DevOps on AWS with Cloud-Native Services

DevOps, a contraction of development and operations, is one of those grand, nebulous terms that seems to defy simple definition. It is therefore worth taking a moment to look at what exactly DevOps is as well as what it is not. Many consider DevOps to be a competitor to the older idea of Agile development, a usurper of sorts, creating a tension between the two and giving the false idea that you must choose one over the other. But in fact, they are not competitors, rather counterparts, and can be effectively used together.

Traditional software development methods fall victim to problems created by two major gaps in the process: between the operations and development teams, and between the development teams and the customer. Agile software development aims to ease the difficulties posed by the second gap, while the set of processes and methods known as DevOps aims to ease the first.

While it is very difficult to precisely define DevOps, three computer science researchers from CSIRO and the Software Engineering Institute have proffered the following definition: DevOps is “a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality.”

DevOps on AWS

There are innumerable ways in which AWS can assist your DevOps operations, but here are just a few concrete examples:

At Trianz, a trusted and renowned managed service provider, we pride ourselves on our expertise in facilitating digital evolution by leveraging cloud technologies such as AWS. As an Advanced Consulting Partner, Managed Service Provider, and global Strategic Go To Market Partner of AWS, Trianz is committed to driving business value for its clients through differentiated services powered by AWS. With our experience and know-how, your DevOps development can become faster and more efficient than ever.

• Use code to automate the configuration of your servers with AWS OpsWorks
  OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef (automation tools for configuration management, compliance and security, and continuous deployment) and Puppet (automation tools for infrastructure and application management). No need to worry about the underlying hardware or virtual resources: the platform manages this transparently.
• Create and manage the infrastructure required to run software on AWS
  As a free service, AWS customers have access to AWS CloudFormation, which automatically generates templates and stacks for software applications running on AWS. Templates define whatever is required to run the application. CloudFormation then builds a running instance, or “stack”, of the template, putting dependencies and data flows in the right order automatically.
• Oversee governance, compliance, operational auditing and risk auditing of your AWS account AWS CloudTrail is a service that executes the above. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure.
• Run code without provisioning or managing servers
  Cloud is all about paying only for the compute time that you consume. Why pay extra if there’s no code running? Lambda works for virtually any type of application or backend service—all with zero administration.
• Improve build performance and save time with AWS CodeBuild local caching
  AWS CodeBuild supports local caching, allowing you to persist intermediate build artifacts locally so they can be reused in later build runs. This can improve performance for projects with large source code repositories, projects that reuse many intermediate artifacts, projects with large Docker images, and projects with many source dependencies.
• Monitor your custom application metrics using Amazon CloudWatch Agent
  Using monitoring and operational data from both AWS resources and on-premises servers, Amazon CloudWatch can give you a global overview of the health of your infrastructure and application. By default, it stores many of your metrics and makes it possible for you to monitor and set an alert for metrics such as number of requests or CPU usage.
• Reach resolutions faster with Amazon CloudWatch’s Snapshot Graphs and alerts
  Automated alerts are a crucial feature of any automated monitoring solution. But with so much data, it can be difficult—to say the least—to identify the key issues. The faster you can determine how important the alert is, the faster you can reach resolution.

  An alert on its own does not provide enough context to accurately evaluate its importance. It must be correlated with data and metrics to truly understand what is occurring. CloudWatch’s Snapshot Graphs can be coupled with alerts to give you the data you need to quickly assess the priority of an alert and resolve issues sooner.

• Test and debug locally before shipping with AWS CodeDeploy
  Testing and debugging locally can speed up the iteration process, isolate potential issues, and facilitate code validation, and it can be done on any machine with the CodeDeploy agent. This way, you can reduce the monumental effort that complex deployments often take to get up and running.

At Trianz, a trusted and renowned managed service provider, we pride ourselves on our expertise in facilitating digital evolution by leveraging cloud technologies such as AWS. As an Advanced Consulting Partner, Managed Service Provider, and global Strategic Go To Market Partner of AWS, Trianz is committed to driving business value for its clients through differentiated services powered by AWS. With our experience and know-how, your DevOps development can become faster and more efficient than ever.