“The most powerful tool we have as developers is automation.”
—Scott Hanselman
Technology has evolved with time which reciprocates the evolution in the ways of handling it. Over the past decade or two, there has been a great shift in computation and software development life cycles. Infrastructure, applications, services, products everything is making its way to the cloud and the market is reacting with billion dollars’ investment in cloud migration. Businesses are increasingly transitioning to different cloud services. DevOps with cloud projects are becoming better defined due to the low costs for testing, deployment, operations, and speedy delivery.
What is DevOps?
DevOps avails the synchronization of software developers (Dev) and operations (Ops) which boosts the speed of organizations for better customer service and competition in the market. The prime focus is to automate the workflow as a reaction to it small chunks of code can now be tested, monitored, and deployed in hours which is different from the traditional way of writing a large chunk of code. The Benefits of DevOps:
Rapid Delivery: DevOps increases the frequency and rate of releases, ergo the product can be improved faster with the release of new features and bug fixes.
Reliability: Continuous monitoring and logging practices helps to stay informed of performance in real-time which ensures the quality of application updates.
Scale: Automation and consistency help to operate, manage and change systems efficiently and with reduced risk.
Improved Collaboration: Developers and operations teams collaborate closely and combine their workflows which escalates the working efficiency.
Security: Automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques provide much-needed security.
Why AWS?
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services which offers cloud-computing services at very affordable rates to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. As one of the era-defining cloud service providers, Amazon provides security for subscribers’ systems as part of a subscription agreement. AWS assists the users by providing a variety of distributed computing tools and abstract technical infrastructure.
Rather than building an actual physical server farm utilizing AWS one can obtain large-scale computing capacity more quickly and cheaply. As of 2017 AWS owns a dominant 33% of all cloud, and the services provided are billed based on usage.
AWS is one of the best cloud service providers and the centralized nature of cloud computing provides DevOps automation with a standard and centralized platform for testing, deployment, and production. Thus, making AWS DevOps a highly popular union.
DevOps automation is moving towards cloud-centric, and this integration lowers the cost associated with on-premises automation technology and provides centralized governance and control for a sound DevOps process. The rationale of DevOps in AWS:
Getting Started: Each AWS service can be initiated with an AWS account without any setup. It provides fully managed services that drive the AWS resources quicker allowing the user to focus on the core product.
Built for Scale: Users can manage a single instance or scale to thousands using AWS services making most of flexible compute resources by simplifying provisioning, configuration, and scaling.
Programmable: The services can be used over the Command Line Interface or through APIs and SDKs. The entire infrastructure can be modeled using declarative AWS CloudFormation templates
Automation: AWS helps to use automation to build faster and more efficiently. The manual tasks such as deployments, development & test workflows can be automated.
Secure: The AWS Identity and Access Management are used to set user permissions and policies. This grants the authority to a user over who and how the user allows access to the resources.
Large Partner Ecosystem: Users can use their preferred third-party and open-source tools with AWS to build an end-to-end solution due to the support of a large ecosystem of partners and extended AWS services.
DevOps Tooling by AWS: AWS tools automate the tasks which help teams manage complex environments and provide services that help users practice DevOps that are built first for use with AWS.
How is AWS assisting DevOps?
The AWS Developer Tools help users automatically build, test, and deploy their applications to AWS. Serverless computing is used to build and deploy microservices architecture. It is easy to manage AWS infrastructure using code and templates and can be monitored in near real-time. The web applications can be deployed without needing to provision and manage the infrastructure. The tools:
AWS Code Pipeline automates the software release process, models the different stages of the software delivery process and it permits the use of built-in plugins or custom plugins at any stage.
AWS Code Build is a fully managed build service that scales up and down automatically to meet the users’ build volume. The build artifacts are encrypted, and it enables continuous integration and delivery.
AWS Code Deploy automates code deployment making them reliable and rapid. It minimizes downtime, the centralized control allows to stop and roll back deployments if there are errors.
AWS Code Star makes development and continuous delivery toolchain for coding, building, testing easier and faster. It makes managing day-to-day development activities easier through a unified user interface.
Amazon Elastic Container Service(ECS) supports server less compute for containers and helps to focus on building and managing applications instead of infrastructure. Several containers can be launched using ECS without any complexity.
AWS Lambda allows running codes without managing servers and it automatically scales the application by running code in response to each event the code can be further optimized by choosing the right memory size for the function.
AWS Cloud Formation automates best practices using widely adopted processes. It allows to create, update, or delete stacks with a single operation.
AWS Systems Manager is a management service that helps to quickly view operational data for the group of resources and allows to automate operational tasks. It helps to manage resources in hybrid environments and permits the management of servers remotely.
AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides continuous monitoring and assessment to record configuration changes. It enables tracking the relationship among resources and review resource dependencies.
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that allows observability on a single platform for AWS cloud resources. It improves operational performance and resource optimization. Provides automatic dashboards for operational visibility and insight.
AWS X-Ray traces user’s request behaviors and discovers application issues thus helping to improve application performance. It is designed for a variety of applications that can be used with an application written in Java, Node.js, and .Net.
AWS CloudTrail is a web service that records, and stores event logs made within the AWS account. It increases visibility into user and resource activity by recording API calls. It allows to automatically track and respond to account activity threatening the security.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling applications on AWS. It increases the developer’s productivity by managing and configuring the servers. It gives complete resource control and is impossible to outgrow.
AWS Code Commit is a fully-managed source control service that eliminates the need to host, maintain, backup. It is secure as it automatically encrypts the files in transit and at rest. It is designed to keep the repositories highly available and accessible.
The extremely customizable cloud computing service provider, AWS is the era-defining cloud service provider. The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer has technical expertise in implementing, operating, and managing on the AWS platform. The individual is skilled in defining, deploying, monitoring metrics, and logging systems on AWS. A certified engineer design manages and maintains tools to automate operational processes.
