DevOps is an ideal way of carrying out the app development that enhances the app performance for business and allows users to share feedback. The increasing adoption rate of DevOps is making job options wider for DevOps learners.
Critical DevOps Lifecycle Phases for Software Integration
The term “DevOps” is made with two distinct words – Development and Operations; it’s an agile relationship between the duos. DevOps is a process practiced by the engineers of development and operations from the beginning of the design to production support. You cannot get the DevOps without understanding its lifecycle. The continuous DevOps lifecycle has in total seven phases, which we will discuss below –
- Continuous Development
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Monitoring
- Continuous Feedback
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Operations
IT engineers can achieve a lot more with the correct implementation of DevOps lifecycle. It makes the app production process more effective and protected. If you are into IT engineering, you must know the fact that DevOps is the future of production lifecycles that guarantees maximum operational efficiencies for the giants.
First, Understand What is Exactly DevOps?
The modern marketplace needs rapid product development which should be based on customer feedback and requirement to respond instantly to market shifts. This eliminates the need of waiting for a year to add extra features in the next release and put pressure on IT team to release a new version instantly.
DevOps is a practice that enables a single team to handle the whole app development lifecycle, i.e. development, testing, deployment, and operations. DevOps aims to shrink the development lifecycle of the system while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in compact alignment with the objectives of the business. It is a software development approach through which developers can build premium-quality software quickly and reliably.
Let’s Discuss the Each of the Phases of DevOps Lifecycle
1. Continuous Development – The continuous development phase of DevOps lifecycle includes ‘planning’ and ‘coding’ of the software. The future of the software project is pronounced by the developer while planning the project and they start developing the code for the app or software. There are no such DevOps tools that are made for planning, yet there are numerous tools that help maintain the app code.
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The code can be written in any established language, but it is maintained with Version Control tools. Code maintaining is referred to as Source Code Management. The widely used tools for this are SVN, Git, CVS, Mercurial, and JIRA. Some developers may also use tools like Ant, Gradle, Maven in the continuous development phase to build/package the code into an executable file that can be used at any of the next phases of the lifecycle.
2. Continuous Integration – The continuous integration phase starts after the development of the application. It includes several steps such as planning of tests that will be performed in the next phase, understanding the code to produce the desired outcome as required in the initial project documentation. It is a software development practice in which developers need to make adjustments to the source code more rapidly. This can be a routine task for them and they may need to do it on a daily or weekly basis . Every adjustment is then created and this enables early detection of bugs, if present. Code building includes several things along with compilation- code review, integration testing, unit testing, and packaging.
3. Continuous Testing – In the continuous testing phase, the QA team continuously test the developed software for bugs. For this phase, the testing team uses automation testing tools like Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, etc. These testing tools allow QAs to test multiple code-bases efficiently in parallel to make no space for flaws in the functionality. QAs can use Docker Containers in this phase for simulating the test environment.
Automation testing done by Selenium and TestNG generates the reports. This whole testing phase can be automated using a Continuous Integration tool called Jenkins. For instance, a developer has composed a selenium code in Java to test the app. He can create this code using Maven or Ant. Once the code is created, it is tested for UAT (User Acceptance Testing).
Developers can save their time and effort with automation since they can execute the tests instead of picking them up manually. Moreover, report generation is a major advantage.
4. Continuous Deployment – In the continuous deployment phase, the code is deployed to the production servers. It is critical to use correct code on all servers for deployment. Configuration management and containerization tools are available to help in achieving continuous deployment.
Configuration management is an act of releasing deployments to servers, scheduling updates on all servers and keeping the configurations consistent throughout the servers.
Containerization tools are also important for the deployment phase. Docker and Vagrant are widely used tools during this stage. These tools assist in producing consistency throughout development, test, staging, and production environments. Moreover, these tools help in scaling down and scaling up of instances at a faster speed.
5. Continuous Monitoring –Continuous monitoring is the most important stage of the DevOps lifecycle. In this stage, developers continuously monitor the app performance and record all the vital information related to the use of the software. This recorded information is later processed to recognize the proper app functionality. The system errors such as server not reachable, low memory, etc. are taken care of and resolved in this stage.
This stage helps developers to reach the root cause of the issue. It maintains the security and availability of DevOps development services. Network issues are also resolved in this stage.
Developers use Splunk, ELK, Stack, Nagios, Sensu, and NewRelic tools to monitor the app performance and the servers closely along with the health of the system.
6. Continuous Feedback – The performance of the application gets enhanced consistently with proper analyzing of the final output of the product. The continuous feedback is a vital phase of the software app where feedback of the customer is a key asset that helps enhance the working of the present software product and release new versions at a faster rate based on response.
7. Continuous Operations – DevOps operations are based on continuity with the complete automated release process.
With DevOps, it is clear now that you can build any software product that will deliver efficient results and enhance the count of potential clients.