AWS offers a suite of flexible services that enable organizations to build and deliver products more quickly and reliably by implementing DevOps practices. These services make it easier to provision and manage infrastructure, deploy application code, automate software release processes, and monitor the performance of your application and infrastructure. Let’s see how AWS can help with DevOps!
DevOps Model
DevOps is a set of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that improves an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster rate than traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables businesses to better serve their customers and compete in the market.
How DevOps Works
Development and operations teams are no longer “silos” in a DevOps model. These two teams are sometimes combined into a single team in which the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations, and develop a diverse set of skills that are not limited to a single function.
Quality assurance and security teams may become more closely integrated with development and operations in some DevOps models, as well as throughout the application lifecycle. When everyone on a DevOps team focuses on security, this is DevSecOps.
These teams employ practices to automate processes that were previously manual and time-consuming. They employ a technology stack and tooling that enables them to operate and evolve applications in a timely and dependable manner. These tools also assist engineers in independently completing tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that would normally require assistance from other teams, which increases a team’s velocity even further.
Benefits of DevOps
Speed
Move at a high rate so that you can innovate for customers faster, better adapt to changing markets, and become more efficient at driving business results. Your developers and operations teams can achieve these results thanks to the DevOps model. Microservices and continuous delivery, for example, enable teams to take ownership of services and then release updates to them more quickly.
Rapid Delivery
Increase the frequency and speed with which you release new features so that you can innovate and improve your product more quickly. The faster you can release new features and fix bugs, the more quickly you can respond to your customers’ needs and gain a competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the entire software release process, from development to deployment.
Reliability
Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so that you can deliver at a faster rate while maintaining a positive user experience. Continuous integration and continuous delivery practices are in use to ensure that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices allow you to keep track of performance in real-time.
Scale
Scale up the operation and management of your infrastructure and development processes. Automation and consistency aid in the efficient and risk-free management of complex or changing systems. Infrastructure as code, for example, allows you to manage your development, testing, and production environments in a more repeatable and efficient manner.
Improved Collaboration
Create more effective teams by following a DevOps cultural model that emphasizes values like ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams work closely together, sharing many responsibilities and combining workflows. This cuts down on inefficiencies and saves time.
Security
Move quickly while maintaining control and compliance. You can use automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques to implement a DevOps model without sacrificing security. For example, you can define and then track compliance at scale by using infrastructure as code and policy as code.
Why Does DevOps Matter?
From shopping to entertainment to banking, software and the Internet have transformed the world and its industries. Software is no longer just a supplement to a business; it is now an essential component of every aspect of a business. Companies interact with their customers via software delivered as online services or applications, as well as on a variety of devices. They also use software to improve operational efficiencies by transforming all aspects of the value chain, including logistics, communications, and operations. Companies in today’s world must transform how they build and deliver software in the same way that physical goods companies transformed how they designed, built, and delivered products using industrial automation throughout the twentieth century.
AWS DevOps Tools
DevOps Tools – How do they interact? AWS offers services to assist you in implementing DevOps in your organization. These tools can be divided into sections based on their function.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice in which developers merge their code changes into a central code repository on a regular basis, after which automated builds and tests are run. CI speeds up the discovery and resolution of bugs, improves software quality, and shortens the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
Continuous delivery is a software development practice in which code changes are automatically prepared for production release. Continuous delivery complements continuous integration by deploying all code changes to the testing and/or production environment following the build stage.
AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that allows you to model, visualise, and automate the steps required for software release. The entire release process for building code, deploying to pre-production environments, testing your application, and releasing it to production can be modelled using AWS CodePipeline. Every time there is a code change, AWS CodePipeline builds, tests, and deploys your application in accordance with the defined workflow.
Furthermore,
AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and generates ready-to-deploy software packages. The developer would be responsible for provisioning, managing, and scaling your own build servers. CodeBuild scales indefinitely and can process multiple builds at the same time.
AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers. Also, AWS CodeDeploy enables you to quickly release new features, avoid downtime during application deployment, and handle the complexity of updating your applications.
