DevOps Lifecycle Explained: Key Components, Phases & Best Practices

In software development, there is a frequently used term, DevOps. You might often hear your development team using it frequently. For those who know what DevOps actually is, they don’t need any introduction to the capabilities of this development approach. But for those who are new to software development or considering developing new software, understanding the DevOps lifecycle becomes more than important. However, the available information about the DevOps lifecycle on the internet is either full of technical jargon or overly complex, making it difficult for newcomers to grasp the concept. So, let’s make it easier for you. 

DevOps is basically a development methodology that combines development (Dev) and Operations (Ops), which itself includes different processes, concepts, and tools. It is like a best friend to the software development company, helping them deliver quality and timely services. Its principles empower them to swift their development practices through effective collaboration, rapid feedback, automation, and iterative improvements. 

So, if you’re planning to invest in software development for your business or are just considering using DevOps to automate your development workflow but aren’t very much familiar with the DevOps lifecycle, then your search has landed you in the right place. In this detailed blog, we will explain the end-to-end DevOps lifecycle, its stages, components, and best practices for leveraging such a result-oriented development methodology. 

10 Key Stats Underscoring the Significance of DevOps

• The global DevOps market size was $10.5 billion in 2023 and is predicted to be $60.74 billion by 2032, increasing at a CAGR of 21.20%. (Source: PolarisMarketResearch)
• In 2021, 83% of IT businesses reported higher value after implementing DevOps practices. (Source: Strongdm)
• 99% of organizations have admitted DevOps has positively impacted their business. (Source: Strongdm)
• 61% of development companies say DevOps helped them deliver high-quality services. (Source: Strongdm)
• Traditional Ops is relatively 41% more time and resource-consuming than DevOps. (Source: Strongdm)

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a software development methodology that combines different concepts, cultural beliefs, and technologies to automate and integrate the development processes. It is centered around communication, collaboration, and integration among the development teams.

This methodology helps development companies to offer quality and timely services. The product's continual enhancement in DevOps is relatively faster than traditional software development methodologies and approaches. 

Without DevOps, developers have to develop the code, ship, and integrate it. After that, the IT Ops team packs and deploys the code. This process can be resource-intensive and requires a great deal of communication between the teams if something doesn’t go as expected. However, DevOps removes the communication gaps between the teams and brings them together in a more collaborative manner than ever. 

Before we jump onto understanding the DevOps lifecycle, here’s what you should know already…

What is the DevOps Workflow?

DevOps workflow is a structured set of practices and processes that bridge the gap between software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It's designed to streamline the software development lifecycle, foster better collaboration, and expedite the delivery of top-notch software.

Core Principles of DevOps Workflow

• Automation: DevOps minimizes human errors and boosts efficiency by automating repetitive tasks. This includes automating code testing, deployment, and infrastructure management.
• Collaboration: DevOps emphasizes the importance of close cooperation between development and operations teams. This synergy ensures that both teams work towards common goals, leading to smoother and faster project completion.
• Continuous Improvement: DevOps focuses primarily on process optimization and outcome enhancement. Teams are encouraged to review and refine their workflows to achieve better results regularly.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): This principle involves frequently integrating code changes and automating the delivery process. CI/CD ensures that new code is consistently tested and deployed, leading to faster and more reliable software releases.

What is DevOps Lifecycle, and How Does It Work?

The DevOps lifecycle is a set of automated software development workflows or processes. The methodology is based on a continuous approach, which is probably why it is symbolized by the infinity loop. This loop highlights the iterative and collaborative approach throughout the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle), which consists of technology stacks and tools for planning, development, testing, deployment, and operations. 

The key players in the DevOps lifecycle include developers and IT operations, who collaborate to ensure software quality and timely delivery. The approach helps two different teams merge into one to create one-of-a-kind software. 

To successfully navigate each stage of the DevOps workflow, teams use a set of tools. This DevOps toolchain helps them implement key DevOps basics, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

Benefits of DevOps Lifecycle

Adopting the DevOps lifecycle offers a plethora of benefits to development companies, teams, and even clients. The primary goal of following the DevOps lifecycle is to speed up software development and ensure reliable software delivery with improved quality and increased efficiency. 

