DevOps – A Buzz or Reality?

It is essential in today’s marketplace to develop products quickly based on customer feedback and the need to respond quickly to market changes. The next release cannot be delayed for one year as this creates extra pressure on the IT team to release a new version as soon as possible.

Developing continuously and responding to constant changes is a critical need here that is highlighted by the DevOps movement. The term “DevOps” refers to a software development approach that integrates the development and operations aspects to achieve agility.”

A DevOps culture includes agile practices such as continuous development, continuous integration, infrastructure changes, and continuous delivery, according to Gartner. In the agile movement, engineering practices have always been embraced, and DevOps automation is now even more integral to engineering practices.

The goal of DevOps is to optimize the entire development process for the whole software delivery process, not just for a single stage, but for the entire lifecycle of a software project from ideation to development to deployment.

During each iteration, agile software development aims to produce working software. Developers use DevOps to deploy new software versions frequently and almost continuously. A software program is improved or weeded out as part of continuous development, resulting in utmost reliability and quality. 

What is DevOps? 

Developers and Operations are two words that are abbreviated to form the simple “DevOps” term. The term refers to the specific methods of developing applications. They ‌refer to software development and IT operations as DevOps. 

What is DevOps Lifecycle?

DevOps Lifecycle – It is all about “continuity”

The DevOps lifecycle comprises seven phases: continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, continuous feedback, continuous deployment, and continuous operations. Let us now examine each phase in the DevOps lifecycle.

1. Continuous Development

You should plan the application objectives that need to be delivered to the customer in the first phase of DevOps lifecycle.

Start the project development process after determining the application objectives. During this phase, activities like code generation and subsequent implementation are undertaken. DevOps follows the continuous development approach, so updates can be made to existing code by using continuous feedback in the development and operations process.

2. Continuous Integration

As soon as development is complete, continuous integration starts. Various steps are required, such as planning the tests that will be carried out in the next phase and interpreting the code to produce the desired outcome as specified in the initial project documentation. DevOps is a seamless process that leads to the next phase efficiently through continuous integration.

3. Continuous Testing

In the DevOps process, testing determines whether applications are actually being used. Testing beta software ensures the application is usable in its intended manner while producing results. During the application development process, an application testing process provides developers with insights into different aspects of an application. These insights are then used to improve the application.

4. Continuous Monitoring

The monitoring phase is the operational phase in DevOps where key information about application usage is recorded and carefully processed to find out trends and identify the problem areas. Creating massive amounts of data about application parameters when the application is in continuous use increases operational efficiency of the software product.

5. Continuous Feedback

By analyzing the product’s final outcome, the application performance is consistently improved. Customer feedback is an important phase of the software application where the feedback from customers can be used to improve the current product and release new versions based on the feedback.

6. Continuous Deployment

Changes to the code during deployment should not impact the functioning of high traffic websites.

7. Continuous operations

As part of the DevOps operations, the release process is fully automated, allowing organizations to accelerate time to market going forward for continuity.

Conclusion

From the discussion, we can tell that continuity is the key to DevOps in removing the many steps that distract development, take longer to detect issues, and produce a better version of the product after several months. DevOps can increase the overall number of interested customers in your product and make any software product more efficiently.