Organizations are migrating to Cloud for cost benefits and ease of business. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are the main aspects to improve time to market for any application enhancement. DevOps for Cloud is an essential aspect. Let´s understand it.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of cultural best practices and tools. DevOps brings development and operation teams together. It helps organizations to improve and evolve their products at a faster pace. It also helps in better time to market for any product enhancement and the best user experience.
What are Amazon Cloud and AWS?
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is helping organizations to move their data and computing logic onto the Amazon cloud. Organizations are getting benefits from the unlimited storage and computation power of distributed cloud infrastructure. In simple words, the Cloud helps companies to use the internet to store and process data on remote servers and pay as per usage. Now companies can focus on their core functions.
Why is DevOps needed for AWS?
AWS provides over 200+ products and services like Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage), Amazon Lambda, etc., to help meet the organization’s need. It may become overhead to continuously build, test and deploy your application enhancements if you are using multiple products. To ease the job, AWS has come up with AWS DevOps services and tools. AWS DevOps services increase frequent production releases by automating various tasks like build, running technical and functional tests, deploying and testing in a non-prod environment, and finally promoting the artifacts to production.
What are the AWS DevOps services?
There are many DevOps services in AWS that helps in CI and CD. Few of them are
Infrastructure as a Code using AWS CloudFormation
DevOps team needs to frequently create AWS instances that should be the same as the existing ones. They can use AWS CloudFormation to create a template of AWS resources like EC2 instances, S3 storage bucket, etc. AWS CloudFormation helps to save infrastructure configuration as code.
Continuous Integration
DevOps team can use the following tools for continuous integration.
AWS CodeCommit
It is a highly scalable managed source control service. It provides the functionality of GIT that helps it to work with your existing tools.
AWS CodeBuild
It compiles the application code, runs tests, and creates deployment-ready artifacts. It avoids the need to have your build servers.
AWS CodeArtifact
It is a fully managed artifact repository. We can publish, store and retrieve artifacts for our applications. It can automatically fetch dependencies from the public artifact repositories through some configuration.
Continuous Delivery
AWS CodeDeploy
It automates and centrally manages the deployment of AWS services like EC2, Lambda on the Cloud. It makes use of different deployment strategies to avoid downtime for production deployment.
AWS Pipeline
Pipeline lets you visualize and model workflow steps for releasing your application. It means that it uses different continuous integration tools to build, test, and deploy your application. It also helps to integrate various tools like GIT repository, Jenkins, etc., and helps to visualize the workflow. We can configure to receive notification using Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service).
Amazon’s AWS DevOps services are making the CI and CD process efficient. Organizations are delivering enhanced user experience by rapidly releasing the changes to the production environment.
