Technology is something that rapidly evolves and aims only to grow in the future. Compared to the past years, the amount of change this field has seen in the last two decades is much larger. AWS and DevOps are two significant technologies in the field of
Cloud Computing, a popular IT domain. This blog talks about these two technologies and the benefits they bring when put together.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of the fields of development and organization. It involves several practices, philosophies, technologies, and tools that help companies increase their ability to offer services and applications with improved products at a high pace.
This velocity was earlier difficult to achieve with traditional methods of infrastructure management and software development. DevOps brings the two departments together, providing a responsive, accurate, and faster software delivery experience to customers.
AWS DevOps Engineers are System Administrators in organizations who have some programming skills. They are responsible for the following organizational tasks:
- Application and infrastructure planning
- Creating CI/CD pipelines and maintaining them
- Monitoring development security
- Automating the development process
What is AWS?
Over the years, Cloud Computing has become extremely popular, and there are numerous cloud providers available today, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, IBM Cloud Services, etc. AWS or Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform developed by
one of the leading organizations in the world, Amazon. It offers numerous services and products that help in storing, accessing, and editing data, along with various other similar features. AWS and other cloud providers make it easy to store large volumes
of business data online with security rather than having to store them in physical spaces, saving tons of cost and space.
What is AWS DevOps?
AWS DevOps is a technology invented for companies to be capable of implementing the concepts of DevOps with the help of various services, features, and tools offered by this cloud platform. AWS offers a range of services that are flexible and designed to
allow organizations to develop and deliver their products more reliably and faster with the help of AWS and DevOps. The features offered by AWS DevOps simplify several business processes, such as monitoring applications, managing the infrastructure, automating
the process of software release, deploying the codes of applications, etc.
About AWS DevOps
This technology allows organizations to perform operations such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), making it possible for them to store the source code for applications and record their versions while automatically developing, deploying,
and testing the applications on AWS or in on-premises environments.
As mentioned earlier, AWS DevOps is a field of Cloud Computing, and the three main parts of Cloud Computing are:
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Monitoring DevOps Tools
Load Balancing
It is a virtual network appliance that allows organizations to distribute the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) traffic across numerous resources of web servers that can be increased or decreased based on the demands. AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) can
help automate this process.
Amazon Security Group
With the rapid increase in the hacking of organizational data and other confidential and personal information, security has become a top priority. Amazon security groups protect a company’s data by acting as a network firewall. Users need to specify the
respective authorized ports, protocols, source IP ranges, etc. to gain access to EC2. All the users can give one instance of EC2 to numerous security groups and all of them further deliver authorized traffic to the respective instances.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront delivers dynamic, static, and streaming websites, along with other content. It can be easily used with other cloud platforms and can be optimized to operate with other components of AWS as well.
ElastiCache
It helps in managing the memory cache of the cloud. This web service caches data that is used frequently, allowing companies to reduce the tension on services and increase their scalability and performance.
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3)
AWS S3 is a method of Amazon that allows professionals to access, back up, and store the assets of the web application, like data. Amazon S3 offers an interactive and user-friendly user interface to manage large volumes of data as and when required over
the Internet. You can save the data as objects in buckets and later access, modify, read, and update these objects as required.
Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS)
Amazon RDS service of Amazon simplifies various processes of a cloud-based relational database, such as its setup, scalability, and operations. This service helps in managing the daily functions and processes of database administration. Further, it offers
cost-efficient and scalable methods of working with RDS. Presently, RDS supports Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, and many such databases.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Amazon EBS allows users to manage application logs and data partitions. Further, it offers long-term persistence and fast access. EBS volumes are best while working with primary storage for file systems, databases, and other applications that require access
to raw and unformatted updates.
Amazon Auto-scaling
AWS Auto-scaling builds server groups that can be reduced and expanded by users based on the demands and requirements.
It is now time to understand the job role and description of certified AWS DevOps Engineers in an organization.
AWS DevOps Tools
AWS DevOps provides a range of tools that help in developing software in the cloud. Let’s look at some of the most popular and commonly used AWS DevOps tools.
