The DevOps lifecycle is the series of stages through which code passes on its way to users. Effective DevOps implementations have a cyclical lifecycle that prioritizes rapid iteration upon small changes. There’s minimal delay between key stages, such as planning a feature, building it, and then deploying it to production environments.
In this article, we’ll peel back the layers of a typical DevOps lifecycle. We’ll explain what happens in each stage and study the tools, components, and processes that support DevOps lifecycles at scale. We’ll wrap up with a summary of some best practices that improve iteration speed and consistency in the software development lifecycle.
The DevOps lifecycle is a set of practices that guide the continuous development, integration, testing, deployment, monitoring, and improvement of software. It begins with planning and coding, then moves through automated testing and building, followed by deployment to production environments. It describes the entire process of shipping changes.
DevOps has a cyclical structure that’s reflected within the lifecycle. Once individual changes reach the end of their lifecycles, a new iteration begins based on monitoring data collected from the previous deployment. This creates a positive feedback loop that drives continuous improvement.
The image below shows the DevOps lifecycle diagram:
Implementing an efficient DevOps lifecycle requires synergy between tools, people, and processes. For instance, workflows need to be automated so changes flow smoothly between stages.
Similarly, it’s important to foster collaborative working methods that let development and operations team members share information freely to avoid development bottlenecks.
The DevOps lifecycle includes seven main components. To keep your delivery pipelines effective, everyone involved with software projects should understand what happens in each.
This makes it easier to distinguish different roles and responsibilities, and it increases team members’ awareness of how their work affects future software development cycles and other stakeholders.
1. Plan
Planning is the starting point for every change. It is where you scope your features, evaluate implementation strategies, and ensure all stakeholders agree on priorities.
Popular software planning tools include JIRA, GitHub Projects, and Azure DevOps Boards.
2. Code
The code or development part is where developers write the code to implement planned changes in your project. It involves IDE tools and VCS platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
Successful planning gives developers precise designs and requirements to work toward. This helps ensure software development stays on schedule and produces the expected result.
3. Test
Once it’s written, the code needs to be tested. Testing is where you write unit and integration tests to ensure that your code works correctly and meets the required security and compliance standards.
The testing process should be automated as part of a Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline to ensure your tests are reliable and repeatable.
4. Build
After the code has been tested, you can create the artifacts that you’ll use for release. This is where you compile binaries, build Docker container images, and prepare any other artifacts that will be needed in production environments.
5. Deploy
Deployment (or release) is when your changes actually ship to users. This is the time to update your live environments so they run your new build.
Use a Continuous delivery (CD) tool to automate the deployment process and prevent misconfigurations. Popular Kubernetes-based choices include Argo CD and Flux CD.
6. Operate
Successfully operating your apps requires continual maintenance of infrastructure resources and deployed environments to ensure they’re configured correctly. These tasks are usually handled by a dedicated team that uses observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and the Elastic Stack to assess how deployments impact key operational metrics.
7. Feedback and iterate
The DevOps lifecycle never really ends, but changes should eventually stabilize once they’ve been operated for a while. The final feedback stage provides an opportunity to combine your monitoring data with insights from users and other stakeholders.
You can then plan how to iterate on your launch, such as by creating follow-up features or improving existing ones.
This brings the DevOps lifecycle back to where it started.
The DevOps lifecycle components can be thought of as seven Cs. Each C refers to a key DevOps process whose name is prefixed by Continuous.
DevOps lifecycle include:
- Continuous integration
- Continuous testing
- Continuous delivery
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous monitoring and observability
- Continuous security and compliance
- Continuous feedback
These phases connect different processes of the DevOps lifecycle, setting up the constant feedback loop that powers the most successful software delivery workflows.
DevOps lifecycle definitions can vary, so other articles may include more or fewer stages than we’ve listed here. The stages we’re focusing on are the main ones to include in any DevOps implementation, but it can sometimes be helpful to define more granular sub-stages when you’re working in large teams at scale.
