User stories to user reality: A DevOps approach for the cloud

The `DevOps' phenomenon that advocates a collaborative and unified method for delivering software, has been gaining tremendous attention from various sectors of the IT industry with organizations adopting this movement exhibiting significant growth in performance. It can be challenging for an organization to commence their DevOps journey owing to the abundant and diverse resources available. There is a need to have an all-inclusive picture of DevOps and how its related concepts can be leveraged to improve delivery of software applications to end-users while enhancing quality and reducing lead time. This paper strives to bring insight into the practices associated with DevOps. An end-to-end solution is provided through an integrated toolchain and a customizable workflow. The role of Docker containers is considered in the context of extending infrastructure provisioning capability of the workflow. In a bid to accelerate delivery and improve testability of applications, a framework to automate Model-View-Controller architectures has been proposed. Through these processes, the cyclical journey of an application is traced from `User Stories' to a running state - `User Reality' on the cloud.