Although the retail arm of Amazon has been an undoubted success, what has really driven much of Amazon’s growth over the past few years is its DevOps with AWS platform. It’s an impressively flexible system, with subscribers paying for anything from a single AWS virtual computer all the way to massive cluster computing agreements. As a result, it’s easy to scale accordingly compared to building a physical server farm itself.
Ease of use and security are two common factors for Amazon having just under a third of the cloud computing market.
As a result, it’s vital to understand how to integrate DevOps onto AWS.
DevOps With AWS: The Basics
Amazon makes it easy to integrate DevOps into AWS in many respects. The numerous white papers on the subject from Amazon itself are always worth a read, providing a start for developers of all calibers. The October 2020 Introduction to DevOps on AWS paper really focuses on the factors that developers must consider to deliver applications. This includes issues of continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and even monitoring and logging.
The more you know, the better you can deliver DevOps with AWS.
Forget Server Management
Public clouds, such as AWS, mean that you do not have to manage servers. That’s a huge workload off your mind, allowing you to focus on building, testing, and deploying your software. However, you still have to work with servers and understand how they integrate with your application. The difference is that you can do everything all at once — try spinning up a thousand private servers individually, and you eventually run into problems. Do the same on AWS, and it’s simple.
DevOps With AWS Services Are Vital
So as anyone who deals with AWS regularly knows that there are dozens of different services out there. You have things like AWS CodePipeline, which helps automate your release pipelines, and you can integrate it with something like GitHub. However, four really useful services are Lambda, CloudFormation, CodeStar, and CloudWatch.
- AWS Lambda lets you run code without servers. This means you lower costs by only paying for the resources the code uses. It’s often known as a serverless computing platform.
- AWS CloudFormation lets you describe your resources and dependencies so that you can launch it as a stack. In addition, you can treat stacks as single units as required, which makes administration much simpler. It works across different accounts and even regions.
- AWS CodeStar makes it easy to start leasing code quickly as you can set up your continuous delivery toolchain within a few minutes. It’s a unified user interface that helps you manage software development activities across the board.
- Amazon CloudWatch is a tool for monitoring and observing that helps DevOps engineers to ensure sites run reliably, providing actionable data regarding system-wide performance changes, operational health, and resource utilization. It basically lets you spot issues before they arise.
There are other tools, of course, ranging from AWS Proton and Fargate (containerization) to CodeDeploy (code automation). All of these are heavily documented and can play a crucial part in DevOps.
AWS Lambda: Cheat Time
Code is code, and there are multiple problems that come up time and time again. As a result, there is a comprehensive gallery of code on various sites to solve problems — GitHub is probably the most lampooned. However, AWS Lambda has a multitude of common solutions to problems, and these are called blueprints. There are also a few wizards that can help with common issues with different languages, including C#, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, and Go.
In some cases, there are entire sections of code that allow you to drag-and-drop major functions into your application. This caused the repository. Basically, all you need to do is configure a few function values and then put them in.
When it comes to DevOps with AWS, it’s surprisingly easy to get started. Great documentation, a well-established code base and solid answers to a lot of major problems make your life much simpler. If you have a project that involves DevOps with AWS, talk to Sonatafy today. We have the expertise to get your project off the ground, with scalable solutions that can involve everything from staff augmentation to completely managed product delivery services.
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