AWS DevOps: Introduction to DevOps on AWS

This is the story of how DevOps met AWS, and how their union can benefit you.

Technology has evolved over time. And with technology, the ways and needs to handle technology have also evolved. The last two decades have seen a great shift in computation and software development lifecycles. We have seen a huge demand for online DevOps training and AWS certification.

This blog focuses on the following points:

1. What Is DevOps?
2. What Is AWS?
3. AWS DevOps

What Is DevOps?

In these fast-paced times, we see more emphasis being placed on faster delivery of software deployment. In order to stay competitive in the market, companies are expected to deploy quality software in defined timelines. Thus, the roles of software developers and system admins have become very important. A lot of juggling of responsibilities happens between the two teams. Let us take a look at how do these individuals contribute to the deployment process.

A programmer or a software developer is responsible for developing the software. In simple words he is supposed to develop a software which has:

• New features
• Security Upgrades
• Bug Fixes

But a developer may have to wait for weeks for the product to get deployed which is also known as** “**time to market” in business terms. This delay may put pressure on the developer because he is forced to re-adjust his dependent activities like:

• Pending code
• Old code
• New products
• New features

When the product is put into the production environment, the product may show some unforeseen errors. This is because the developer writes code in the development environment, which may be different from the production environment.

Let us go ahead and take a look at this process from the operations point of view. Now the operations team or the system administrating team is responsible for maintaining and ensuring the uptime of the production environment. As the company invests time and money in more products and services, the number of servers admins have to take care of also keeps growing.

This gives rise to more challenges because the tools that were used to manage the previous number of servers may not be sufficient to cater to the needs of upcoming and growing number of servers. The operations team also needs to make slight changes to the code so that it fits into the production environment. Hence, the need to schedule these deployments accordingly also grows, which leads to time delays.

When the code is deployed, the operations team is also responsible for handling code changes or minor errors to the code. At times, the operation team may feel pressured and it may seem like developers have pushed their responsibilities to operations’ side of the responsibility wall. As you may come to realize, none of the sides can be held as the culprit.

What if these two teams could work together? What if they:

• Could break down silos?
• Share responsibilities?
• Start thinking alike?
• Work as a team?

Well, this is what DevOps does. It helps you get software developers and operations in sync to improve productivity. DevOps is the process of integrating development and operations teams in order to improve collaborations and productivity. This is done with automation of workflows and productivity and continuous measurement of application performance.

DevOps focuses on automating everything that lets them write small chunks of code that can be tested, monitored and deployed in hours, which is different from writing large chunks of codes that takes weeks to deploy. Let us move ahead and understand more about AWS and how it forms a crucial pairing with DevOps to give you AWS DevOps.

What Is AWS?

If you go back a decade, the scenario of handling and storing data was different. Companies preferred storing data using their private servers. However, with more and better usage of the internet, the trend has seen a paradigm shift for companies, as they are moving their data to the cloud. This enables companies to focus more on core competencies and stop worrying about storing and computation.

For example, Netflix is a popular video streaming service which the whole world uses today. Back in 2008, Netflix suffered a major database corruption, and for three days their operations were halted. The problem was scaling up, which is when they realized the need for a highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud. They began using cloud services, and since then their growth has been off the charts.

Gartner says that by 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy today. Interesting, isn’t it?

Almost every company has started to adopt cloud services, and AWS, in particular, is the leading cloud service provider in the market. Let us understand more about it.

AWS

Amazon’s AWS makes its customer base strong from small-scale companies to big enterprises like D-Link.

AWS DevOps

AWS is one of the best cloud service providers and DevOps is the popular and efficient implementation of the software development lifecycle, making AWS DevOps a highly popular amalgamation.

AWS CloudFormation

DevOps teams are required to create and release cloud instances and services more frequently than traditional development teams. AWS CloudFormation enables you to do just that. Templates of AWS resources like EC2 instances, ECS containers, and S3 storage buckets let you set up the entire stack without you having to bring everything together yourself.

