Accelerate DevOps with AWS: Benefits & Tools

Accelerate DevOps with AWS: Benefits & Tools

Gartner’s definition of DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach.
DevOps is the mainstreamed agile software development that developers and operations teams use to build, test, deploy and monitor applications with speed, quality and control by applying automated processes to streamline IT. The ability to release improved business capabilities continuously is the necessity in today’s SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) world. It’s a business-driven approach to rapidly deliver solutions using

• Agile methods
• Collaboration
• Automation

Cloud and DevOps are completely independent but are reinforcing strategies for delivering business value through IT. It’s important to understand how the cloud and DevOps work together to help businesses achieve their digital transformation goals. Touted as Cloud and DevOps: A Marriage Made in Heaven- Lets look into the benefits of Cloud and DevOps

• Faster Go to Market- Product release is agile through faster access to development environments on cloud and streamlined developer processes through DevOps. CI/CD delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.
• Increase security with automated, templated, repeatable processes that significantly reduce operational error and, even more importantly, build security controls by design.
• Eliminate downtime through cloud-based continuous operations. The managed services/ solutions on cloud increase availability and failover ability.
• Increase scalability: Scalability of cloud allows organizations to increase capacity as the need arises. With DevOps the applications now can be developed to be highly scalable as they are developed, all this while reducing the cost of IT infra and faster global reach.

With regard to cutting expenses and improved collaboration, utilizing AWS for DevOps bodes well. However, the stage has numerous different advantages, including the capacity to mechanize various parts of the DevOps procedure, for example, server planning, advancement and test work processes, cross-regional support, and deployments. Additionally, different AWS services allow developers to use them in accordance with the necessities of a DevOps group. For instance, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CodeDeploy enable clients to build up the code conveyance pipelines which are expected to effectively actualize a fruitful Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery process. Different projects, for example, Amazon EC2 Container Service and AWS Elastic Beanstalk enable users to mechanize deployments, while AWS Lambda enables them to run code without the requirement for a server system. These are only a couple of services that makes AWS the cloud of choice for DevOps.

As discussed earlier the benefits of DevOps on cloud. Lets also look at the advantages of DevOps on AWS. Apart from faster time to market, security, improved collaboration and reliability. AWS offers fully managed DevOps services wherein you focus on the core product, the installation, capacity and the scale is taken care of. AWS DevOps services are programmable , You have the option to use each service via the AWS Command Line Interface. AWS has a large Ecosystem of Partners that integrate with and extend AWS services.

So what are the challenges to DevOps, as Gartner states through 2023, at least 80% of DevOps initiatives will not sufficiently scale to meet customer requirements due to nontechnical reasons.
This will be because of

• Inability to learn and change
• Failure to change the culture
• Leadership doesn’t change
• Failure to automate

And cultural change Can’t be Forced! Hence motivate, educate, and empower teams & leaders to embrace the DevOps change.

AWS DevOps tools automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keeps the development team in the privy of the pace that is enabled by DevOps. Below are the list of tools for various solutions and the respective AWS tools/services

Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery The AWS Developer Tools help you safely store and form your application’s source code and consequently assemble, test, and send your application to AWS or your on-premises ecosystem.
Software Release Workflows AWS CodePipeline	Build & Test Code AWS CodeBuild	Deployment Automation AWS CodeDeploy	Unified CI/CD Projects AWS CodeStar

Infrastructure as Code Use code and templates to provision, configure, and manage your AWS infrastructure.
Templated Infrastructure Provisioning AWS CloudFormation	Chef Configuration Management AWS OpsWorks	Configuration Management AWS Systems Manager	Policy as Code AWS Config

Microservices Use containers or serverless computing to build and deploy a microservices architecture.
Production Docker Platform Amazon Elastic Container Service	Serverless Computing AWS Lambda

Platform as a Service Deploy your web applications without the need for provisioning and managing infrastructure and application stack.

Run & Manage Web Apps AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Version Control Host secure, extremely scalable Git repositories in the cloud.

Private Git Hosting AWS CodeCommit

Monitoring & Logging Monitor your application and infrastructure performance and record logs in near real-time.
Cloud and Network Monitoring Amazon CloudWatch	Distributed Tracing AWS X-Ray	Activity & API Usage Tracking AWS CloudTrail