders. In addition, the Product Backlog is also maintained based on customer feedback, broken down into smaller releases and milestones for continued software development.

After the team agrees on the business requirements, the development team starts coding the desired requirements. It's an ongoing process that requires developers to code as project requirements change or performance issues arise.

Nordstrom, for example, embraced DevOps to minimize the time required to develop, test, and release updates. Nordstrom is an American luxury department store chain in the United States and Canada. The company followed the waterfall model in rewriting its consumer-facing in-store app, and as such, it faced issues and a lot of negative customer feedback when the app launched. So the company decided to dismantle the silos.

As a result, they moved to continuous planning and development with a single backlog of work, which helped the company improve the build quality and throughput of its application. In addition, the company was able to reduce errors and increase the number of product releases from twice a year to monthly.

Tool used:There are no dedicated planning tools, but the development team needs some tools for code maintenance. GitLab, GIT, TFS, SVN, Mercurial, Jira, BitBucket, Confluence and Subversion are some tools used for version control. Many companies prefer agile practices for collaboration and use Scrum, Lean and Kanban. Among all these tools, GIT and Jira are the most popular, used for complex projects and excellent collaboration between teams.Development.

2. Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is the most important phase in the entire DevOps lifecycle. at this stageupdated codeor additional functionality and features are developed and integrated into existing code. In addition, errors in the code are detected and identified at all stages of this phase.unit tests, and the source code is modified accordingly. This step makes integration a continuous approach where code is testedeach confirmation. The necessary tests are also planned at this stage.

Let's take the example ofDocusign, which developed electronic signature technology in 2003. It helps its customers automate the process of preparing, signing, and managing contracts. Its development teams have followed the Agile methodology for years to gather customer feedback and build small, fast releases. However, collaboration between the development and operations teams was lacking, which led to a lot of bugs.

Furthermore, their business was based exclusively on the transaction of signatures and approvals. So the biggest challenge for the company was continuous integration and continuous delivery. A single mistake can cause a serious problem and ruin the entire operating process. Therefore, the organization decided to switch to DevOps. DocuSign has implemented a tool - simulation for their internal API to accelerate product development and delivery. This tool helped the organization integrate critical functions such as incident management. This tool also facilitates simulation testing.

Tool used:Jenkin, Bamboo, GitLab CI, Buddy, TeamCity, Travis eCircleCIare some DevOps tools used to make the project flow smoother and more productive. For example, Jenkin (open source tool) is widely used to automate builds and tests. CircleCI and Buddy, on the other hand, are commercial tools. Whichever tools you choose for continuous integration, choose the one that fits your business and project.Requirements.

3. Continuous test

Some teams do the continuous testing phase before integration, while others do it after integration. Quality analysts continually test the software for bugs and issues at this stage using Docker containers. In case of a bug or error, the code is sent back to the integration phase for modification. Test automation also reduces the time and effort required to deliver high-quality results. Teams use tools likeSeleniumin this stadium. In addition, continuous testing improves test evaluation reporting and minimizes the costs of deploying and maintaining test environments.

Tool used:JUnit, Selenium, TestNG, and TestSigma are some DevOps continuous testing tools. Selenium is the most popular open source automation testing tool that supports multiple platforms and browsers. TestSigma, on the other hand, is aUnified AI-driven test automation platform that takes the technical complexity out of test automationartificiallyintelligence.

4. Continuous Delivery

This phase is crucial and the most active in the DevOps lifecycle, where final code is deployed to production servers. Continuous delivery includes configuration management to ensure accurate and smooth deployment of code to servers. Development teams release code to servers and plan server upgrades, keeping configurations consistent throughout the production process. Containerization tools also help with the deployment process, providing consistency across development, testing, production, andstaging environments. This practice allowed the continuous deployment of new features in production.

For example, Adobe has adopted the DevOps culture to continually release minor software updates. It manages and automates your deployments withCloudMunch's End-to-End DevOps Platform. This DevOps platform shows Adobe developers how changes to one Adobe product can affect others. And so, it helped the company deliver software quickly with better product management.

Tool used: Ansible,Puppets, EKoch it's the configuration management tools that make the deployment process smooth and consistent throughout the production process. Docker and Vagrant are other commonly used DevOps tools to handle continuous delivery process scalability. Furthermore, Spinnaker is an open source continuous delivery platform for sharing software changes while ArgoCD is another open source tool for Kubernetes native CI/CD.

5. Continuous Feedback

ContinuouslyFeedback came in to analyze and improve the application code. During this phase, customer behavior is regularly evaluated for each release to improve future releases and deployments. Organizations can opt for a structured or unstructured approach to collecting feedback. In the structural approach, feedback is collected through surveys and questionnaires. In contrast, feedback is received through social media platforms in an unstructured approach. Overall, this phase is essential to enable continuous delivery for the adoption of abetter versionthe app.

One of the best examples of continuous feedback ismandarin bank. It's a Canadian bank that has embraced continuous feedback to improve its customers' mobile experience. After opting for continuous feedback, this Canadian bank got a significant amount of valuable feedback in a matter of weeks, which helped the bank quickly identify the root cause of the problem. Also, it helped them to improve the app as per the needs of their customers. Tangerine Bank did a great job of reallocating resources and money to other important things after embracing DevOps.

Tool used:Pendo is a product analytics tool to collect customer reviews and insights.Qentellis TEDis another tool primarily used to track the entire DevOps process to gather actionable insights for bugs andDefects.

6. Continuous Monitoring

During this phase, the functionality and characteristics of the application are continuously monitored to detect them.System errorFor example, low memory, unreachable server, etc. This process will help the IT team quicklyrecognize problemsin terms of application performance and thedeeper causeback. When IT teams encounter a critical issue, the application goes through the entire DevOps cycle again to find the solution. However, security issues can be detected and fixed automatically during this phase.

Tool used:Nagios, Kibana, Splunk, PagerDuty, ELK Stack, New Relic and Sensu are some DevOps tools used to make the ongoing monitoring process quick and easysimply.

7. Continuous operation

The final stage of the DevOps lifecycle is critical to reducing planned downtime such as: B. Planned maintenance work. Developers often have to shut down the server to perform updates, which increases downtime and can even cost the company a significant loss. Finally, continuous operation automates the process of application startup and application updates. It uses container management systems likeKubernetesand Docker to avoid downtime. These container management tools simplify the process of building, testing, and deploying your application across multiple environments. The main objective of this phase is to increase application uptime to ensure uninterrupted services. Through continuous operation, developersto save timewhich can be used to accelerate application time-to-market.

Tool used:Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are the container orchestration tools used for application high availability and faster deployment.

let's get oneCheck out all available DevOps toolsfor all lifecycle stages in the following table:

Undoubtedly, DevOps has established a new culture in the software development industry, ensuring the highest quality standards for software products. The main goal of the DevOps lifecycle is to maintain continuity and simplify automation. It's about how efficiently developers, testers, and operations teams work together to quickly deliver the software product with an improved user experience.

Do you also want to automate your development workflow to accelerate your business value or a DevOps solution for better collaboration? Simform can help you streamline and leverage your workflow with maximum automationCI/CD-Pipelineto increase user satisfaction. We follow DevOps best practices throughout the entire product development lifecycle. Our DevOps experts can also help you create a cross-functional team for better collaboration. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to reap the business benefits of an effective DevOps cycle.