DevOps Lifecycle: From Code to Deploy & Monitor

“How can businesses release new features to market faster, reduce defects, and optimize operational costs—all at the same time?” This is a question most CTOs, Product Managers, and technology-driven organizations must confront in the digital era.

The answer lies in DevOps—not merely a set of tools, but an operating model and collaborative culture that unites software development (Development) and system operations (Operations). DevOps breaks down the traditional silos between these teams, enabling a software delivery process that is faster, more stable, and more adaptable.

In this article, BHSOFT will take you through the DevOps Lifecycle—the end-to-end journey from Code to Deploy & Monitor—to help you:

• Gain a clear understanding of each stage in the DevOps lifecycle
• Learn how to effectively implement CI/CD, cloud, and monitoring practices
• Gain practical insights into how DevOps services enable sustainable business growth

What Is the DevOps Lifecycle?

The DevOps Lifecycle describes the entire process of software development and operations within a DevOps environment. The DevOps lifecycle model is continuous and iterative, where feedback from operations and end users is continuously fed back into the development phase to drive ongoing improvement.

A standard end-to-end DevOps lifecycle typically includes the following core 7 stages:

Plan → Code → Build → Test → Release/Deploy → Operate → Monitor & Feedback

Each phase of the DevOps lifecycle process plays a critical role and is tightly connected through automation, CI/CD pipelines, and real-time monitoring systems. This continuous integration and continuous delivery approach enables teams to deliver high-quality software faster, respond quickly to changes, and maintain system stability at scale.

Read more: How DevOps benefits software development

The Detailed Stages of the DevOps Lifecycle

This lifecycle consists of 7 core stages, designed to ensure speed, quality, and system stability.

1. Plan

The Plan phase is the foundational step, shaping the strategy for product development. Without a clear plan, the subsequent stages risk scope creep and timeline delays.

Core Objective: Clearly define Business Requirements, Technical Scope, and the Product Development Roadmap.

Key Activities:

• Requirements Gathering: Collaborating with stakeholders to define User Stories and Acceptance Criteria.
• Backlog Management: Building the detailed Product Backlog and Roadmap following Agile/Scrum principles.
• Metric Definition: Establishing crucial operational metrics like SLA (Service Level Agreement), SLO (Service Level Objective), and Technical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
• Assessment: Performing Risk Assessment and evaluating the system’s Scalability architecture.
• Common Tools: Jira, Trello, ClickUp (for Project Management), Confluence (for documentation).

Deliverables:

• Product Roadmap
• Sprint Backlog
• Definition of Done (DoD)

2. Code

The Code phase focuses on producing high-quality, maintainable, and automation-ready source code.

Core Objective: Building maintainable, testable code that is ready for automation.

Key Activities:

• Version Control: Implementing a robust Branching Strategy, such as Git flow or the modern Trunk-Based Development.
• Peer Review: Conducting Code Reviews and Pair Programming to enhance code quality.
• Standardization: Applying strict Coding Standards and utilizing Linting tools to ensure consistency.
• Tools: Git, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket (Version Control Systems).

Best Practices:

• Small, frequent Commits with clear messaging.
• Using structured Pull Requests (PR) with defined merge criteria.
• Shift-left Security Integration: Running security analysis tools (SAST/DAST) early in the development process to detect vulnerabilities.

3. Build

The Build phase transforms source code into a deployable product (artifact). Its goal is to create consistent and reusable artifacts—such as binaries, container images, or packages—through full automation.

Key Activities:

• Continuous Integration (CI): Automatically building and compiling upon every new commit.
• Dependency Management: Automated fetching and management of libraries and dependencies.
• Packaging: Building container images (e.g., Docker images) to ensure environment parity.
• Tools: Maven, Gradle (build tools), Docker (packaging), Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI (CI/CD tools).

Deliverables:

• Versioned Artifacts (e.g., app-v1.2.3.jar).
• Deployment-ready Container Images stored in a Container Registry.
• SBOM (Software Bill of Materials): A comprehensive list of software components, critical for security compliance.

4. Automated Testing in DevOps

Testing is a critical quality assurance stage that is continuously integrated into the CI/CD pipeline, rather than being a final, isolated step. Early Bug Detection and guaranteeing high Software Quality before release.

