Understanding the DevOps System Development Lifecycle

When it comes to the IT and development industries, DevOps is a hot topic right now. DevOps usage has only increased since Forrester proclaimed 2018 the "Year of Enterprise DevOps." By the end of 2022, companies using DevOps should grow 20% in CAGR. Meanwhile, the value of the DevOps market promises to rise to as much as $30 billion by 2028. These numbers indicate the importance of DevOps in today’s digital workplace.

Inevitably, digital technology in the workplace will keep evolving. Therefore, businesses need to understand what DevOps means and how to use it in their operations more than ever.

Principles of DevOps

As a theory and approach, DevOps is all about improving IT and development team processes through cooperation and automation.

It has been customary for IT and development to operate in separate compartments, each with its own set of teams and procedures while developing software. Unfortunately, due to this separation and value differentiation, discord, poor alignment, and misunderstanding have been the order of the day in the operations department.

The "us vs. them" mentality of traditional software development has given rise to DevOps.

The core of DevOps entails striving to bridge the communication and cooperation gap between IT operations and development. This measure will, in turn, speed up and enhance the delivery of IT services more effectively.

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The Fundamentals of DevOps

Even though DevOps is a practical approach, it's primarily a mentality and culture change in a company. It's based on a few fundamental principles:

1. Iteration

You can accelerate deployments by writing tiny bits of code within a time-box sprint. This proactive measure supports releases and sub-releases.

2. Automation

Everything should be automated, including new code testing, procedures, and how your infrastructure is delivered. This way, you'll save overworking and wastage.

3. Continuous Improvement

This principle involves optimizing performance, timing deployment, and appropriate costing. And all of these are possible through learning from errors, continuous improvement via testing, and acting on feedback.

4. Collaboration

This fundamental entails assembling a team, boosting collaboration, and simplifying silos across quality assurance, IT operations, and development teams. Imagine the scenario that all workers have to work via a virtual contact center due to a curfew or something similar. Physical interaction like it'd be in an office space will be limited. But, DevOps principles ensure efficiency despite the distance of each worker.

DevOps concepts generally extend the lean agile attitude to operations. And this is done mainly by focusing on automation and tools to achieve faster deployment.

Delivery, continuous integration, and deployment (CI/CD) are agile methods that developers and IT professionals may use because of automation and the technologies that support it. This method ensures the whole development pipeline cooperates from the initial concept to the final deployment and testing.

DevOps concepts, in addition, give priority to iterative methods that support continuous testing and feedback. Once again, this method allows for a quicker development cycle and enhances the products' quality and security. Ultimately, you close the gap between developers, users, and IT operations by applying DevOps principles in your company and doing smaller but more consistent deployments. And these deployments must be constantly monitored, tested, and iterated on feedback.

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Benefits of DevOps

Although it isn't an all-around remedy, DevOps may alleviate many issues plaguing conventional IT organizations. Many advantages await milking in DevOps, especially from its focus on cooperation, agility, and automation. These benefits include the following:

• Customer/user satisfaction improvements
• Efficiency enhancement
• Marketing within shorter timeframes
• Enhanced collaborative efforts
• Identifying and correcting problems promptly
• Increased Return on Investment (ROI)

A major advantage of DevOps is the likelihood of misunderstandings or misalignment is considerably minimized. And this is due to the smooth collaboration of teams, which is enabled by culture and procedure. These assertions further show that increased productivity and better products are the end benefits of good communication.

It's possible to speed up the development process while also ensuring that bugs and other issues are caught early. Importantly, this merger action is feasible using agile approaches such as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD).

Once more, it's not surprising that so many companies are hurrying to embrace this mentality to profit from DevOps. And as long as the DevOps method is performed effectively, it not only leads to improved products and more satisfied clients. But it also promises better financial results to ensure your workers don't earn below minimum wage.

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Key Components of a DevOps Lifecycle

Agility and automation are at the heart of the DevOps process flow. However, it's important to note that continuous development, integration, testing, monitoring and feedback, delivery, and deployment are all part of the DevOps lifecycle. And each phase aims to close the development-operations gap.

1. Continuous Development

"Continuous development" refers to the iterative procedure for producing software that'll be made available to users as a whole. Its components include continuous integration, testing, delivery, and deployment.

Businesses can provide new products or features by executing a continuous development strategy and its accompanying sub-strategies. Additionally, this provision will be swifter, with less risk, increased quality, and significant elimination of bandwidth restrictions.