Here’s how the DevOps lifecycle can benefit organizations in different ways:

• As said, DevOps provides all the speed required to deliver the software in a timely manner, reducing its time to market and ensuring its high quality. 
• DevOps practices, particularly automation and continuous monitoring, can help development teams find and fix issues quickly, reducing downtime and complexity. 
• Adopting DevOps principles helps development companies scale their infrastructure to meet the surging demands. 
• Following the DevOps lifecycle offers stability through automation, testing, and feedback, resulting in more reliable development environments. 
• This development methodology focuses on automation that can be resource-efficient and help reduce human errors. 
• Through its monitoring and analytics capabilities, the DevOps lifecycle offers clear insights into user behavior, system performance, and other metrics. 
• DevOps lifecycle helps organizations to introduce new features rapidly through continuous learning, innovation, and experimentation. 
• DevOps lifecycle includes change management, monitoring, testing, and quality assurance to ensure quality and timely software delivery. 

Key Components of DevOps Lifecycle

The DevOps components, popular as the 7Cs of DevOps, are the base of every software development lifecycle. These components focus on constant improvement and faster software delivery. 

1. Continuous Development

This phase of the DevOps lifecycle outlines the entire vision for the entire SDLC. However, it primarily focuses on the planning and coding phases. During this stage of development, the teams gather project requirements and discuss them with all stakeholders. At the same time, they also need to maintain the product backlog based on feedback, which is broken down into milestones. 

Once the team brainstorms on business requirements, the developers can start coding for the specific software. It is a never-ending process that requires developers to code again and again wherever there is any change in the requirement or in case of any performance issues. 

Tools Used: GitLab, GIT, SVN, Mercurial, Jira, TFS, BitBucket, Confluence, and Subversion.

2. Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is probably the most crucial part of the software development. This stage involves developing updated code and add-on functionalities and integrating them into existing code. The phase also includes unit testing, under which bugs are identified and modified according to the source code. It helps developers test code at every commit. Moreover, other tests, like functional testing, are also an important part of this DevOps component. 

Tools Used: Jenkin, GitLab CI, Bamboo, TeamCity, Buddy, Travis, and CircleCI. 

3. Continuous Testing

The approach to this stage of the DevOps lifecycle can be different according to different companies. While some carry it out before integration, others do it after the integration. Quality Assurance (QA) teams continuously test the software for issues and bugs using Docket containers. 

If QA experts find any bug or error, the code is returned for modification to the previous stage. Automation testing helps reduce the effort and time to deliver quality results. Tools like Selenium are handy during this phase. At the same time, continuous testing can improve the test analysis report. 

Tools Used: JUnit, TestNG, Selenium, and TestSigma

4. Continuous Deployment

This stage of software development is one of the most active and crucial parts of the DevOps lifecycle, during which developers deploy to production servers. Continuous deployment involves managing configurations to ensure code is accurately and smoothly deployed on servers. 

Development teams release code to servers and schedule updates, maintaining consistent configurations throughout production. Containerization tools also aid in deployment by ensuring consistency across development, testing, production, and staging environments. This approach enables the continuous delivery of new features in production.

Tools Used: Puppet, Ansible, and Chef

5. Continuous Feedback

Continuous feedback is used to analyze and improve application code. During this phase, each release regularly evaluates customer behavior to enhance future updates and deployments. Businesses can gather feedback in two ways: structured or unstructured. 

In the structured approach, feedback is collected through surveys and questionnaires. In the unstructured approach, feedback is gathered from social media platforms. This phase is essential for continuous delivery, helping to introduce better versions of the application.

Tools Used: Pendo & Ted

6. Continuous Monitoring

During this stage, the app's features and functions are constantly checked to spot problems like low memory or server issues. This helps the IT team quickly find and fix performance problems. 

If they find a major issue, the app goes through the whole DevOps process again to fix it. Security problems can be found and fixed automatically during this time.

Tools Used: Nagios, Kibana, ELK Stack, Splunk, PagerDuty, New Relic, and Sensu

7. Continuous Operations

The final stage in the DevOps lifecycle is essential for minimizing planned downtime, like scheduled maintenance. Usually, developers need to take the server offline to make updates, which can increase downtime and potentially cause significant losses for the company. 

Continuous operation automates the process of launching the app and its updates, using container management systems like Kubernetes and Docker to eliminate downtime. These tools make building, testing, and deploying the application easier across different environments. 

The main goal of this phase is to maximize the app's uptime for uninterrupted services. Continuous operations save developers time, allowing them to speed up the app's time-to-market.

