Four Ways AWS Benefits DevOps Teams

DevOps (the nifty moniker for “development and operations”) is an essential strategy that’s become a must for all-sized companies looking to reap the benefits of optimized performance, organization, and quality assurance. Statistics show that DevOps adoption has proven particularly successful for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with 31 percent currently utilizing DevOps across the entire organization – a feat that no large enterprise has been able to achieve, according to ECS Digital.

As more SMEs continue to integrate DevOps strategies into their daily workloads, they can turn to certain technologies to propel a successful adoption. Among them, the cloud – and Amazon Web Services (AWS), in particular. Let’s take a look at how pairing DevOps with AWS can help SMEs significantly increase their operational agility.

1: Scalability

AWS environments are provisioned with scalability in mind, enabling DevOps teams to support a single instance or quickly and easily expand to thousands of instances. This allows the proper resources to be allocated, almost instantly, for their latest cloud site or app project.

Unlike traditional data centers or hosting services, AWS has massive flexibility for resource allocation. A cloud project can scale vertically (i.e. add more resources to one instance) or horizontally (by provisioning resources across the globe via different AWS regions and locations). This allows the DevOps team to target their resource allocation and provide users with a fast and responsive experience on their cloud-powered site or application.

2: Automation

The ability to automate certain processes is a cornerstone of a DevOps engineer’s workload. That’s when AWS CodeDeploy comes in handy. CodeDeploy is a service that makes it easy for teams to automate manual tasks, testing workflows, and even deployments. The automated tasks can all be managed through the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI, which can also provide detailed reports for the success and timing of the automations.

The power of CodeDeploy can have ramifications across an entire organization. Scaling up and down is suddenly no longer a manual, time-consuming affair when there’s a massive traffic spike. Downtime can be avoided by utilizing automated instance provisioning scripts, avoiding the loss of income and/or users. That’s in addition to the improvements for the DevOps team, such as reduced and more tailored workloads that allow team members to focus on other mission-critical tasks.

3: Better Collaboration

One of the best aspects of a solid DevOps strategy is the ability to bring previously siloed departments together. In order to support this level of cross-organization collaboration, these teams must have ways to securely share their work.

AWS Identify and Access Management enables a DevOps team to set individual permissions and policies for each project stakeholder while supporting granular control over works in progress. Users are able to share and view DevOps work in real time and within a secure environment.

“Finally, support becomes a shared responsibility and as teams become exposed and integrated to all ideas, identifying and fixing problems is able to be spread across teams, reducing one of the core drivers of the frustration and anger from ‘Ops to Devs’ in the siloed model,” as Bulletproof cloud services contributor, Nick Beagley, pointed out.

4) AWS Developer-Specific Tools: CodePipeline and CodeBuild

AWS also provides features that were specifically designed with DevOps teams in mind:

• CodePipeline: This continuous integration and delivery service is an essential for any developer using AWS. CodePipeline allows new features and updates to be delivered in the most streamlined way possible, thanks to this tool’s building, testing, deploying, and release process model capabilities. Best of all, CodePipeline can also integrate with other third-party service like GitHub, creating a more unified DevOps rollout.
• CodeBuild: This build service eliminates the need to provision and manage servers for the purpose of building and testing code. DevOps teams can use CodeBuild to compile their source code, efficiently test and create software packages poised for deployment. CodeBuild works in a continuous and concurrent manner, ensuring that items aren’t stuck in a queue and that everything remains on schedule.

DevOps teams can take their productivity and workflows to the next level by leveraging some of AWS’ most efficient and powerful services.

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