DevOpsLifecycle

DevOpsLifecycle is a concept used to describe the end-to-end lifecycle of software delivery as a continuous, integrated workflow that merges development and operations activities. It emphasizes automation, collaboration, and rapid feedback to shorten lead times, improve quality, and increase reliability across the software lifecycle. While not a formal standard, the term is used to illustrate how teams move from planning through deployment and operations in an ongoing loop rather than through isolated stages.

Key stages typically include planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, and monitoring, with feedback loops that drive improvement. In practice, the lifecycle relies on continuous integration, continuous delivery or deployment, and continuous testing to ensure that changes can be safely delivered at high velocity. Artifacts such as source code, containers, and configuration as code are versioned and promoted through environments, from development to staging to production.

Common practices within the DevOpsLifecycle include infrastructure as code, automated provisioning, automated testing, configuration management, and immutable infrastructure. Deployment strategies such as blue/green and canary releases reduce risk, while feature flags enable safer experimentation. Monitoring, logging, and tracing provide observability to detect issues, while incident management and blameless postmortems support learning and resilience.

Adoption of the DevOpsLifecycle is driven by culture and collaboration between developers, operators, and other stakeholders. Success is commonly measured by lead time, change failure rate, deployment frequency, and mean time to recover. The concept is language- and tool-agnostic, but benefits from a defined pipeline, governance, and continuous improvement.

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