The term DevOps is coined from the terms Development and Operations. A web development or a software development project usually comprises of a development team that works on the code, a testing team that validates the code against project requirements and an operations team that takes care of deploying the code into the production environment.
DevOps enable the development teams and the operations teams to collaborate and mitigate the risk involved in developing a web application.
Before DevOps, software applications were developed with either the waterfall model or the AGILE development model:
- The waterfall or sequential model was a pioneering approach in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). With this model, software development becomes a linear process where different phases and tasks are positioned successively.
- AGILE software development, on the other hand, involved the use of various approaches and the collaboration of multiple teams in SDLC.
The linearity of the waterfall model and the cross-functionality of AGILE software development were still unable to ensure quick and continuous delivery of flawless software applications.
DevOps Services came into play by effectively serving the purpose of reducing the time involved in SDLC for prompt deliveries and securing the continuous production of high-quality, foolproof software applications.
DevOps Life Cycle in Web Development
A DevOps engineer roughly follows 7 phases during the DevOps lifecycle. This section briefly lists the processes and tools in each phase.
Continuous Development
The continuous development phase involves the entire gamut of planning and coding the web application. The scope and delivery timeline of the project is determined during the planning phase after which the developers begin developing the code for the application.
The code for a web application architecture can be written in any language. The code written is maintained by version control tools. This is commonly referred as source code management. Git, Mercurial, CVS, and JIRA are the most popular tools used during this phase. Ant, Maven, Gradle are the tools that can be utilized in this phase for building or packaging the code into an executable file that can be forwarded to any of the next phases.
Git is one of the most popular tools used not only by engineers but also by freelance web developers for source code management. It is a free and open-source version control system used to manage all kinds of projects efficiently. DevOps engineers use Git to track changes in the source code which enables multiple developers to work in parallel on a web application. DevOps as a service can further streamline this process, providing scalable and efficient management of development and operations.
Continuous Testing
In this stage the developed web application is continuously tested for bugs or errors. Automated tools like Selenium, TestNG, Junit and so on are commonly used for continuous testing. These automated tools allow you to test multiple code-bases thoroughly in parallel to ensure flawless functionality of the web application.
Selenium is commonly used tool for automated testing service and TestNG is used to generate the reports. This entire functionality can be achieved with the help of a single automated tool called Jenkins.
Automated testing tools save a lot of time, effort and labor. In the addition to this you get an added advantage of report generation. The task of evaluating the test cases that failed in a test suite is easier with automated testing. The execution of the test cases can be scheduled at predefined times. Once the testing is complete, the code is continuously integrated with the existing code.
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a development procedure in which the developers are required to commit changes to the source code more frequently. These commits can be made on daily or weekly basis. Every commit is then built and this helps you in early detection of problems if they are present. Building code not only involves compilation but it also contains code review, unit testing, integration testing, and packaging.
There is continuous integration of the new code and existing code for a web application. The integrated and update code is also seamlessly integrated into the end-user systems by devops engineers.
Jenkins is the most popular tool used for the integration phase. Jenkins prepares an executable file when there is a change in the Git repository. This executable is forwarded to the test server or the production server.
Continuous Deployment
In this phase the developed web application code is deployed to the production servers. It is also important to make sure that the code is correctly deployed on all the servers. Configuration management and Containerization tools are used in achieving Continuous Deployment (CD).
Configuration management is used in establishing and maintaining consistency in an application’s functional requirements and performance. This includes scheduling updates on all the servers, releasing deployments to servers, and most importantly keeping the configurations consistent across all the servers.
As you deploy a new code on a continuous basis, configuration management tools play a vital role in executing tasks quickly and frequently. Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, and Ansible are the popular tools used in this phase.
Containerization tools also play an equally vital role in the deployment stage. Docker and Vagrant are the commonly used tools for this purpose. These tools help in bringing consistency across Development, Test, Staging and Production environments. Besides this, they also help in scaling-up (adding resources) and scaling-down (removing resources) of instances swiftly.
There is minimal scope of errors or failure in the production environment when you use these tools as they package and replicate the same dependencies and packages used in the development/ testing/ staging environment. It makes your application compatible with different computers.
Continuous Feedback
Continuous testing and continuous integration are the two important phases that ensure consistent improvements in the application code. Continuous feedback is a special phase where these improvements are analyzed.
This phase allows the developers to assess the outcome of these modifications on the final product. Users who tested these applications can share their experiences in this phase. In a wide number of cases, continuous feedback phase of a DevOps lifecycle is a critical point in the application development process. The feedback is assessed efficiently and developers begin working on the new changes. Once you receive a positive response from customer feedback, it paves the way for releasing new versions of the web application.
Continuous Monitoring
This is a very important stage of the DevOps life cycle where you continuously monitor the performance of your application. In this phase vital information about the usage of the application is recorded. This information is processed to determine the proper functionality of the application. The system errors such as server issues, low memory and network issues are resolved in this phase.
The root cause of any issue is also determined in this phase. This phase involves maintaining the security and availability of the services.
In this phase, the Operations team monitors the user activity for bugs or any improper behavior of the system. The common tools used for this are Splunk, ELK Stack, Nagios, NewRelic and Sensu. These monitoring tools help you monitor the application’s performance and the servers closely and also enable you to check the health of the system proactively.
Devops engineers use many monitoring tools to improve the process and make systems, thus ensuring cost-effectiveness. Critical and major issues detected are flagged and moved to continuous development phase. This leads to a quicker resolution of the problems.
Continuous Operations
This is the final phase of the DevOps lifecycle. During the continuous operations phase, release processes are automated for the current and later versions. Web development cycles in continuous operations are shorter, allowing developers to accelerate the time-to-market (TTM) for the application on an ongoing basis.
These DevOps phases are carried out on loop continuously till you achieve the desired product quality. Therefore, almost all of the major IT companies have opted DevOps for building their products.
Conclusion
DevOps as a career path and an organizational initiative is taking a stronghold in the web development space. With its de-silo and faster development approach, DevOps becomes a great contributor to the technology marketplace. It is the foremost set of tools used for meeting technical business challenges by creating dynamic apps.
The adoption of DevOps continues to increase, considering the benefits of such practices to developers and users alike. While the DevOps lifecycle endures in the technical backdrop of software development projects from a majority of businesses around the world, it will continue to be applied diversely in the development of modern static webpages and dynamic software applications in the years to come.
