Automation And Tooling – Introduction To DevOps On AWS

AWS Stands for Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform provided by Amazon. It offers computing, storage, networking, etc. services to organizations or individual users over the Internet. organizations can host their servers, databases, and other networking needs on AWS without worrying about managing them manually, all the setup required to handle such needs is completely managed by AWS. It is considered the most popular cloud provider. AWS has large and growing customers ranging from startups to large public sector organizations.

What Is DevOps?

Let’s understand DevOps by a simple example, suppose there is a team of developers and testers who are working on a project developers forwarded developed applications to testers, and now testers will test this application against some custom test cases. if they find any bug then they will again revert it to developers here this cycle will always happen again and again which will increase the application deployment time cause developers do not understand how testing works and testers don’t know how development works. so to bridge this gap and to reduce application development time DevOps Concept was introduced which is a mixture of this development and operations team

DevOps is not a new technology or a new language, it is just a method that is used in the software development life cycle (SDLC). In DevOps Development team and operations team work together to achieve a common goal.

What Is AWS DevOps?

As discussed earlier we are now familiar with DevOps. Now we will going understand how DevOps is carried out in AWS. AWS offers collection of tools and services that allow organizations to apply DevOps methodologies efficiently in their development life cycle. many of the organizations from startups to even large enterprises prefer using DevOps on AWS because of simple to use services provided for DevOps by AWS.

By using AWS’s scalable and flexible infrastructure along with DevOps practices, organizations can improve their software delivery, and deliver better application to customer..

AWS DevOps Architecture

• DevOps on AWS goes through various stages following diagram shows overall architecture of DevOps on AWS

Note: It also includes additional tools which are not on AWS but can be used in DevOps practices.

1. Infrastructure as Code: AWS provides DevOps service CloudFormation through which organization can automate their cloud infrastructure, with the help of CloudFormation templates they can automatically launch their application servers, store the data into storage like S3. CloudFormation’s IaC helps to deploy application in multiple regions simultaneously.

2. Continuous Integration: CI can be defined as continuously adding code changes into a shared repository AWS Supports such important Devops practice by providing services like AWS CodeCommit for version control, AWS CodeBuild for building code, and AWS CodePipeline for automating the build, test, and deployment phases.

3. Continuous Delivery: CD can be defined as delivering deployment to the users time to time by continuous changes in the versions of an application. AWS services such as AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeDeploy helps to implement this DevOps method to the organizations.

4. Monitoring: When an application is deployed successfully it is necessary to monitor the application continuously to ensure that its working as intended, if any risks are associated with an application can quickly identified. AWS offers service like CloudWatch to monitor the performance of application.

5. Security and Compliance: When it comes to application, security is a paramount for any company and while working on devops AWS offers various security services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and AWS Config to implement best DevOps security practices.

6. Serverless Architecture: AWS also offers to organizations to create serverless architectures to their DevOps practices With Lambda, DevOps teams can automate tasks, respond to the events, and build scalable, event-oriented architectures without the need to manage infrastructure.

7. Deployment Options: AWS offers various deployment sevices depending on customer’s needs. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provide container orchestration for organizations which uses microservices architectures.

The DevOps process on AWS typically follows these steps:

• Developers commit code changes to the Git repository.
• CodePipeline service identifies the changes and tells CodeBuild to build and test the code.
• If the build and tests from CodeBuild are successful, CodePipeline deploys the respective application to the specific deployment option which was selected (e.g., Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or EC2).
• CloudWatch monitors the deployed application and logs any issues or metrics.
• CloudFormation manages the underlying infrastructure resources required for the application.

AWS DevOps Tools And Best Practices

The following are the popular AWS DevOps that are discussed as per the Workflow categorization:

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• AWS CloudFormation: Popular Infrastructure as a code (Iac) tool provided by Amazon web services (AWS) that allows users to automate the provisioning of AWS services such as EC2, Amazon S3, AWS Lamda, etc
• AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit): Allows Developers writing infrastructure as code using familiar programming languages like Python, Java.

Source Code Management

• AWS CodeCommit: A secure source code management service that hosts Git repositories.
• AWS CodeBuild: A continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages which ready for deployment.
• AWS CodePipeline: A continuous delivery service that automates the release process of application by automating the steps required to release changes in software’s code.
• AWS CodeDeploy: Automates application deployments across various AWS services like Amazon EC2 and ECS.

Deployment Options

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) And Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS): Enables container orchestration for deploying microservices architectures.
• AWS OpsWorks and AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Simplify deployments for specific application types, like Java or Node.js.

Monitoring

• Amazon CloudWatch: Provides monitoring of your applications and infrastructure, offers what is happening with application’s performance, health etc.

Advantages Of DevOps On AWS

The following are the advantages of DevOps on AWS:

• Increased Speed: DevOps on AWS fastens development and deployment processes through automation and CI/CD pipelines, allowing faster delivery of applications and features.
• Increased Scalability: AWS infrastructure easily scales to incorporate increasing workloads on application, allowing organizations to adapt to changing demands.
• Cost Efficiency: The pay-as-you-go model of AWS is highly beneficial to organizations which are working on DevOps Enabled application with high computing and managing needs.
• Easy Infrastructure Management: AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, because of this developers or organizations can only focus DevOps practices without worrying about infrastructure.

Disadvantages Of DevOps On AWS

The following are the disadvantages of devops on AWS:

• Limited Customization: While AWS offers a range of services, some organizations might require specific devops functionalities or customization options that may not available on AWS.
• Vendor Lock-in: Building or creating a DevOps pipeline which is completely developed on AWS may result into vendor lock-in, making organizations or individual users difficult to migrate to other cloud providers such as Azure, Google Cloud Platform in the future.
• Limited Control: While AWS offers extensive control over resources, some organizations might want more control over their infrastructure that might not be achievable within the AWS environment.

Conclusion

In this Post, We have gone through easy explanation of what DevOps actually is and how it simplifies development operations of an application. also introduced with how AWS helps in applying devops practices to organizations.

Automation And DevOps On AWS – FAQ’s

What Role Does AWS Codebuild Play In The CI/CD Pipeline?

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces deployable artifacts.

What Are Some Key AWS Services For Automation In DevOps?

key services are AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda.

How Can AWS Cloudwatch Logs Be Utilized In A Devops Environment?

AWS CloudWatch Logs allows DevOps teams to collect, monitor, and analyze log data from AWS resources and applications.

How Does Automation Help In Devops On AWS?

Automation helps streamline processes, increase efficiency, and reduce manual errors in DevOps workflows on AWS.