DevOps, a portmanteau of ‘development’ and ‘operations’ is a contemporary delivery methodology widely in use in the information technology across the globe.
The diagrammatic depiction of DevOps’ phases resemble an infinity symbol, suggesting that it’s a continuous process of improving efficiency and constant activity in the confluence of development and operations.
DevOps evolved as a game changing methodology in the information technology world with continuous development, continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous feedback. DevOps weaves collaboration of development and operations in to its methodology fabric.
DevOps methodology approach has 8 phases, each phase and the tools used in each are as below:
First phase - Plan: The development team puts down a plan with requirements and user stories collected from the business users of the client.
Tools used - Jira: It’s for recording the requirements and user stories of the client. Also for project management - project tasks, schedule and project progress reports. One may capture the errors or bugs and track the same till the closure.
Second phase - Code: Once the plan is in place, the development team develops the code as per the requirements and user stories collected from the customer.
Tools used - GIT: It’s a repository system for the code that is developed by the developers/coders. With the version management feature, various versions of the code may be stored and reverted to any version in case of any issue. Code merging with the previous/existing versions may be done.
Third phase - Build: Once a developer completes the code – an automated tool performs a series of unit tests and an end to end integration tests, if any test fails, the build request fails and the developer is informed about the errors or bugs found during the testing. The testing may be done manually too, post the manual testing of the code, the test results are notified to the developer. The code is moved to the next phase if there are no bugs or errors found during the testing.
Tools used - Maven: It automates the process of building and developing software applications.
Tools used - Gradel: It is one of the most flexible tools, highly customisable and high in performance in comparison with other tools.
Fourth Stage - Test: Once the code is successfully built and made executable, then the business users perform the user acceptance testing. The application is tested by the users to see if it’s as per their user stories and business requirements given during the plan phase.
Tools used - Selenium: Is one of the most sought automated testing tool in the world of testing. With this, one can run tests in parallel. It works on any OS and with most of the popular programming languages.
Fifth Stage - Release: After the successful completion of the user acceptance testing of the application, application code is designated as release and a unique release number is given for its identification. There may be multiple releases in the queue for deployment in the working environment.
Sixth phase - Deploy: The deployment of the application code is done as per a predefined sequence and schedule. This may be an automated event through an automation tool or a manual one too. In this phase, the application is deployed on the working environment.
Tools used - Kubernetes: The tool deploys any given application code in compartments as per the predefined chronology and schedule. In case of any bug or error with the newly deployed application code, one may revert back to the old version of the application on the working environment. Other tools include Ansible, Chef and Dockers.
Seventh phase - Operate: Once the new application code is live on the working environment, the operation team (business users) may work on it and provide feedback.
Eight phase - Monitor: The final phase of the DevOps cycle is monitor, it involves monitoring of the entire DevOps environment, right from plan to operate. The feedback of the new application from the automated tools and business users is collected, collated and sent to the plan phase for review and process optimisation.
This is where the DevOps model brings in the continuity by confluence of development and operation phases of a software application life cycle.
Tools used - Nagios: The tool has the features like monitoring and alert mechanism. It collects the feedback of the application code from operations, collates and sends it back to the development phase.
In DevOps model, there is no start or end, it’s a continuous evolution of a software application throughout its life cycle.
Features of DevOps
Continuous Integration: There is a continuous integration between the development (plan, code, build and test) phase and operation (release, deploy, operate and monitor) phases of the DevOPs methodology. Over a period of time in a software application’s life cycle – the gap between the operations and development tends to become zero or negligible - due to this continuous integration.
Continuous Delivery: The process automation of the development phases - plan, code, build, test of the DevOps model with automated tools and minimum manual intervention results in the continuous delivery.
Continuous Deployment: After the application package passes the user acceptance testing (UAT), the package is designated as release, and a unique release number is given for all the UAT passed packages for identification. All the releases are put in queue for deployment. In the concept of the continuous deployment, each of these releases is given a schedule and sequence, and deployed accordingly. In case, any application release has a bug or error or business limitations, then it is taken off from the working environment, and will be brought back to the live environment only after corrective actions.
Continuous Feedback: Continuous integration and continuous delivery is through a continuous feedback. The objective of this is to revert the working environment to the old code in case there is an error or bug in the newly deployed application code. After the corrective action from the developer team, the code is deployed back in the working environment. The errors or bugs may be captured through an automated feedback tool or from the business users.
Acroplans, for all its information technology projects and its customers, implements the DevOps model for best results with the help of its best in class DevOps experts.
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