DevOps and Cloud transformation streamline development and operations, enhancing collaboration, efficiency, and scalability. By integrating continuous delivery and cloud infrastructure, businesses achieve faster deployment cycles and improved resource management. This synergy allows organizations to innovate rapidly while maintaining robust, reliable, and scalable systems.
With DevOps and Cloud, companies can swiftly and effectively respond to market demands, driving growth and ensuring a competitive edge in a fast-paced digital landscape.
DevOps Model Defined
DevOps combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools to increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
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How DevOps Works
Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these teams merge into a single unit where engineers work across the entire application lifecycle. This includes development, testing, deployment, and operations. Quality assurance and security teams may also integrate more tightly with development and operations throughout the application lifecycle. This integration is sometimes called DevSecOps.
These teams automate historically manual and slow processes, using a technology stack and tools that help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also enable engineers to independently accomplish tasks, further increasing a team’s velocity.
Benefits of DevOps
Speed
Move at high velocity to innovate faster, adapt to changing markets, and grow more efficient at driving business results.
Rapid Delivery
Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.
Reliability
Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes, delivering at a rapid pace while maintaining a positive user experience
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Scale
Operate and manage infrastructure and development processes at scale efficiently and with reduced risk.
Improved Collaboration
Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, emphasizing values like ownership and accountability.
Security
Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques.
Why DevOps Matters
Software and the Internet have transformed industries from shopping to banking. Software no longer merely supports a business but becomes an integral component of every part of it. Companies interact with customers through software delivered as online services or applications. They also use software to increase operational efficiencies, transforming every part of the value chain, such as logistics, communications, and operations.
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DevOps Cultural Philosophy
Transitioning to DevOps requires a change in culture and mindset. DevOps is about removing the barriers between two traditionally siloed teams, development and operations. With DevOps, these teams work together to optimize both the productivity of developers and the reliability of operations, striving to communicate frequently, increase efficiencies, and improve the quality of services they provide to customers.
DevOps Practices Explained
Key practices that help organizations innovate faster by automating and streamlining software development and infrastructure management processes include:
Communication and Collaboration: Use DevOps tooling and automation to establish collaboration by bringing together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations.
Continuous Integration: Developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run.
Continuous Delivery: Code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for release to production.
Microservices: Build applications as a set of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with other services through a well-defined interface.
Infrastructure as Code: Provision and manage infrastructure using code and software development techniques.
Monitoring and Logging: Capture and analyze data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure to understand how changes impact users.
DevOps Practices
The following are DevOps best practices:
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Microservices
- Infrastructure as Code
- Monitoring and Logging
- Communication and Collaboration
Below you can learn more about each particular practice.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. The key goals of continuous integration are to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
Learn more about continuous integration »
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. When continuous delivery is implemented properly, developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.
Learn more about continuous delivery and AWS CodePipeline »
Microservices
The microservices architecture is a design approach to build a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism, typically an HTTP-based application programming interface (API). Microservices are built around business capabilities; each service is scoped to a single purpose. You can use different frameworks or programming languages to write microservices and deploy them independently, as a single service, or as a group of services.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control and continuous integration. The cloud’s API-driven model enables developers and system administrators to interact with infrastructure programmatically, and at scale, instead of needing to manually set up and configure resources. Thus, engineers can interface with infrastructure using code-based tools and treat infrastructure in a manner similar to how they treat application code. Because they are defined by code, infrastructure and servers can quickly be deployed using standardized patterns, updated with the latest patches and versions, or duplicated in repeatable ways.
Learn to manage your infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation »
Configuration Management
Developers and system administrators use code to automate operating system and host configuration, operational tasks, and more. The use of code makes configuration changes repeatable and standardized. It frees developers and systems administrators from manually configuring operating systems, system applications, or server software.
Learn how you can configure and manage Amazon EC2 and on-premises systems with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager »
Learn to use configuration management with AWS OpsWorks »
Policy as Code
With infrastructure and its configuration codified with the cloud, organizations can monitor and enforce compliance dynamically and at scale. Infrastructure that is described by code can thus be tracked, validated, and reconfigured in an automated way. This makes it easier for organizations to govern changes over resources and ensure that security measures are properly enforced in a distributed manner (e.g. information security or compliance with PCI-DSS or HIPAA). This allows teams within an organization to move at higher velocity since non-compliant resources can be automatically flagged for further investigation or even automatically brought back into compliance.