Key Activities:

• Automated execution of various test types: Unit Tests, Integration Tests, End-to-End Tests (E2E).
• Executing non-functional tests: Performance Testing and Security Testing.
• Tools: JUnit, pytest (Unit), Selenium, Playwright (E2E), Postman (API/Integration), SonarQube, OWASP ZAP (Security & Code Quality).

Best Practices:

• Shift-left testing: Moving testing activities earlier in the lifecycle.
• Test as Code (TaC): Writing and managing test scenarios as code.
• Establishing Quality Gates within the CI/CD pipeline to automatically halt deployment if quality thresholds are not met.

5. Release & Deploy

This phase focuses on deploying software to production quickly, safely, and with high stability, using automation to ensure zero service disruption.

Key Activities:

• Executing Continuous Delivery (CD) or Continuous Deployment.
• Implementing safe deployment techniques: Blue-Green Deployment, Canary Deployment (staggered rollout).
• Utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools for environment management.
• Tools: Kubernetes (Orchestration), Helm (Package Manager), Argo CD (GitOps), Terraform, Ansible (IaC).

Deliverables:

• Deployment Manifests (configuration files).
• Detailed Release Notes.
• A tested and validated Rollback Plan.

6. Operate

The Operate phase focuses on maintaining system health, stability, and availability after deployment by applying Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles to ensure reliability, high performance, and cost efficiency.

Key Activities:

• Incident & On-call Management: Handling system incidents according to standardized procedures.
• Disaster Recovery: Setting up robust Backup & Disaster Recovery (DR) mechanisms.
• Capacity Planning: Forecasting and preparing for potential traffic surges.
• Tools: Prometheus, Grafana (Monitoring), ELK Stack (Log Management), PagerDuty (On-call/Alerting).

Deliverables:

• Runbooks: Detailed guides for incident handling.
• SLO/SLI Dashboards: Monitoring panels tracking service level indicators.
• Postmortem Reports: Analysis reports after incidents to prevent recurrence.

7. Monitor & Feedback – Continuous Monitoring and Improvement

The final phase serves as the “eyes and ears” of the lifecycle, establishing a continuous feedback loop that feeds real-time insights back into the Plan stage to drive ongoing product improvement and system optimization.

Key Activities:

• Operational Data Collection: Monitoring metrics, logs, and traces.
• Incident Response: Setting up effective Alerting and Incident Response procedures.
• User Feedback: Collecting and analyzing feedback from end-users.
• Tools: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Jaeger (Tracing), Datadog, New Relic (Observability Platforms).

Best Practices:

• Transitioning from Monitoring (watching what you know) to Observability (the ability to answer any question about the system).
• Reducing Alert Fatigue by only triggering alerts when an SLO is at risk of violation.
• Connecting Technical Metrics (CPU Usage, Latency) with Business Metrics (Conversion Rate, Payment Error Rate).

Read more: CI/CD vs DevOps: Understanding the Key Differences

The Role of CI/CD in the DevOps Lifecycle

In the DevOps Lifecycle, CI/CD is widely regarded as the "backbone" that seamlessly connects the Code – Build – Test – Deploy stages into a single, automated, continuous, and repeatable process. Instead of fragmented deployment steps that rely heavily on manual intervention, CI/CD allows businesses to standardize the entire software development and release pipeline.

How Does CI/CD Connect and Automate the DevOps Lifecycle?

Continuous Integration (CI): CI ensures that every change to the source code is integrated frequently, with automated builds and tests executed immediately upon a developer's code commit. This practice facilitates early bug detection, mitigates the risk of code conflicts, and maintains consistent software quality.

Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD): CD automates the release process, enabling the software to be either perpetually ready for deployment or automatically deployed directly to the production environment in a fast, secure, and consistent manner.

Thanks to CI/CD, Development and Operations teams can collaborate more effectively, reducing "bottlenecks" in the process and significantly shortening the time-to-market for new features.