Conversely, smaller teams and projects may choose to combine some of these stages to make processes more manageable.
Let’s take a closer look at the stages and their roles within the lifecycle.
1. Continuous integration
Continuous integration (CI) is the process of integrating new code changes and features as soon as they’re ready. This means that changes are merged into your codebase earlier, immediately after they pass all required tests and approvals.
Developers should push new changes as soon as possible after their code is working and then start a new iteration to build the next component.
Continuous integration increases development velocity and promotes fast iteration on smaller changes. Merging changes sooner means you’re less likely to encounter merge conflicts, allowing developers to keep working on new code with fewer errors. Any problems detected are more likely to be visible and scoped to just the changed code, making them easier to fix.
You can implement continuous integration using platforms such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI. Your CI pipelines should run all the tests your project requires and then merge the code once they pass. You can then progress to running automated delivery and deployment pipelines to ship the change to production. We’ll discuss this in more detail below.
2. Continuous testing
Continuous testing is closely related to continuous integration, but it deserves to be treated as an independent process. Whereas continuous integration refers specifically to how code is accepted into your project, continuous testing describes the constant need to run and repeat tests throughout the DevOps lifecycle.
Testing begins by implementing an effective Test-Driven Development (TDD) strategy. Writing tests before your code makes it easier to check that all features behave as expected while also helping to minimize scope creep. Developers should run the feature’s test suite regularly as they work until all tests pass when the feature is complete.
Automated tests should then be used in CI pipelines to execute your full test suite before the code is integrated into your project. This ensures code can’t be merged with failing tests and also helps protect against regressions caused by new code that affects the behavior of older work.
Testing doesn’t end after integration, either: You should implement checks, reviews, and approvals for the build, deploy, and operate DevOps lifecycle stages to ensure your releases are correctly configured.
Operational testing of deployed workloads is also important at scale. API fuzz testing and live environment scans detect edge-case issues that only show up in production and emerging risks like new zero-day vulnerabilities.
3. Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) is the process of automatically preparing changes for release after they’ve been successfully integrated with your project. It ensures your repository is always ready to deploy.
Continuous delivery pipelines are usually implemented alongside CI pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD. This is why CI and CD are often conjoined as CI/CD: Once the CI stage is complete, the CD pipeline continues the DevOps lifecycle.
Typical CD tasks include building your code, creating container images, and preparing release notes. The process produces all the artifacts you need to launch a new deployment successfully. You can then trigger the release at any time without having to run complex build tasks manually.
4. Continuous deployment
Continuous deployment is a natural progression of continuous delivery. Whereas continuous delivery ensures new changes are ready for release, continuous deployment also automates the actual release process. Once changes have been integrated, tested, and built, they’re launched into production without any developer intervention.
Implementing a continuous deployment workflow is one key way to make your DevOps lifecycle faster and more responsive. It ensures changes are released to users as soon as they’re ready, enabling them to try features and fixes faster. This gives you earlier access to feedback, reduces your cycle time, and provides a competitive advantage.
Continuous deployment also means developers don’t spend time manually deploying new changes or setting up complex release workflows.
For instance, many real-world apps need to deploy using a canary or blue-green strategy. Continuous deployment tools easily automate this process: They use a GitOps workflow to read your repository’s content continually and then stage and promote updates in your environments.
If you already have robust continuous testing and delivery processes, adopting continuous deployment should be essentially risk-free. You already know changes are ready to deploy, so automating their launches is unlikely to pose additional issues.
Because the DevOps lifecycle revolves around delivering small changes quickly, starting a new software development iteration should allow you to deal with any unexpected problems efficiently.
The way you implement continuous deployment depends on the type of infrastructure you’ll deploy to. Argo CD and Flux CD are the two most popular tools for Kubernetes workloads, whereas solutions like Heroku and Google Cloud Deploy let you quickly launch serverless app deployments.
