The development phase includes all coding activities – writing, testing, reviewing, and integrating code by team members – as well as compiling the code into deployable build artifacts. To innovate rapidly without sacrificing quality, stability, or productivity, we utilize highly efficient tools, automate tedious manual processes, and iterate through small increments using automated testing and continuous integration.

The delivery phase involves reliably and consistently deploying applications into production environments. It also involves deploying and configuring the fully governed infrastructure underlying those environments. In this phase, we establish a release process with clear manual approval stages and automated gates that advance applications through stages until available to customers. Automating these processes makes them scalable, repeatable, and controlled. Thus, we can frequently deliver applications with ease, confidence, and peace of mind.

The operation phase involves maintaining, monitoring, and troubleshooting applications in production environments to ensure system reliability, high availability, and zero downtime. By adopting best practices, we reinforce security and governance while identifying issues before they affect customer experience. We also mitigate issues quickly as they occur. Maintaining this level of vigilance requires rich telemetry, actionable alerting, and full visibility into applications and underlying systems.