Furthermore, AWS CodeStar allows you to develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS in a matter of minutes. AWS CodeStar has a unified user interface; that allows you to manage all of your software development activities in one place. You can set up your entire continuous delivery toolchain in minutes; with AWS CodeStar, allowing you to start releasing code sooner.
Microservices
Using containers or serverless computing, create and deploy a microservices architecture.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a container orchestration service; that enables you to easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. It integrates deeply with the rest of the AWS platform to provide a secure, and simple solution for running container workloads in the cloud.
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows you to run code without having to provision or manage servers, create workload-aware cluster scaling logic, maintain event integrations, or manage runtimes. With Lambda, you can run code for almost any type of application or backend service – all while requiring no administration. Simply upload your code as a ZIP file or container image, and Lambda will automatically and precisely allocate compute execution power; and run your code in response to any incoming request or event, regardless of traffic volume.
You can configure your code to trigger automatically from over 200 AWS services and SaaS applications. Or you can call it directly from any web or mobile app. You can write Lambda functions in your favourite language; (Node.js, Python, Go, Java, and others) and use serverless and container tools to build, test; and deploy your functions, such as AWS SAM or Docker CLI.
Infrastructure as Code
A fundamental DevOps principle is to treat infrastructure in the same way that developers treat code.
AWS CloudFormation is a service that allows developers to create AWS resources in a systematic and predictable manner. Text files in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) format store resources. The templates necessitate a specific syntax and structure based on the types of resources created and managed. You create your resources in JSON or YAML using any code editor; such as AWS Cloud9, and then check them into a version control system. CloudFormation then builds the specified services in a safe, repeatable manner. Like a stack, a CloudFormation template is deploy into the AWS environment. Stacks can be managable using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface, or the AWS CloudFormation APIs.
OpsWorks employs Chef to automate the configuration, deployment; and management of servers across your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or on-premises compute environments. AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks Stacks are the two offerings from OpsWorks.
Furthermore,
AWS Systems Manager is a management service that automates the collection of software inventory; the application of operating system patches, the creation of system images, and the configuration of Windows and Linux operating systems. These capabilities aid in the definition and tracking of system configurations, the prevention of drift; and the maintenance of software compliance in your EC2 and on-premises configurations.
AWS Config is a fully manageable service that gives you an AWS resource inventory; configuration history, and configuration change notifications to help with security and governance. Config Rules allow you to create rules that check the configuration of AWS resources recorded by AWS Config automatically.
Get the complete AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Course Outline here!
Logging and Monitoring
Feedback is essential in order to facilitate this. A robust monitoring, alerting, and auditing infrastructure allows developers and operations teams to collaborate closely and transparently.
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch metrics collect data from AWS services such as Amazon EC2 instances; moreover, Amazon EBS volumes, and Amazon RDS DB instances automatically. These metrics can then be organised into dashboards and alarms; or events can be created to trigger events or Auto Scaling actions.
X-Ray on AWS
AWS X-Ray assists developers in the analysis and debugging of live, distributed applications; such as those built with a microservices architecture. You can use X-Ray to understand how your application and its underlying services are performing in order to identify and troubleshoot the source of performance issues and errors.
Amazon Web Services CloudTrail
It is critical to understand who is making changes to your infrastructure in order to embrace the DevOps principles of collaboration; communication, and transparency. The AWS CloudTrail service provides this transparency in AWS. All AWS interactions are manageable via AWS API calls, which AWS CloudTrail monitors and logs. All log files generated are saved in an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. Amazon S3 server-side encryption is used to encrypt log files (SSE). Furthermore, All API calls are logged; whether they are made directly by a user or by an AWS service on their behalf.
Control of Versions
AWS provides secure and highly scalable Git repositories in the cloud for version control.
AWS CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that allows businesses to easily host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. furthermore, CodeCommit can be in use to securely store anything from source code to binaries, And it integrates with your existing Git tools.
Platform as a Service (PAAS)
Deploy web applications without having to provision and manage infrastructure or the application stack.
Additionally, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a simple service for deploying and scaling web applications and services written in Java,.NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on well-known servers like Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
Simply upload your code, and Elastic Beanstalk will handle the rest, including capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain complete control over the AWS resources that power your application and have unlimited access to the underlying resources.
