Running at velocity is the un-sculpted philosophy at every modern business premise today. There’s but little time to pause, ponder, reflect, driving firms to constantly innovate to meet the fast-changing market demands and the competitive thrust magnifying every hour. DevOps is the engineer’s Eden to transform this innovation lifecycle; automate routine operations across infra provisioning, code management, to final software/update releases. This allows them window to focus on the true elephants in the room; blueprinting the product flow, building code, and transforming user experiences with continuous strategic updates.
DevOps makes continuous innovation possible and feasible. For businesses running most or all their critical workloads, applications on hyperscale cloud platforms like AWS, having a separate DevOps ecosystem paired with third party tools and processes is a goliath challenge. Cloud-native services such as AWS DevOps tools, built for easy integration and usage provides application developer teams with the means to efficiently implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), across the software development lifecycle. This enables them to securely store and version application source code, while automatically building, testing, and eventually deploying the application to either on-premises environments or to AWS.
Read this blog for a quick brush across the latest AWS DevOps tools, services, and technologies and how they can benefit business operations.
AWS DevOps Tools and Technologies: A Map
| Process/Service Type | Tool | Description |
| Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery | AWS CodePipeline | CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates |
| AWS CodeBuild | CodeBuild is an integration service that scales continuously and processes multiple builds. Users can build and test code with continuous scaling | |
| AWS CodeDeploy | This tool automates software deployments to several different computer services like Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, or any other on-premises servers you choose | |
| AWS CodeStar | Provides a unified user interface for easy management of all software development activities in one place | |
| Microservices | Amazon Elastic Container Service | Highly scalable, available, and performance-intensive container management solution supporting Docker containers and easy run of applications |
| AWS Lambda | Run software code without the hassle of provisioning servers or managing them | |
| Infrastructure as Code | AWS CloudFormation | Gives developers, users a streamlined platform to blueprint and manage a collection of AWS resources |
| AWS OpsWorks | A configuration management service using automated tools to treat, manage server configurations as code | |
| AWS Systems Manager | Helps automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, configure OS to define and track system configurations and associated tasks from a single pane of glass | |
| AWS Config | Managed service providing AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications for security and governance | |
| Monitoring and Logging | Amazon CloudWatch | Amazon CloudWatch monitors all AWS cloud resources, applications, and workloads for seamless operations |
| AWS X-Ray | Realize how applications and underlying services are performing to identify and mitigate root causes of errors | |
| AWS CloudTrail | Helps in operational risk auditing and governance of the AWS account | |
| Amazon DevOps Guru | Detects abnormal application behaviour with machine learning algorithms to improve the application’s operational performance and availability | |
| Platform-as-a-Service | AWS Elastic Beanstalk | An orchestration service for scaling and deploying web applications and services |
| Version Control | AWS CodeCommit | CodeCommit is a secure, highly scalable, fully managed source control service that hosts private Git repositories. |
Want to know more about AWS CodeCommit? Here is quick summary.
Fig 1: Example CI-CD pipeline structure built using fully AWS-native services (Source: AWS)
Benefits of Implementing and Running with AWS DevOps
Agility of Operations
Moving development operations at high velocity to innovate for customers faster, adapting to changing markets better, and driving business results efficiently with processes such as CI-CD pipelines, microservices, etc. Adopting a DevOps model enables developers and operations teams to achieve high-agility business outcomes.
Rapid, Frictionless Delivery
Helps enhance the frequency and pace of releases so that innovations and new products can be released faster, improvements can be made on agile mode. Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that help automate the software release or updates process, from build to deploy without risk.
Reliability of Operations
Ensures performance quality of application updates and infrastructure upgrades so that team can deliver reliably at rapid pace while maintaining seamless, positive experiences for end users. Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end users. Continuous integration and continuous delivery help test each update/upgrade and ensure the same is functional and secure. Monitoring and logging tools deliver critical performance insights and flags errors in real-time.
Uninterrupted Scale
Operate and manage infrastructure and development processes at scale, without disruption. Automation and consistency help manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps manage development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.
Improved Collaboration
Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, emphasizing ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share responsibilities, and combine workflows to reduce inefficiencies and save time.
Security Integration
Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. Embrace a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, business users can define and then track compliance at scale.
AWS DevOps Best Practices
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery: CI/CD pipelines are the lifeblood of the DevOps philosophy. Continuous integration means building and regularly validating the project by updating code changes at set intervals. Continuous delivery builds off CI by automatically deploying code in the production environment.
- Infrastructure Automation: This practice focuses on quality code, automating infrastructure provisioning and management functionalities that need to be tested at regular intervals automatically.
- Infrastructure as Code. This practice provisions and manages AWS cloud resources by writing a template file that is machine consumable and human readable. The AWS CloudFormation tool is the go-to resource for AWS cloud development users.
- Monitoring and Logging: All system activity needs to be monitored and recorded to assure that events get triggered at the right time, and to correct anything that isn't performing well.
Read more about AWS DevOps implementation best practices.
Looking to transform your application development and innovation pipeline with DevOps integration? Cloud4C, world’s leading application-focused cloud MSP and an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, allows businesses seamless integration of AWS-native tools and services into their DevOps operations at zero disruption to the latter. Taking a consultative approach from blueprinting to final implementation under a managed services model, Cloud4C’s certified AWS DevOps experts aided by 25 Centers pf Excellence augments your existing capabilities by acting as an end-to-end extended DevOps partner.
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