If you are in the IT sector, you might have heard about DevOps, and your company might already have started implementing it as well. According to Forbes, more than 50 percent of organizations face problems in implementing DevOps. On the flip side, companies like Amazon and Netflix have saved millions of dollars in server capacity by implementing DevOps
So, how are companies able to achieve this? What are the tools used in the DevOps lifecycle? How can you start implementing DevOps in your organization? We will be discussing all this today in this blog on the DevOps process! Here are the topics covered in the blog:
Looking for the steps in the DevOps lifecycle tutorial? Check out our YouTube video on DevOps Tutorial for Beginners:
Phases of DevOps Lifecycle
The Phase of DevOps lifecycle provides a structure to the project in such a way that it gives the team or the person working on it a view of what comes next. By following this approach, one can develop a quality project in very little time and with high reliability. One cannot simply say that he/she knows DevOps without knowing its lifecycle. Here are the various stages of the DevOps lifecycle along with a diagram below:
- Continuous Development
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Monitoring
- Continuous Feedback
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Operations
Continuous Development
The continuous development phase involves planning and coding the product the team is developing. In this phase of the DevOps lifecycle, the vision and goal of the project are set, and developers start to code. The integration of development and operations teams helps in planning the work accordingly, increasing the productivity of the team. In this phase, they use tools, such as Git, CVS, Slack, etc.
Before DevOps, the concept of the cloud was in just its initial stages, and companies had to use fixed hardware and software allocations they had planned for the project. Now, with cloud services in place, they can plan to increase or decrease the resource allocation for the project using cloud resources within their budget.
With the adaptation of DevOps lifecycle, there occurred an increase in the usage of good coding methodologies and versioning systems. Take Git, for example. Using Git and its commands, users can maintain version control for keeping track of the changes made to a set of files so that, whenever the newer versions have serious bugs or critical vulnerabilities in them, the team can revert to previous versions.
Similarly, Slack, Skype, and more recently Zoom are used for communication between the team members where they can send messages directly or hold virtual meetings to keep track of the progress of the project.
Continuous Integration
In the continuous integration phase, the source code in the central repository is regularly updated by developers. This phase not only involves compilation but also unit testing, integration testing, code review, and the packaging of the code written by the developers. The tools used in this DevOps process are Jenkins, GitLab, etc.
Jenkins orchestrates a chain of actions that helps it achieve the continuous integration process in an automated fashion. It is a server-based application and uses servers like Apache Tomcat. The reason why it is used so much is it monitors the repeated tasks that arise during the development of a project and continually tests the builds to show errors, if any, in the early stages of development itself.
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Continuous Testing
In the continuous testing phase, the code written by developers is sent to testers where they use automated tools to test it for bugs. The beauty of this phase is that they can schedule to run the tests automatically at a predefined time. The report generated in this phase is sent back to the developers where they make necessary updates to the code to remove the bugs.
The tools used in this DevOps lifecycle are JUnit (to test the Java code), Selenium, and Docker to simulate a test environment in a container so that the rest of the code is not disturbed.
Selenium is an automated testing framework used to validate applications across various browsers and platforms. You can create Selenium test cases using various programming languages, such as Java, Python, C#, etc. It is not just a single tool but a suite of software where each piece is used for the different QA testing needs of an organization.
Continuous Monitoring
The continuous monitoring phase involves monitoring the health, performance, and reliability of the application or code, as well as the infrastructure, as the phases move from development to deployment. The tools used in this phase are Nagios, Sensu, etc.
Nagios is a platform that tracks the infrastructure, networks, and systems. It monitors and alerts services for servers, switches, software, etc. If there is a problem, it warns the users and notifies them again when the problem gets solved.
Continuous Feedback
In the continuous feedback phase of the DevOps lifecycle, the evaluation of the effect of each release on the user experience takes place, and this evaluation is reported back to the team to improve the future releases.
The feedback can be gathered in two methods: structured and unstructured. The structured method is applied through surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups. The unstructured feedback collection is done through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. Here, the users take part in this DevOps process by providing their feedback, just like how users provide app reviews on Google Playstore.
In this phase, the team uses Pendo, which is a product-analytics tool that helps organizations get customer views. It gives user insight, user guidance, user sentiment, and user feedback to an organization to know what its users want or what they are expecting.
Continuous Deployment
In the continuous deployment phase of the DevOps lifecycle, the application is deployed on the production server to make it available for the intended users. The tools used in this phase are AWS CodeDeploy, Octopus Deploy, Jenkins, etc.
AWS CodeDeploy is a software deployment service that automates deployment to a variety of services. It makes it easier for organizations to rapidly release new features, avoiding downtime during the deployment, and it handles the complexity of the deployment process. It automates software deployment, eliminating the need for error-prone manual operations. It also scales the resources to match deployment needs.
Continuous Operations
The continuous operations phase involves the reduction or elimination of planned downtime like scheduled maintenance. The goal of this phase is to increase the uptime or the time the users can use the application. Companies use container management systems like Kubernetes or Swarm in this phase.
When developers want to make updates to the production server, usually they have to take it offline and make changes to it. This would increase the downtime of the software bringing loss to the organization.
To decrease and eliminate that downtime, they can use Kubernetes. They take a container with the software managed by Kubernetes and make the necessary changes to it, while Kubernetes runs another container containing the current version of the software. When the team deploys the software with changes, Kubernetes make those changes to all the containers present in the server without the team manually doing it.