Software Architect's Handbook

DevOps practices

There is variation depending on the organization and the software development methodology used, but in a DevOps release cycle, the following major activities generally take place:

• Development
• Integration
• Build and unit testing
• Delivery to staging
• Acceptance testing
• Deployment to production

The following diagram illustrates a typical DevOps release cycle:

Three of the main DevOps practices are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. These practices revolve around the key activities of a DevOps release cycle, so let's explore them in more detail.