AWS CodeStar
AWS CodeStar is an extremely useful tool that helps in implementing DevOps on the AWS platform. It offers a user-friendly and interactive interface that enables users to create and deploy their applications on AWS effortlessly. Besides, it allows the users
to set up the whole continuous delivery toolchain within a few minutes. If you wish to keep your focus on running applications on AWS, then this is the best tool as it is a one-stop tool to manage the complete life cycle of a software product.
AWS CodePipeline
This tool allows one to automate the continuous-delivery program code to get rapid and accurate updates. This helps enhance the processes such as the development, testing, and deployment of applications.
AWS CodeBuild
CodeBuild is a completely managed service that allows professionals to compile the source code for the application, test the application, and prepare a software package that can be deployed. It allows users to develop and test the code through continuous
scaling.
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS CodeDeploy automates the process of software deployment to local environments or cloud services, such as AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2, etc. This tool prevents downtime during the process of deployment.
AWS Cloud Development Kit
AWS Cloud Development Kit is an open-source framework used for software development. It makes use of known programming languages to model and provision the resources for cloud applications.
AWS DevOps Use Cases
The most popular use cases and best practices of AWS DevOps in organizations.
Infrastructure Automation
The aim is to provide quality code by automatically testing the code at regular intervals.
CI/CD
CI/CD pipelines are the foundation of DevOps. CI or continuous integration helps in developing and continuously validating business projects by making changes in the code regularly and updating the same. Continuous delivery (CD), on the other hand, takes
CI forward as it helps in deploying the code automatically in the production environment.
Infrastructure as a Code
This allows organizations to manage the resources of the AWS cloud through template files that can be read by humans and consumed by machines. The AWS CloudFormation tool is the best resource for users developing the AWS cloud.
Collaboration and Communication
All the departments of an organization should be on board with unique ideas for the project in hand and need to be well-informed. Moreover, there should be a platform where users can share valuable feedback that can help make improvements in the project.
Logging and Monitoring
All the activities in the system must be stored and monitored to ensure that events occur at the right time and the errors if any must be rectified timely.
AWS Device Farm
Think of a service that lets you interact with a device through your web browser in real-time. The AWS Device Farm is typically an application testing service that helps you to test and interact with your Android, iOS, and web apps in real-time, physical
phones, and tablets that are hosted by Amazon Web Services.
AWS DevOps Vs Azure DevOps
Infrastructure
AWS DevOps: AWS methods have always been ahead in terms of services in the innovation graph and offer comprehensive services for storage and compute
Azure DevOps: Azure started off as a PaaS and made it easy for professionals to develop apps without worrying about the servers they run on
Service Integration
AWS DevOps: It enables users to integrate and implement various AWS services, viz., S3, EC2, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Azure DevOps: It offers various services, such as SQL databases, Azure App Services, Azure VM, etc., and eases the process of SDLC using Jenkins and other tools
Key Feature
AWS DevOps: AWS DevOps automates the entire code deployment using AWS Services
Azure DevOps: Azure DevOps consists of Kanban workflows, boards, and a large extension ecosystem
Benefits of AWS DevOps
Some of the key advantages of using AWS for DevOps.
Easy to Work with
For companies to use AWS services, they must have an account set up on AWS. Further, it is important that they install the software so that they can use the required services. The scalable nature of AWS easily allows the DevOps department of the organization
to work on numerous instances. This unique feature that DevOps provides allows organizations to distribute the necessary resources instantly for app and cloud projects. AWS, further, helps them allocate the resources properly and offers an interactive user
experience.
Facilitates Collaboration
DevOps aims to provide services that help in facilitating communication and collaboration among the various departments of a company. While facilitating cross-organization communication, AWS comes in handy. AWS services like access and identity management
allow the DevOps team members to set up the level of access, permission, and policies for different stakeholders of the project. Moreover, AWS helps users in viewing and sharing the progress in DevOps in real-time over a secured network environment.
Process Automation
One of the significant roles of a DevOps professional is to automate specific tasks, and this can be done with the help of AWS CodeDeploy. This AWS service allows organizations to automate a range of manual tasks, such as deployment and testing. Further, AWS
Management Console and AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) helps in managing and automating numerous processes, along with offering reports on achieving the expected results. Besides, with AWS, there is no need for companies to set up and install the infrastructure
as it is done automatically.