The growth of process automation and the use of technology to solve problems has made the number of systems, web applications and mobile applications developed to increase enormously. As a result, shaping a new, more fruitful workflow to integrate development professionals, IT operations, quality engineering, and security has become a priority. Thus came the set of six practices that fuel the DevOps culture.

The main characteristic of the DevOps culture is to optimize communication between teams and make tasks performed in isolation be done in a more coordinated, dynamic, and continuous way.

How the application lifecycle works

The application lifecycle goes through tunable and automated processes within the DevOps culture. Find out how you can make these processes operational:

Source: AW School (www.awschool.com.br)

Planning

The first step in developing a system is the planning phase. It is at this stage that the requirements and features that will be built in that project are described.

Those who follow the DevOps culture begin to include elements of the agile methodology from that moment on. Lists of tasks to be completed, Kanban boards and tools are created that make teams more aligned and in constant communication.

This first movement of organization and communication continues to accompany the team throughout the process.

Development

When it’s time to get down to the actual technical work, DevOps strengthens the value of working with a focus on communication and transparency. It is at this stage that the DevOps team can perform the tests, reviews, and integrations more assertively.

The use of tools to automate processes and speed up production, without losing sight of the quality of work, allows the project to be more fluid.

With more aligned development stages, production speed increases and new releases can be made in less time.

Delivery

The delivery stage arrives when the system being developed has reached a more robust, secure, and enforceable production environment. For DevOps teams, this moment is to approve the solution being created.

At this stage, it is possible to see that the processes gain the potential to become scalable and better controlled for those who develop in the DevOps model.

Operation

The operations phase encompasses monitoring and bug fixing functions before the user experience is compromised. The DevOps team works preemptively, after all, the previous steps were created in a secure and well-tested development environment.

In the DevOps system project development model, any failures can happen, but it is part of the culture to provide a quick and efficient return to the customer, after all, the entire team is immersed in the process and has already gone through several stages exchanging information and knowledge about the product.

For developers to have more control over project progress and system administrators to better understand the development steps of applications and solutions, DevOps works as a structured communicator.

The project of developing a new system, or optimizing some functionality, goes through stages called the life cycle. In each of the stages, a certain task is contemplated that can take more or less time for the development team.

Development cycles within DevOps practice

Each of these steps comprises a certain number of hours of infrastructure development, integration, testing, deployment, and management running for final delivery. After this cycle, there is still post-delivery follow-up for the necessary adjustments.

When teams put the DevOps model into practice, this system‘s lifecycle has the participation of those who are programming and who are at the other end, the infrastructure team.

This work together results in shorter and better optimized cycles; higher frequency of deployment; safer deliveries aligned with the business objectives of the client who contracted the development of that system.

In practice, processes become more transparent. System developers gain more control over the code being created, and the system operator follows and sees what is being developed, being able to participate more closely, including feedback when necessary, so that the system will adjust during development.

DevOps applied to application lifecycle

There are some practices in the application lifecycle that drive development in a more accelerated, automated way, and that contribute to ongoing DevOps development. These ways of working include:

CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery)

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice that leads developers to make code changes in an automated way without changing the core code.

In turn, Continuous Delivery (CD) performs the deployment in an automated way and with a frequency determined for each new version of the system that is in production, with the objective of making updates more frequent.

Running the CI/CD in parallel is to seek better results at all stages between confirming the code being developed.

Version control

Version control allows developers to track revisions and history of what has changed to facilitate the analysis and possible recovery of some part of the code that needs to be revised.

Seeing the system with the codes merged into the same file makes the changes more optimized and allows more than one person to work on the system at the same time.

Agile software development

The DevOps practice that includes Agile is about a development approach that emphasizes teamwork and customer and user participation during development processes.

When teams develop in an agile way, the focus is on improvement and changes, seeking to adapt the system to meet expectations in relation to what is being developed.

Infrastructure as code

This practice allows the system to be deployed reliably, controlled and repeatedly, as it offers the necessary resources for the system to be presented in a descriptive and manageable way by the teams.

Within the Infrastructure as code, automation is present, reducing the risk of a human error, making the process more optimized and safer.

Configuration management

This Configuration Management practice works in parallel with Infrastructure as Code.

This management is aligned with system resources, servers, database, and virtual machines.

Continuous monitoring

To complete DevOps practices applied to the application lifecycle, it is imperative to reform the importance of Continuous Monitoring.

It means the team has, in real time, full visibility into the performance of what is running on the system.

This includes using alerts for certain conditions that will prepare the team to deal with any type of complication.

Keeping the DevOps team in the practice of Continuous Monitoring is a great way to mitigate problems and find solutions as quickly as possible!

Why choose DevOps for developing systems?

Integrating infrastructure and technology teams through the DevOps methodology is a strategic decision. As with other frameworks that use Agile cultures, leading the solution development teams with this structure is to seek better communication, integration and consecutively deliver more value to the customer.

However, this decision is a matter of company culture. When there are already Agile Methodology practices in progress, choosing DevOps will be a path naturally instituted by the team.

Want to learn more about how to lead your team through a set of agile practices? Talk to our solution development team and know where to start.