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 also software development life cycles. Today’s blog focuses on one such approach known as DevOps and AWS DevOps in particular.
This blog focuses on the following points:
- What Is DevOps?
- What Is AWS?
- AWS DevOps
So let us get started then, shall we?
What Is DevOps?
In these fast-paced times, we see more emphasis being laid on faster delivery of software deployment. Because in order to stay competitive in the market the companies are expected to deploy quality software in defined timelines. Hence the roles of software developers and system admin 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. So this delay may put pressure on the developer because he is forced re-adjust his dependent activities like:
- Pending code
- Old code
- New products
- New features
Also when the product is put into the production environment, the product may exhibit 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 administrators team is responsible for maintaining and assuring the uptime of the production environment. Now as the company invests time and money in more products and services, the number of servers, admins have to take care of also keep growing.
This gives rise to more challenges because the tools that were used to manage the earlier amount of servers may not be sufficient to cater to the needs of the 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 to handle 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 the operations side of the responsibility wall. As you may come to realize that none of the sides can be held, 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. To simply define it with jargon terms. DevOps is the process of integrating Developers and Operations teams in order to improve collaborations and productivity. This is done with the 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 take weeks to deploy. So this was about DevOps. Let us move ahead and understand what is 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 or more precisely 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. These two points below talk about the significance of the cloud:
Fact: Netflix is a popular video streaming service that 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, that is when they realized the need for highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud. Came in cloud services, and since then their growth has been off the charts.
Since every company has started to adopt cloud services. It can be claimed that the cloud is the talk of the town. And AWS, in particular, is the leading cloud service provider in the market. Let us understand more about it.
AWS
AWS which stands for Amazon Web Services is an ‘Amazon.com‘ subsidiary that offers cloud-computing services at very affordable rates, therefore making its customer base strong from small-scale companies like Pinterest (which has just 5 employees) to big enterprises like D-Link.
What Is Cloud Computing?
It is the use of remote servers on the internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or personal computer.
There are basically 3 categories in cloud computing:
IaaS(Infrastructure as a service)
- IaaS gives you a server in the cloud(virtual machine) that you have complete control over.
- In Iaas, you are responsible for managing everything from the Operating System on up to the application you are running.
PaaS(Platform as a Service)
- With PaaS, you have a combination of flexibility and simplicity.
- Flexible because it can be tailored to the application’s needs.
- Simple as no need for OS maintenance, versions, patches.
SaaS(Software as a Service)
- A software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications.
- Instead of installing and maintaining software, you simply access it via the Internet.
- Automatic updates reduce the burden on in-house IT staff.
AWS DevOps
AWS is one of the best cloud service providers and DevOps on the other hand is the ‘need of the hour’ implementation of the software development lifecycle. The following reason makes 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. Hence you can leverage the AWS Security and management features. 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 like Sumo Logic etc
AWS CodePipeline
CodePipeline is one popular feature from AWS which highly 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 allows you to make it easy to use AWS DevOps together.
All these reasons make AWS one of the best platforms for DevOps. This pretty much brings us to the end of this AWS DevOps blog. Please let me know in the comments section below, whether you liked the blog or not.
I hope you enjoyed this What is Cloud Computing Tutorial. If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series that will explain the various other aspects of Cloud.
1. AWS Tutorial
2. AWS EC2
3. AWS Lambda
5. AWS S3
6. AWS Console
7. AWS RDS
9. AWS Fargate
10. Amazon Lex
11. Amazon Lightsail
12. AWS Pricing
13. Amazon Athena
14. AWS CLI
15. AWS vs Azure
17. On-premise vs Cloud computing
19. How To Restore EC2 From Snapshot?
20. AWS CodeCommit
Originally published at https://www.edureka.co on January 30, 2018.