5. Continuous monitoring and observability (continuous operations)
Continuous monitoring, also known as continuous observability or continuous operations, refers to the need to constantly review deployed apps to detect errors and performance issues. You should also monitor utilization rates, user feedback, and DevOps lifecycle metrics to gauge the efficacy of your development workflow.
Ideally, monitoring responsibilities are shared among all DevOps team members. For example, Infrastructure operators will primarily be concerned with the health and performance of provisioned resources, whereas security teams need insights into detected vulnerabilities.
You should use tools like Prometheus to collect metrics from your deployed environments and make them accessible to stakeholders.
Successful continuous monitoring also hinges on efficient incident detection and resolution. Configuring automated alerts for applications and infrastructure ensures you’re notified as soon as significant events happen.
Information obtained from alerts should then be prioritized for resolution in the next development sprint. This ensures monitoring data continually informs development requirements, ultimately reducing the number of errors and incidents you’ll encounter.
6. Continuous security and compliance
Continuous security and compliance describe the ongoing process of addressing security issues throughout the DevOps lifecycle. It prioritizes automated real-time monitoring and collective responsibility for security issues.
Tightly integrating security into all DevOps lifecycle stages ensures it’s fully considered from day one, making vulnerabilities less likely. This is often described as a “shift left” model because security tasks are performed earlier in the development process, compared with traditional strategies in which security is typically a pre-deployment exercise.
The common rephrasing of DevOps as DevSecOps highlights how security tasks are just as fundamental to software success as development and operations work.
Continuous security requires potential security and compliance issues to be identified during a change’s planning stage. Teams can then develop mitigations to prevent the identified vulnerabilities from actually occurring.
You should also use automated static and dynamic security testing tools (SAST/DAST) like Semgrep, Checkov, and Trivy to detect possible code and config issues before you deploy. Then add real-time threat detection solutions like Falco and Kubescape to spot emerging problems in your live environments continually.
7. Continuous feedback
Continuous feedback is the process of constantly analyzing software delivery outcomes to improve your DevOps workflow. You should combine your monitoring data with feedback collected directly from users, developers, and other stakeholders. This lets you plan high-level enhancements to your products and processes.
Feedback goes beyond basic deployment health and performance checks. It lets you gauge whether your DevOps lifecycle is effectively serving the needs of people connected with your project. For example, feedback may reveal developer frustrations that are affecting deployment throughput or highlight that recent launches haven’t been properly aligned with user requirements or business strategy.
A continuous approach to feedback means collecting it throughout the DevOps lifecycle, not just after launch. Gathering feedback on plans or test outcomes allows you to capture potential issues before they’re committed to development.
It’s also important to diligently maintain your feedback strategy. Neglecting feedback routines because of busy schedules can cause you to lose sight of what actually matters to your stakeholders.
Popular DevOps lifecycle tools support various phases such as planning, development, integration, deployment, monitoring, and operations. Some of the tools can be used throughout all the processes.
| Process | Purpose | Popular tools |
| Plan | Define business goals, track progress, prioritize features | Jira, Confluence, Trello, GitHub Projects, Azure Boards |
| Code | Write and manage application + infrastructure code | Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, ARM, GCP Deployment Manager, Packer, Vagrant, Spacelift, Git, GitHub, GitLab |
| Test | Automated testing for app and infra (unit, integration, policy checks) | Jenkins, Spacelift, Chef InSpec, Ansible Molecule, TestNG, JUnit, Selenium, Postman |
| Build | Compile code, build artifacts, validate builds | Jenkins, Spacelift, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Travis CI, Bazel |
| Deploy | Release and deploy applications and infra across environments | Spinnaker, Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Kubernetes, Nomad, OpenShift, Argo CD, Flux, Octopus Deploy |
| Operate | Manage infrastructure, maintain runtime environments | Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Kubernetes, Nomad, OpenShift, SaltStack, Vagrant |
| Feedback and iterate | Observe, analyze, and adapt system based on monitoring and user feedback | Prometheus, Sensu, Nagios, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) |
Now that we’ve learned the stages and processes involved in the DevOps lifecycle, you might be wondering how you can ensure your workflows run smoothly.
