DevOps Life Cycle: Everything You Need To Know About DevOps Life Cycle Phases

DevOps is a combination of two words which is ‘development’ and ‘operations’. It is a practice which allows a single team to control the whole application development cycle from development to the final stage of the app. It can be beneficial for an organization to deliver an application quickly and other services. It is one type of software development approach from that you can develop high-level quality software and deliver to the customers with more reliability.

In short, DevOps is an alignment of development and IT operations with better communication and collaboration. It has several stages such as continuous development, continuous integration, testing, monitoring, and deployment.

Let's discuss each of the DevOps lifecycle stages below.

1. Continuous Development:

This is the first phase of the DevOps cycle which includes "planning" and "coding" of software. At this planning stage, you need to decide the scope of the whole application before starting the code. There are no project planning tools in the market but, you can take leverage of project maintenance tools which are available in the market. You can use most popular tools like JIRA, CVS, Git, and Mercurial which will help you to manage the code in an executable file and you can easily forward it to the next phase.

2. Continuous Testing:

In this stage, your software will be continuously tested for bugs, errors and other issues. For this, you can use automated testing tools like selenium, TestNG, and JUnit which will allow software tester to test complete modules throughout the project. This Automation testing will ensure you to save your time and efforts too.

3. Continuous Integration:

This is one of the important stage in DevOps life cycle which will start after the development phase. At this phase, you can add functionalities with prevailing code. Continuous integration can manage a working relationship between developers and operational teams. To manage this, developers need to commit the changes in their source code by daily basis. This will appear to all team members. Along with this, you can even detect several problems in an earlier stage.

At this phase, automation is a must for important processes such as code compilation, code review, unit and acceptance testing. Automation process should be performed in such way, if the developer changes the particular code or any activity that can automatically detect by the build system, then sanity test will be applied and the build will be posted to a repository. You need to follow this automation process continuously for maintaining the smoothness of the project.

4. Continuous Deployment:

This is also an important process which should be performed in such a way that whenever the developer will change the activity or any source code it will not affect the functionality of a software or high traffic of website.

5. Continuous Monitoring:

This is one of the most important phase, where you can monitor the performance of the mobile application. There are many tools available in the market such as Splunk, ELK Stack, Nagios, NewRelic and Sensu from which you can check the performance of major applications and through that you can also check the health of your system.

As per the analysis report of DevOps "high-performing Web and Mobile App Development Company deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster."

Moreover, DevOps is a methodology that we will continue to see in the future as the top option for developing dynamic, flexible and high-performance apps that evolve constantly to meet high business challenges. For further knowledge, you can refer this blog. A Complete Guide for Businesses to Use DevOps for Driving Innovation.

Olivia Smith is Technical Leader at CMARIX, a leading Magento Development Company with 3+ year of experience.