We had the waterfall, agile, and waterfall software development methods prior to the advent of DevOps. The cooperation between developers and operation engineers was lacking in these earlier models. The release and development processes took longer as a result. More creative solutions were required since improved team communication and quicker software delivery to businesses where required. This is how the DevOps methodology came to be. Continuous software delivery is made possible via DevOps. This is achieved by having fewer issues to address and, where necessary, implementing a speedier resolution.
Describing DevOps
A single team may now handle the whole application development lifecycle thanks to the DevOps methodology. Specifically, design, testing, implementation, and operation. The development life cycle is meant to be shortened through DevOps. This is done while offering updates, corrections, and improvements that are in line with corporate goals. Superior software can be built more reliably using the DevOps methodology.
Development Life Cycle
The procedure involves ongoing:
- Development
- Integration
- Testing
- Deployment
- Monitoring
Each stage of the lifecycle is shown below.
Continual improvement
Planning is the first step in this phase, then software coding. During the planning stages, the project’s vision is chosen, and the team then starts writing the application’s code. Planning doesn’t require DevOps technologies. But there are some tools needed to keep the code up to date. Any language may be used to write the code, and version control techniques are used to manage it. Source Code Management is the term used to describe the code maintenance procedure. JIRA, CVS, Mercurial, SVN, and Git are the most widely used programs.
Continuous testing
This stage involves testing the produced program for bugs. At this time, Selenium, JUnit, and TestNG, to name a few, are the most often used automated testing tools. With the use of these technologies, QAs can test numerous code bases concurrently to make sure that the functionality is flawless. Docker Containers can be utilized to simulate the test environment during this development phase.
Selenium is used for automation testing, and TestNG produces the reports. The step can be fully automated with Jenkins’ assistance, a Continuous Integration tool. By using automation testing in place of manual execution, a great deal of time, labor, and effort can be saved. DevOps continues to be favored in part because of these resources saved. Additionally, creating reports is a huge benefit. Test case execution can be scheduled for specific times. The code is incorporated with the current code after testing.
Permanent integration
The DevOps life cycle revolves around this step. Here, following best practices for software development, the team must frequently commit changes to the source code. Depending on the demands and breadth of the program, this can happen daily or weekly. Every commit is then built, allowing for the early detection of any problems. Unit and integration testing, compilation, and packaging are all steps in the process of writing code.
The existing code is regularly integrated with the code enabling new capabilities. As software development is ongoing, the integration of new code must be steady and seamless in order for the systems to update the end users. One of the most widely utilized tools during this stage is Jenkins.
Continuous deployment
The code gets pushed to the production servers at this point. Making sure that the code is correctly deployed on all servers is essential. Continuous deployment is accomplished in this phase via automated configuration management and containerization (CD). Release of deployments and scheduling of updates while ensuring that server-wide configurations are constant is known as automated configuration management. Tools for configuration are crucial because the new code has been delivered. They assist in carrying out activities much more regularly and quickly. During this stage, common tools include Chef, SaltStack, Ansible, and Puppet.
You can maintain consistency across all environments by using containers. This covers the locations where the application is created, tested, and used. Dockers and Vagrant are two commonly used containerization tools. These tools greatly decrease, if not completely eliminate, the scope of mistakes and failures in the production environment. This is due to the fact that they replicate and package the same dependencies and packages that are used in the development, testing, and staging environments.
Additionally, the tools support consistency across the environments used for application development, testing, and deployment. It becomes simple to run the application on many PCs. In addition, they facilitate quick scaling up and down of instances.
Continous observation
This phase of the DevOps lifecycle is quite important. It is the location where important data about the program is stored. Information is processed to determine the appropriate functionality of the program. This method fixes any system faults. Such issues include, for instance, the server not being reachable or low memory. In this phase, the true cause of any problem is properly identified. Additionally, network difficulties are fixed, aiding developers in troubleshooting issues as soon as they are identified.
On the surface, DevOps could appear time-consuming and complex. The model is more streamlined, nevertheless, which improves the effectiveness and efficiency of development.