Learn how you can use AWS Config and Config Rules to monitor and enforce compliance for your infrastructure »
Monitoring and Logging
Organizations monitor metrics and logs to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the experience of their product’s end user. By capturing, categorizing, and then analyzing data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure, organizations understand how changes or updates impact users, shedding insights into the root causes of problems or unexpected changes. Active monitoring becomes increasingly important as services must be available 24/7 and as application and infrastructure update frequency increases. Creating alerts or performing real-time analysis of this data also helps organizations more proactively monitor their services.
Communication and Collaboration
Increased communication and collaboration in an organization is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps. The use of DevOps tooling and automation of the software delivery process establishes collaboration by physically bringing together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations. Building on top of that, these teams set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis. This helps speed up communication across developers, operations, and even other teams like marketing or sales, allowing all parts of the organization to align more closely on goals and projects.
DevOps Tools
The DevOps model relies on effective tooling to help teams rapidly and reliably deploy and innovate for their customers. These tools automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers in control of the high velocity that is enabled by DevOps. AWS provides services that are designed for DevOps and that are built first for use with the AWS cloud. These services help you use the DevOps practices described above.
Next Steps
What Is DevOps and How Does It Work?
DevOps is a cross-disciplinary practice where application development (dev) works together with IT operations (ops) to improve product quality and accelerate time to market.
In a DevOps framework, developers and IT managers collaborate with experts in quality control, security, and support. The goal of this cooperative effort is to deliver code rapidly, in a seamless loop of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Cloud Computing and the DevOps Approach
When DevOps teams work in the cloud, they enjoy easier access to scalable hardware resources that help build, test, and deploy updates more quickly. This integration helps organizations remain responsive and competitive in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
Applying DevOps Benefits
In a DevOps framework, code is released faster and more frequently, allowing new features and bug fixes to reach the market sooner. This supports ongoing improvement and innovation for cloud applications, providing a positive user experience and a strong competitive advantage.
DevOps Principles and Framework
Security is a critical element of cloud computing, so it must be part of the DevOps framework. Integrating security capabilities into development processes and infrastructure is essential, often referred to as DevSecOps.
Adaptability: How to Begin Using DevOps in Your Team
According to collaboration software vendor Atlassian,2 there are four important guidelines for success in DevOps:
- Clarify roles and responsibilities. As developers work more closely with operations teams, “it’s time to understand who does what, plus identify any skill gaps,” Atlassian advises.
- Define working agreements. Atlassian also recommends that work styles and methods be defined up front. Examples might include a choice of project tracking tools or a pledge to limit after-hours communication.
- Anticipate risks. Analyze gaps and develop a contingency plan before beginning a new project so DevOps team members are prepared for issues that might arise.
- Conduct regular reviews. Engage the team in a retrospective analysis to encourage continuous improvement. Atlassian recommends monthly or even biweekly sessions.2
These strategies should be repeated with each new project and whenever there is a change in personnel that affects the DevOps team.
DevSecOps: Incorporating Security
Most cloud applications are updated frequently, fitting for continuous development processes. DevOps best practices enable this flexible work style, with cross-functional collaboration among teams who develop, test, deploy, monitor, and enhance products in an ongoing, iterative loop.
DevOps Tools
When implementing a DevOps practice in the cloud, it can be helpful to bring in new tools to help automate aspects of the development and deployment processes and to monitor active applications and infrastructure.
Forrester analysts recommend driving DevOps with a hybrid cloud to offer more tools and services to developers in a range of cloud development environments. This approach can help organizations to attract and retain talented developers while maintaining cost controls and operational efficiencies.
Cloud Optimization Tools for DevOps
DevOps practitioners looking to embrace the cloud can benefit from cloud optimization and management tools that gather data, make recommendations, or optimize code automatically. The tools help to improve performance and reduce the costs of cloud computing.
To increase DevOps’ effectiveness, Intel also provides a number of tuning guides for 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor based systems, which can be applied to the server platforms that power many popular instances in the public cloud.
DevOps Best Practices and Use Cases
Most cloud applications are updated frequently, so it is fitting for those applications to be developed in a continuous process. DevOps best practices enable that flexible work style with cross-functional collaboration among teams who develop, test, deploy, monitor, and enhance products in an ongoing, iterative loop.DBaaS Enables DevOps Analysis
Database as a Service (DBaaS) centralizes data and services in the cloud so DevOps teams can analyze application performance and monitor customer responses across multiple business units.