DevOps An Incredibly Easy Method That Works for Software Development

What is DevOps:

Some of you might have misunderstood that DevOps is a technology. But no, DevOps is a methodology for software development. In this post, you will get complete knowledge of the DevOps lifecycle and why it is used.

Prior to DevOps, there are two software development modals namely.

1.Waterfall or Sequential modal

2.AGILE Software development modal

1. Waterfall or sequential modal:

In the waterfall model, software development is carried out in sequence order from top to bottom. The waterfall model had different phases such as Requirement Definition, Software Design, Implementation, Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance. This modal takes more time to develop software because in this modal unless you complete a phrase you can’t carry the other phase. Also, the working software was delivered only after the final phase of this model.

2. AGILE Software development modal:

The AGILE modal is which continuous iteration of development and testing takes place throughout the software development life cycle of the project. Here both the development and testing phase has the same process throughout the entire process. It has time-consuming issues as well as a lack of collaboration between Developers and Operation Engineers. So this leads to the development of the DevOps process.

DevOps:

From the name you can understand that DevOps is the process of development and operation taking place at the same time continuously for the entire process from software development to testing. Here a single team caries the work for the entire process. DevOps main aim is to reduce the time taken to develop the software and to create a collaborative environment between the Developers and the operation engineers

DevOps Life cycle:

DevOps Life cycle consists of various stages such as continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring let’s look at each one of the processes.

Continuous Development in DevOps:

In this phase, planning and coding of the software are carried out. The vision of the project is decided during the planning phase and the developers begin developing the code for the application. The code can be written in any language, but it is maintained by using Version Control tools. Maintaining the code is referred to as Source Code Management. The most popular tools used are Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS, and JIRA. Also tools like Ant, Gradle can be used in this phase for building/ packaging the code into an executable file that can be forwarded to any of the next phases.

Tools used:  Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS, JIRA, Ant, Maven, and Gradle.

Continuous Testing in DevOps:

Here, the developed software is continuously tested for bugs.  Some of the developers do the testing phase before integration. A test environment is simulated with the use of Docker containers. Through automated testing, developers save effort and time, usually lost in manual testing. Reports generated by automated testing improve the test evaluation process. Analyzing the failed test-cases becomes easy. After going through a UAT (User Acceptance Testing) process, the resultant test-suite is simpler and bug-free. TestNG, Selenium, and JUnit are some of the DevOps tools used for automated testing. These tools can also arrange test-case execution in a pre-set timeline.

Tools used:  TestNG, Selenium, and JUnit.

Continuous Integration in DevOps:

This is an important process of DevOps. It is a software development practice in which the developers require to commit changes to the source code more frequently. This may be on a daily or a weekly basis. Every commit is then built and this allows early detection of problems if they are present. Building code not only involves compilation but also includes code review, unit testing, integration testing, and packaging.
Tools used: Jenkins, TeamCity, GoCD, Bamboo, Gitlab CI, and CircleCI.

Continuous Deployment in DevOps:

In this phase, the finalized application code is deployed to the production servers. Configuration Management is a key process in this phase, and it carries out the precise deployment of application code on all servers. Consistency in the application’s performance and functional conditions is established and curated. Code is released to the servers, updates are scheduled for all servers, and these configurations are kept consistent throughout the production process.

Tools used:  Ansible, Puppet,  Saltstack, and Chef.

Continuous Monitoring in DevOps:

Here vital information about the use of the software is recorded. This information is processed to recognize the proper functionality of the application. The system errors such as low memory, server not reachable, etc are resolved in this phase.  The root cause of any issue is determined 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 us automatically fix the problem as soon as they are detected.

Tools used: Splunk, ELK stack, Nagios, NewRelic, and Sensu.

Conclusion:

DevOps gives a better process and environment to the software development industry to complete the process in a short period of time than the regular time consumed. It reduces the technical gap between the development and testing teams. Here the software is tested from the initial stages thus reducing the error occurring in the middle and final stages, thus indeed reducing cost, time, and manpower for a project. DevOps is the best modal to carry a software development project.