What is DevOps?
In simple language, DevOps is a philosophy that encourages better communication and collaboration between teams in an organization. It describes the adoption of iterative software development, automation and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance.
The term, DevOps, also covers culture changes, such as building trust and cohesion between developers and systems administrators and positioning technological projects to business requirements. DevOps have the power to change the software delivery chain, services, job roles, IT tools and best practices.
What is DevOps lifecycle?
The various phases like continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring establish the DevOps Life cycle. Now let us explore each of the phases of DevOps life cycle and their tools one by one.
Continuous Development
This phase of the DevOps lifecycle involves the planning and coding of the software. The vision of the project is decided during the planning phase. And the developers begin working on the code for the application. There are no DevOps tools that are required for planning, but there are a number of tools for maintaining the code.
The most popular tools used in this phase of DevOps lifecycle include Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS, and JIRA. Additionally, tools like Ant, Maven, Gradle can be used for building packaging the code into an workable file that can be forwarded to any of the next phases.
Continuous Integration
The source code gets modified several times, and these regular changes happen on a weekly or a daily basis. Code integration is the next phase in the DevOps lifecycle. It is also the core phase of the entire DevOps lifecycle. In continuous integration, new codes that support add-on functionalities are built and integrated into the existing code.
Bugs in the source code are detected early on the phase. To produce new code that brings more functionalities to the application, developers take the help of tools for unit testing, code review, integration testing, compilation, and packaging.
Jenkins is widely used as a reliable DevOps tool for procuring the updated source code and constructing the build into.exe format.
Continuous Testing
In this phase of the DevOps lifecycle, the developed software is constantly tested for bugs. A test environment is simulated with the use of Docker containers. Through automated testing, developers save effort and time, generally lost in manual testing. Reports generated by automated testing improve the test evaluation process. Analyzing the failed test-cases becomes effortless. After going through a User Acceptance Testing or UAT process, the resultant test-suite is simpler and bug-free. TestNG, Selenium and JUnit are some of the DevOps tools used for automated testing.
Continuous Feedback
The application development is constantly improved by analyzing the results from the operations of the software. This is carried out by putting the critical phase of constant feedback between the operations and the development of the next version of the current software application.
The connection is the essential factor in the DevOps as it removes the unnecessary steps which are required to take a software application from development, using it to find out its problems and then producing a better version. It kills the efficiency that may be possible with the app and reduce the number of interested customers.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous Monitoring is a very crucial stage of the DevOps life cycle where the developers constantly monitor the performance of your application. Here important information about the use of the software is recorded. This information is processed to recognize the proper functionality of the application. The system errors like low memory, server not reachable, etc. are resolved in this phase.
The root cause of any issue is defined in this phase. It maintains the security and availability of the services. Also, if there are network issues, they are resolved in this phase. It helps in automatically fixing the problem as soon as detected.
This practice involves the participation of the Operations team who will monitor the user activity for bugs or any inappropriate behavior of the system. The popular tools used for this are Splunk, ELK Stack, Nagios, NewRelic and Sensu. These tools help in monitoring the application’s performance and the servers closely and also allow to check the health of the system proactively.
Continuous Deployment
In this phase of the devop lifecycle, the code is deployed to the production servers. Furthermore, it is essential to ensure that the code is correctly used on all the servers.
The new code is deployed constantly, and configuration management tools play an essential role in executing tasks frequently and quickly. Here are some popular tools which are used in this phase, like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack.
Continuous Operations
The last phase of the DevOps lifecycle is the quickest phase and the least complicated one. The purpose of continuous operation is to automate the process of releasing the application and the following updates. Development cycles in continuous operations are shorter, permitting developers to ongoingly accelerate the time-to-market for the application.