2. Continuous (Real-Time) Integration

The continuous integration method of software development is often used in the DevOps process flow. For example, developers routinely incorporate their code updates, which are subsequently automatically tested, into a shared repository.

Thanks to continuous integration, developers will always have access to the latest, verified code. In addition, continuous integration (CI) serves as a hosted contact center service that helps prevent expensive development delays. And this prevention is by allowing several developers to work on the same source code reliably before integrating diverse code sections individually on release day.

Lastly, the DevOps process flow's goal is to blend dependability, agility, security, and speed. Therefore, it must include the Continuous Integration technique.

3. Nonstop Testing

Continuous testing in DevOps ensures that programmers can verify that their code works as intended in a real-world situation. In addition, this testing process may highlight bugs or special product features for fixes and improvement. Then they'll be subjected again to development phases for more enhancement.

4. Continuous Feedback and Monitoring

Your team should have procedures established for monitoring and providing feedback on products and systems at every stage of the development process. For this reason, you should automate as much of the monitoring as possible.

With this process in place, IT operations can alert developers as soon as a problem is discovered. As a result of this, not only does the security and dependability of the system improve. In addition, the capacity to respond quickly to problems is increased.

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5. Continuous Delivery

Next to Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD) is a natural progression. Changes to the code are created, tested, and packaged automatically before being released for production. CD aims to send out updates quickly and reliably to meet user desires.

Continuous delivery automates the release process so that fresh builds may be issued with a single click.

6. Continuous Deployment

Constant deployment may be more appropriate for seasoned DevOps organizations. However, it’s essential to note that continuous deployment is a variant of continuous development that's complete automation, requiring no human or manual intervention.

Every valid modification is automatically delivered to users via a continuous deployment procedure. As a result, scheduled release days are no longer necessary, and the feedback loop is closed faster. Also, it becomes easier for developers to obtain input from users and fix problems when they provide smaller and more regular updates.

DevOps teams need to strive toward continuous deployment. However, this should only be done when the DevOps process has been well refined. Automated testing must be rigorous and trustworthy for continuous deployment to perform well.

Introducing DevOps to Your Company

The challenge of implementing a DevOps process in your company may appear overwhelming if you haven't done it already. Depending on the present state of your firm, you may wish to introduce DevOps using an agile methodology.

The following is an example of a step-by-step implementation strategy:

• Put in place an iterative, agile development approach
• Enlist cloud computing
• Incorporate CI and CD workflows into your operations.
• Automate the deployment of digital signature software.
• Automate the process of software evaluation.
• Ensure Continuous deployment implementation.

Keep in mind that the automation of DevOps necessitates both a shift in infrastructure and a move in tooling. Therefore, your DevOps process flow may disrupt if you don't have the proper infrastructure and technologies.

Each stage of the development pipeline needs automation and agility. Only then can you build a real working DevOps environment.

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4 Helpful DevOps tools for Tracing Your Workflows

Consider employing these DevOps tools as you naturalize your team processes to the DevOps environment:

1. Git

Git makes staging regions, PBX hosting, and a variety of workflow options simple to save. It also ensures you can easily track back to previous source code versions.

2. ZenTao

With ZenTao, you may create an unlimited number of projects for assignment to multiple people. Also, you can prioritize each task according to its relevance. In addition, ZenTao's project schedule views allow you to see how much work your team has to do on a given day or week.

3. Kubernetes

Kubernetes helps group containers into logical units, ensures deployment to clusters, and sees to automation of distribution and scheduling.

4. Raygun

This tool is an application performance monitoring software. Raygun will diagnose problems and trace errors back to a single line of code, function, or API request.

Ensure Fluidity and Continuity in Your DevOps Processes

In the DevOps cycle, continuity is the most crucial component. You’ll disrupt the DevOps lifecycle if you skip any of its phases. Also, inconsistency will delay the discovery of defects, reducing the program's overall efficiency.

An efficient software product is the goal of the DevOps process. Therefore, IT and development teams must follow DevOps lifecycle best practices. This adherence will ensure success and being a step ahead of possible curves.

Need more help? Check out the Zentao blog. They have more articles on project management tools, software management, DevOps, and so much more.

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Author bio :

Tanhaz Kamaly is a Partnership Executive at Dialpad, a modern cloud-hosted business communications platform that turns conversations into the best opportunities, both for businesses and clients. He is well-versed and passionate about helping companies work in constantly evolving contexts, anywhere, anytime.