Understanding the DevOps Lifecycle Phases for Software and Web Development

SaaS companies have been on the rise in the past several years. The growing digitization and automation in various industries enable the use of tools and solutions to streamline business processes. With more software and web solutions on the horizon and existing ones already competing for prominence in the oversaturated market, your software solution needs to be designed, tested, deployed, and continuously improved with the customer in mind.

For that to happen, most software-centric companies today have switched to DevOps methodology. The agile approach is blending the development with the operations processes into a streamlined, unified system. Within this system, people will collaborate more easily, leverage business data and customer feedback, and provide a smarter, evolving software or web solution to the target audience.

Before you switch to DevOps within your organization, you should first research and understand the DevOps lifecycle core phases. Even though this approach enables greater software and web development flexibility, knowing the overarching principles by which you create your product roadmap will allow you to make the most of DevOps to make your business all the more competitive.

The value of adopting the cloud

As we have seen in the past few months, remote collaboration is truly possible if you switch to the cloud. The flexibility, scalability, and security of the cloud environment enable software developers to work in a seamless, continuous process with all stakeholders apprised of any changes in the scope of work or customer feedback. When they learn of any changes in the scope of work based on customer feedback, they can address these changes faster and more efficiently.

Leveraging cloud technology to switch to DevOps allows your organization to adapt your entire infrastructure. This includes a range of development tools needed for software designing, and it helps with lag-free app deployment in real-time. Developers working on the cloud can effortlessly exchange information, team leaders can monitor their teams, and everyone will be accountable for their portion of the work at all times.

The cloud also enables automation across the board. For instance, your teams can let go of extraneous tasks and focus solely on the core processes for software development. The built-in cloud security helps ensure the safety of all processes and the implementation of the most vital security and compliance protocols, too.

Establishing the development process

Now that you have the right environment for software development and you’ve assigned tasks to your stakeholders, your teams can move on to the actual coding stage of this approach: the development phase. Keep in mind that the agile nature of DevOps allows your business to treat this as an ongoing stage. It will not strictly end when you have the first iteration of the code you want to use in your software.

On the contrary, the development process, much like all others, overlaps with testing and monitoring. Upon deployment, your teams will continue developing new, better code for improving the performance of your software or web application.

As you discover more information about how your customers perceive the product and how your app fares compared to others in your market, your teams can come up with creative solutions to boost the look, feel, and functionalities of your software. 

Continuous testing and monitoring

Each cloud environment comes with its own merits and challenges. To make the most of cloud technology as a whole, you need a dedicated expert or a team of a few experts who will handle processes in the cloud environment. For example, many developers work with reputable cloud solutions such as AWS. It goes without saying that your developers need the right certification to manage such environments.

With the help of professional AWS certification, your dedicated DevOps engineer will be able to ensure the stability of development workflows. This also includes implementing security controls and managing automation within the cloud. Among other processes vital for DevOps, testing and monitoring can be automated with the help of the right tools at your disposal. You can then leverage the collated data in order to focus on software deployment and ongoing development.

This also applies to fixing errors in your web development process. Error reporting is an essential part of this continuous monitoring process, as they need to be detected in development before they reach the hands of users. Even errors with DNS servers can interfere with normal development processes and can be damaging to a company’s brand and user experience.

Ongoing software deployment

Without the agile mindset of DevOps, deployment is treated as a one-time step. You create an app or a website, you test, you deploy. However, agile methodology empowers your organization to keep up with new and arising trends and to recognize opportunities to improve your software on the go.

Deployment in DevOps means continuous learning, testing, and then leveraging that knowledge from a wide array of sources to transform the end product. The continuity of deployment allows the app to run without interference while your teams can collect data, test and monitor your app’s performance, and then go back to the drawing board with new ideas that can later be deployed.

Continuous feedback and operations

No matter the complexity of the software you develop, your users (be they major corporations or single users within the general public) will share their feedback through app stores and directly with you. Interpreting this data is a vital step of the lifecycle, helping your developers come up with creative solutions.

There are bound to be bugs and performance issues over time, and the goal for your developers and operations experts is to develop and deploy continuous updates and patches based both on industry trends, customer feedback, and performance ratings.

Although different DevOps teams structure their workflow differently, these stages are essential to the DevOps process. Once you determine the most effective discovery, development, testing, and deployment system, the agile methodology of this approach will let you keep producing better and better software.

DevOps helps integrate all processes under a single roof, keeping all stakeholders involved and relevant and ensuring that all deadlines and all criteria for successful software development are met. Entire organizations benefit from DevOps as a model, not just the customer or the product itself. It might take some time for you to adapt to the process, but once you understand the core principles and lifecycle stages, you will be able to transform your company with the help of DevOps and grow.