Tools Used: Kubernetes and Docker Swarm

Your Success, Our Priority

Turn Your Idea Into Reality

Talk to Us →

5 DevOps Lifecycle Best Practices in 2024

To leverage the benefits of the DevOps lifecycle, it is essential to implement best practices that can help all stakeholders collaborate well. So, here are some DevOps best practices to follow in 2024: 

1. Encourage Teamwork

It's important to create an environment where different teams work together and share responsibilities. Adopting the DevOps approach means making changes at all levels, from top management to the ground staff. The focus of DevOps is more on helping people succeed rather than just using new tools and technology.

Organizations should build and support a DevOps culture by promoting continuous learning, teamwork, and empowering every team member across all departments.

2. Be Patient

Implementing DevOps might seem straightforward, but it's actually quite challenging. It's like moving to a new house – leaving old habits behind and embracing new ones. This process involves a lot of changes, which can lead to frustration and disappointment.

Developers may struggle with the new requirements, so it's important for the organization to support them. Provide proper education and training on DevOps and its tools. Sit down with your team, ensure everyone understands the transition, and address any questions or concerns they might have.

3. Establish Performance Metrics

To ensure a smooth DevOps transformation, it's crucial to set clear objectives and performance metrics from the start. Before involving developers in the DevOps process, define appropriate benchmarks. These benchmarks can include various aspects like the number of engineers needed or the number of automated processes.

Setting goals is essential for the DevOps transformation program. Without clear goals, the journey would be aimless. Project teams should collaborate with stakeholders to define these performance metrics. Once set, they can work towards achieving these targets using the DevOps transformation methodology.

4. Choose the Right DevOps Toolchain

A DevOps toolchain is a set of tools that helps development and operations teams work together smoothly throughout the stages of development, design, building, testing, measuring, and deployment. Picking the right tools is crucial as it can help avoid conflicts between these teams.

While there are many tools available, using too many can make things complicated and confusing. Therefore, it's better to focus on processes rather than just tools. For effective configuration management, it's wise to use tools compatible with your system and easily integrate with each other.

5. Focus on Long-Term Goals

Businesses need to realize that DevOps is not a quick fix. Instead, it's a long-term approach to transforming processes. You won't see immediate results for all your challenges with DevOps.

Large and complex transformation projects take time and require significant resources. Additionally, companies need to invest a considerable amount of money to complete these projects. Therefore, businesses considering DevOps should not rush into it without fully understanding their own needs.

Conclusion

Continuity is key in the DevOps lifecycle. Skipping any phase can disrupt the development process. This discontinuity can result in late bug detection, which affects the software's overall performance.

DevOps aims to make software products more efficient. To succeed and stay competitive, businesses should adhere to the best practices of the DevOps lifecycle.

If you need expert help with the DevOps lifecycle or implementation, contact Mtoag Technologies anytime! As one of the best mobile app development companies, we offer free yet effective consultations. 

FAQs

What is DevOps Full Form?

DevOps stands for Development and Operations. It represents a collaborative approach that integrates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to improve efficiency, speed, and quality in the software development lifecycle.

What is the Process Flow of DevOps?

The DevOps process flow emphasizes agility and automation. It includes continuous development, integration, testing, monitoring, feedback, delivery, and deployment. This cycle ensures seamless collaboration between development and operations teams, driving faster and more reliable software production.

What is the DevOps Pathway?

The DevOps pathway involves learning programming languages, understanding operating systems, mastering version control, and adopting continuous integration and delivery tools. It also includes infrastructure monitoring, cloud design patterns, and continuous learning to stay updated with the latest trends and tools.

What is DevOps SDLC?

DevOps SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) integrates DevOps practices into the traditional SDLC phases: planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, and monitoring. This integration enhances collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement throughout the software development process.

What is DevOps Cycle Time?

DevOps cycle time measures the duration from when developers commit a code to when it is deployed to production. It helps teams understand their development pipeline's efficiency and identify areas for improvement to accelerate software delivery.

What are DevOps Basics?

DevOps basics include collaboration between development and operations teams, process automation, continuous integration, and delivery, infrastructure as code, and monitoring. These principles aim to enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure faster and more reliable software delivery.

What are CI and CD in DevOps?

CI (Continuous Integration) automatically integrates code changes into a shared repository and runs tests to ensure code quality. CD (Continuous Delivery/Deployment) automates the release process, allowing code changes to be deployed to production quickly and reliably.

What are the 3 P's of DevOps?

The 3 P's of DevOps are People, Process, and Products. These elements emphasize the importance of collaboration (People), streamlined workflows (Process), and the use of tools and technologies (Products) to achieve efficient and effective software delivery.