Here are some DevOps practices to follow:
- Integrate all tools and processes — DevOps tools and processes need to integrate cleanly with each other to minimize delays between lifecycle stages. Manual approvals, data siloing, and unclear communication channels all slow down development throughput. You should take a holistic approach to planning DevOps lifecycle improvements — looking at individual stages in isolation can create problems in neighboring stages.
- Automate everything — Automating the DevOps lifecycle is the only viable way to ensure speed, efficiency, and consistency at scale. Combine CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation platforms, and dedicated observability suites to reduce manual work and prevent errors in your processes.
- Use consistent processes for code, configuration, and infrastructure — The DevOps lifecycle applies to your entire software delivery workflow. Including non-code tasks such as infrastructure and configuration management in the lifecycle lets you use the same working methods for every part of your stack. This also enables more effective decision-making by ensuring infrastructure requirements are considered as you plan new features.
- Promote a culture of collaboration, iteration, and autonomy — The DevOps lifecycle works best when teams collaborate closely on small iterations. This tightens feedback loops and helps prevent communication issues. Ensure developers, operators, and other stakeholders have easy access to relevant information and resources. This improves overall productivity by enabling tasks to be completed more autonomously.
- Continually look for improvement opportunities — Your DevOps lifecycle should evolve as your projects grow and new development requirements arise. Aim to continually improve your workflows by searching for inefficiencies and implementing optimizations. For instance, you may find you need to automate additional processes or invite more frequent communications between stakeholders.
- Include security and compliance from day one — Security and compliance issues must be prioritized throughout your DevOps lifecycle. Shift security left so it’s considered from day one, during the requirements planning stage. This will minimize the risk of vulnerabilities occurring in your code or infrastructure. You should then implement automated tests and live environment scans to ensure any remaining problems are detected early.
Read more: 16 DevOps Best Practices Every Developer Should Know
A successful DevOps implementation requires capable tools that automate your processes, including CI/CD, IaC, and infrastructure management. These fields can be tricky to get right, but dedicated platforms make it easy to control your infrastructure resources, saving valuable time that can be returned to your business.
Spacelift is an IaC management platform that helps you implement DevOps best practices. Spacelift provides a dependable CI/CD layer for infrastructure tools, including OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, Ansible, and more, letting you automate your IaC delivery workflows.
Spacelift is designed for your whole team. Everyone works in the same space, supported by robust policies that enforce access controls, security guardrails, and compliance standards. You can manage your DevOps infrastructure much more efficiently, without compromising on safety.
With Spacelift, you get:
- Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
- Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
- Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, or Spacelift’s Kubernetes operator, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
- Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
- Drift detection and optional remediation
When you shift to treating infrastructure like a software project, you need all of the same components that a software project would have. That means having a CI/CD platform in place, and most aren’t suited to the demands of IaC. Insurtech company Kin discovered that Spacelift was purpose-built to fill that gap.
If you want to learn more about what you can do with Spacelift, check out this article.
Do you plan to implement DevOps in your organization? Or maybe you are seeking ways to improve your processes? Book a demo with our engineering team to discuss your options in more detail.
The DevOps lifecycle refers to the process of delivering software changes, from idea through to monitoring your final release. The lifecycle is modeled as a cyclical waterfall where the results from each stage flow directly into the next one. Once an iteration ends, performance metrics and user feedback from the release are used to plan the next cycle.
Continuous everything is the main theme throughout the DevOps lifecycle. From continuous integration to continuous monitoring, security, and compliance, focusing on the seven Cs outlined above guides you toward implementing an effective software delivery workflow.
These continuous software development processes drive efficiency improvements throughout the lifecycle, helping shorten iterations by automating key tasks. This enhances software delivery outcomes for all stakeholders, the development team, and the operations team.
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