AWS EC2

AWS EC2 speaks for itself. You can run containers inside EC2 instances, so you can leverage the AWS Security and management features, yet another reason why AWS DevOps is a lethal combo.

AWS CloudWatch

This monitoring tool lets you track every resource that AWS has to offer. Plus it makes it very easy to use third-party tools for monitoring.

AWS CodePipeline

CodePipeline is one popular feature from AWS which simplifies the way you manage your CI/CD toolset. It lets you integrate with tools like GitHub, Jenkins, and CodeDeploy, enabling you to visually control the flow of app updates from build to production.

Instances In AWS

AWS frequently creates and adds new instances to their list and the level of customization with these instances allow you to make it easy to use AWS DevOps together.

All these reasons make AWS one of the best platforms for DevOps.

Originally published by Vishal Padghan at https://dzone.com

#aws #devops

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How to Extend your DevOps Strategy For Success in the Cloud?

DevOps and Cloud computing are joined at the hip, now that fact is well appreciated by the organizations that engaged in SaaS cloud and developed applications in the Cloud. During the COVID crisis period, most of the organizations have started using cloud computing services and implementing a cloud-first strategy to establish their remote operations. Similarly, the extended DevOps strategy will make the development process more agile with automated test cases.

According to the survey in EMEA, IT decision-makers have observed a 129%* improvement in the overall software development process when performing DevOps on the Cloud. This success result was just 81% when practicing only DevOps and 67%* when leveraging Cloud without DevOps. Not only that, but the practice has also made the software predictability better, improve the customer experience as well as speed up software delivery 2.6* times faster.

3 Core Principle to fit DevOps Strategy

If you consider implementing DevOps in concert with the Cloud, then the

below core principle will guide you to utilize the strategy.

• It is indispensable to follow a continuous process, including all stages from Dev to deploy with the help of auto-provisioning resources of the target platform.
• The team always keeps an eye on major and minor application changes that can typically appear within a few hours of development to operation. However, the support of unlimited resource provisioning is needed at the stage of deployment.
• Cloud or hybrid configuration can associate this process, but you must confirm that configuration should support multiple cloud brands like Microsoft, AWS, Google, any public and private cloud models.

Guide to Remold Business with DevOps and Cloud

Companies are now re-inventing themselves to become better at sensing the next big thing their customers need and finding ways with the Cloud based DevOps to get ahead of the competition.

#devops #devops-principles #azure-devops #devops-transformation #good-company #devops-tools #devops-top-story #devops-infrastructure

What is AWS DevOps? - AWS DevOps Tutorial

AWS and DevOps are two of the most powerful technologies that can be of great use when combined together. This short blog on what is AWS DevOps is written in a way to help you get a clear idea of AWS, DevOps, and about the outcome when these two technologies become one. Later in the course of this blog, you will also learn briefly about the tools and technologies of AWS DevOps, its advantages and how AWS DevOps and Azure DevOps differ from each other. Get ready to learn in-depth about the popular field in this tutorial.

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 in particular and the benefits they bring when put together.

#aws #cloud computing #devops #aws devops

DevOps Basics: What You Should Know

Once an industry term becomes popular, particularly in technology, it can be difficult to get an accurate definition. Everyone assumes that the basics are common knowledge and moves on. However, if your company has been discussing DevOps, or if you are interested in learning more about it, here are some basics you should know.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps refers to the restructuring of the traditional software application cycle to support Agile development and continuous improvement/continuous delivery. Traditionally, the software was created in large-scale, monolithic bundles. New features and new releases were created in large packages and released in full-scale, infrequent, major deployments.

This structure is no longer effective in the modern business environment. Companies are under increasing pressure to be agile. They must respond rapidly to changes in the business environment to remain competitive. Software development needs to be completely changed as a process so that incremental improvements can be made frequently – ideally, several times per day.