Core Benefits of CI/CD for Businesses

Implementing CI/CD within the DevOps Lifecycle delivers several tangible benefits:

• Reduced Lead Time: Automation drastically cuts the time from an initial idea to deployment in production.
• Fewer Manual Errors: Minimising human error during the build, test, and deployment phases.
• Increased Release Frequency: Enables the release of smaller, more frequent, and safer incremental versions.
• Improved User Experience: Users receive new features faster, backed by stable quality assurance.

CI/CD Consulting & DevOps Services from BHSOFT

With extensive experience delivering DevOps services across various product models (SaaS, enterprise systems, cloud-native applications), BHSOFT supports businesses by:

• Designing and optimizing the CI/CD pipeline to precisely fit the system architecture.
• Selecting the most effective CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps).
• Integrating CI/CD seamlessly with cloud environments, containerisation technologies, monitoring, and security protocols.
• Ensuring the pipeline is scalable, secure, and sustainable for long-term stable operation.

Key KPIs and Metrics in DevOps Performance

Measuring success is vital in any continuous improvement cycle. In DevOps, performance is gauged not just by speed but by stability and efficiency. Enterprises must rigorously track key operational metrics to ensure pipelines are effective and reliable.

The Crucial DORA Metrics

Forward-thinking organisations prioritise the four DORA metrics (DevOps Research and Assessment), which are the gold standard for measuring team performance and delivery capability:

• Deployment Frequency (DF): How often an organisation successfully releases new code to production. (A high frequency indicates smaller batch sizes and effective automation).
• Lead Time for Changes (LT4C): The time taken from code commit to successful deployment in production. (Low LT4C is a strong indicator of an efficient, automated pipeline).
• Change Failure Rate (CFR): The percentage of deployments that result in failure (e.g., service degradation, outages) requiring immediate remediation. (Lower CFR means better quality and testing rigor).
• Mean Time to Restore (MTTR): The average time it takes to restore service after a system incident or failure. (Low MTTR highlights a team's resilience and robust incident management protocols).

Complementary Technical and Business Metrics

To gain a holistic view of system health and business impact, DORA metrics should be coupled with:

• Latency: The delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction (e.g., API response time).
• Error Rate: The frequency of technical errors (e.g., 5xx HTTP responses).
• Resource Utilisation: The efficiency of hardware and cloud resources (e.g., CPU, memory usage), crucial for cost optimisation.
• Business KPIs: Linking technical performance directly to commercial outcomes (e.g., conversion rates, Daily Active Users (DAU)), proving the ROI of DevOps efforts.

Read more: Best Practices for DevOps in Legacy System Migration

DevSecOps – Integrating Security Throughout the DevOps Lifecycle

In the modern landscape, security can no longer be an afterthought or a final checkpoint; it must be ingrained into the development culture. DevSecOps is the practice of integrating security measures and testing at every stage of the DevOps pipeline—shifting security "left".

Core DevSecOps Practices

By incorporating security controls early and continuously, DevSecOps aims to prevent vulnerabilities from reaching production:

• Static/Dynamic/Component Analysis in CI/CD:
• SAST (Static Application Security Testing): Analysing source code for vulnerabilities without executing it.
• DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing): Testing running applications externally for vulnerabilities.
• SCA (Software Composition Analysis): Identifying risks in open-source components and third-party dependencies.
• Secrets Management: Securely handling sensitive data (passwords, API keys) outside the source code using dedicated vaults and tools.
• Policy as Code (PaC): Defining and enforcing security and compliance rules automatically via code (e.g., using tools like Open Policy Agent), ensuring consistency across all environments.

Conclusion

The DevOps Lifecycle is a strategic foundation that enables organizations to deliver software faster, more reliably, and at scale. By seamlessly connecting Plan, Code, Build, Test, Deploy, Operate, and Monitor through automation and CI/CD pipelines, businesses can shorten time-to-market, improve software quality, and continuously enhance user experience.

However, realizing the full value of DevOps requires the right strategy, tooling, and hands-on expertise. BHSOFT provides end-to-end DevOps services and CI/CD consulting, covering DevOps architecture design, CI/CD pipeline implementation, cloud and container adoption, monitoring, security, and SRE-driven operations.

BHSOFT partners with organizations across the entire DevOps Lifecycle, helping transform DevOps from an operational initiative into a long-term competitive advantage. Contact us today!