However, changing a development lifecycle completely requires major changes – in people and culture, process, and enabling tooling – to be effective. DevOps was created by the breaking down of cycles between development and operations, combining two separate functions in application development. These changes intend to support agile, secure, continuous improvements, and frequent releases.

#devops #devops adoption #devops benefits #q& #a #devops goals #devops migration #devops questions

Measuring DevOps Metrics: A How-To Guide

DevOps is supposed to help streamline the process of taking code changes and getting them to production for users to enjoy. But what exactly does it mean for the process to be “streamlined”? One way to answer this is to start measuring metrics.

Why metrics are important to track

Metrics give us a way to make sure our quality stays the same over time because we have numbers and key identifiers to compare against. Without any metrics being measured, you don’t have a way to measure improvements or regressions. You just have to react to them as they come up.

When you know the indicators that show what condition your system is in, it lets you catch issues faster than if you don’t have a steady-state to compare to. This also helps when you get ready for system upgrades. You’ll be able to give more accurate estimates of the number of resources your systems use.

After you’ve recorded some key metrics for a while, you’ll start noticing places you could improve your application or ways you can reallocate resources to where they are needed more. Knowing the normal operating state of your system’s pipeline is crucial and it takes time to set up a monitoring tool.

The main thing is that you decide to watch some metrics to get an idea of what’s going on when you start the deploy process. In the beginning, it might seem hard to figure out what the best metrics for a pipeline are.

Figuring out which metrics are important to you

You can conduct chaos engineering experiments to test different conditions and learn more about which metrics are the most important to your system. You can look at things like, time from build to deploy, number of bugs that get caught in different phases of the pipeline, and build size.

Thinking about what you should measure can be one of the harder parts of the effectiveness of the metrics you choose. When you’re considering metrics, look at what the most important results of your pipeline are.

Do you need your app to get through the process as quickly as possible, regardless of errors? Can you figure out why that sporadic issue keeps stopping the deploy process? What’s blocking you from getting your changes to production with confidence?

That’s how you’re going to find those key metrics quickly. Running experiments and looking at common deploy problems will show you what’s important early on. This is one of the ways you can make sure that your metrics are relevant.

#devops #devops-principles #devops-tools #devops-challenges #devops-adoption-challenges #devops-adoption #continuous-deployment #continuous-integration

AWS Cost Allocation Tags and Cost Reduction

Bob had just arrived in the office for his first day of work as the newly hired chief technical officer when he was called into a conference room by the president, Martha, who immediately introduced him to the head of accounting, Amanda. They exchanged pleasantries, and then Martha got right down to business:

“Bob, we have several teams here developing software applications on Amazon and our bill is very high. We think it’s unnecessarily high, and we’d like you to look into it and bring it under control.”

Martha placed a screenshot of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing report on the table and pointed to it.

“This is a problem for us: We don’t know what we’re spending this money on, and we need to see more detail.”

Amanda chimed in, “Bob, look, we have financial dimensions that we use for reporting purposes, and I can provide you with some guidance regarding some information we’d really like to see such that the reports that are ultimately produced mirror these dimensions — if you can do this, it would really help us internally.”

“Bob, we can’t stress how important this is right now. These projects are becoming very expensive for our business,” Martha reiterated.

“How many projects do we have?” Bob inquired.

“We have four projects in total: two in the aviation division and two in the energy division. If it matters, the aviation division has 75 developers and the energy division has 25 developers,” the CEO responded.

Bob understood the problem and responded, “I’ll see what I can do and have some ideas. I might not be able to give you retrospective insight, but going forward, we should be able to get a better idea of what’s going on and start to bring the cost down.”

The meeting ended with Bob heading to find his desk. Cost allocation tags should help us, he thought to himself as he looked for someone who might know where his office is.

#aws #aws cloud #node js #cost optimization #aws cli #well architected framework #aws cost report #cost control #aws cost #aws tags