DevOps – Continuous Integration and Delivery/Deployment

AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely.

Access management

User groups
Users
Roles
Policies
Identity providers
Account settings

Access reports

Access analyzer
Archive rules
Analyzers
Settings
Credential report
Organization activity
Service control policies (SCPs)

AWS CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure.

Benefits and features:

• Fully managed
• Secure
• High availability
• Store Anything

AWS CodePipeline is a continuous integration and continuous delivery service for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. You can use CodePipeline to fully model and automate your software release processes.

The ELK Stack is a collection of three open-source products — Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. ELK stack provides centralized logging in order to identify problems with servers or applications. It allows you to search all the logs in a single place. It also helps to find issues in multiple servers by connecting logs during a specific time frame.

E stands for ElasticSearch: used for storing logs
L stands for LogStash : used for both shipping as well as processing and storing logs
K stands for Kibana: is a visualization tool (a web interface) which is hosted through Nginx or Apache

ElasticSearch, LogStash and Kibana are all developed, managed ,and maintained by the company named Elastic.

ELK Stack is designed to allow users to take data from any source, in any format, and to search, analyze, and visualize that data in real time.

A DevOps Engineer is an IT professional who works with software developers, system operators, and other production IT staff to administer code releases. DevOps should have hard and soft skills to communicate and collaborate with development, testing, and operations teams.

The DevOps approach needs frequent, incremental changes to code versions, requiring frequent deployment and testing regimens. Although DevOps engineers need to code occasionally from scratch, they must have the basics of software development languages.

A DevOps engineer will work with development team staff to tackle the coding and scripting needed to connect code elements, like libraries or software development kits.

DevOps should be used for large distributed applications such as eCommerce sites or applications hosted on a cloud platform. It should not be used in mission-critical applications like banks, power and other sensitive data sites. Such applications need strict access controls on the production environment, a detailed change management policy, and access control policy to the data centres.

DevOps helps Agile development teams implement continuous integration and continuous delivery, helping them get products to market faster.

Other important factors are: Predictability, Reproducibility, Maintainability, Time to market, Greater Quality, Reduced Risk, Resiliency, Cost Efficiency, Breaks larger code base into small pieces etc.

In traditional approaches, there are usually too many moving parts in the development cycle, making planning a very difficult task. DevOps relies on smaller continuous releases and automation by a dedicated team, which makes planning much easier. In traditional team has no clue about the progress of the Development team. The operations team develops a monitoring plan as per their understanding. In DevOps, the Operations team is completely aware of the developers’ progress. Operations teams interact with developers and jointly develop a monitoring plan that caters to IT and business needs.

• Before DevOps, the development and operation team worked in complete isolation.
• Testing and Deployment were isolated activities done after design-build. Hence they consumed more time than actual build cycles.
• Without using DevOps, team members spend a large amount of their time testing, deploying, and designing instead of building the project.
• Manual code deployment leads to human errors in production.
• Coding & operation teams have separate timelines and are not synch, causing further delays.

There is a demand to increase the rate of software delivery by business stakeholders. As per Forrester Consulting Study, Only 17% of teams can use delivery software quickly, proving the pain point.

DevOps is a software development and IT operations process that helps to improve the collaboration between developers and operators by automating the Deployment, configuration, monitoring, and management of applications.

Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more—hosted at a remote data center managed by a cloud services provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or bills them according to usage. — Source IBM

Cloud computing offers your business many benefits. It allows you to set up what is essentially a virtual office to give you the flexibility of connecting to your business anywhere, any time. With the growing number of web-enabled devices used in today’s business environment (e.g. smartphones, tablets), access to your data is even easier.

There are many benefits to moving your business to the cloud:

Reduced IT costs

Moving to cloud computing may reduce the cost of managing and maintaining your IT systems. Rather than purchasing expensive systems and equipment for your business, you can reduce your costs by using the resources of your cloud computing service provider. You may be able to reduce your operating costs because:

• the cost of system upgrades, new hardware and software may be included in your contract
• you no longer need to pay wages for expert staff
• your energy consumption costs may be reduced
• there are fewer time delays.

Scalability

Your business can scale up or scale down your operation and storage needs quickly to suit your situation, allowing flexibility as your needs change. Rather than purchasing and installing expensive upgrades yourself, your cloud computer service provider can handle this for you. Using the cloud frees up your time so you can get on with running your business.

Business continuity

Protecting your data and systems is an important part of business continuity planning. Whether you experience a natural disaster, power failure or other crisis, having your data stored in the cloud ensures it is backed up and protected in a secure and safe location. Being able to access your data again quickly allows you to conduct business as usual, minimizing any downtime and loss of productivity.

Collaboration efficiency

Collaboration in a cloud environment gives your business the ability to communicate and share more easily outside of the traditional methods. If you are working on a project across different locations, you could use cloud computing to give employees, contractors and third parties access to the same files. You could also choose a cloud computing model that makes it easy for you to share your records with your advisers (e.g. a quick and secure way to share accounting records with your accountant or financial adviser).

Flexibility of work practices

Cloud computing allows employees to be more flexible in their work practices. For example, you have the ability to access data from home, on holiday, or via the commute to and from work (providing you have an internet connection). If you need access to your data while you are off-site, you can connect to your virtual office, quickly and easily.

Access to automatic updates

Access to automatic updates for your IT requirements may be included in your service fee. Depending on your cloud computing service provider, your system will regularly be updated with the latest technology. This could include up-to-date versions of software, as well as upgrades to servers and computer processing power.

The IT industry may shout that cloud computing is the way of the future and that all businesses should move their IT to the cloud. The reality is that any IT solution should be investigated and planned, whether it’s within your office or accessed via the internet.  So, what factors will you need to consider?

The following guidelines address some of the pains that can be experienced with a hurried, unstructured move to cloud computing.

• Identify what you want in the cloud
• Confirm your ongoing costs & savings
• Confirm the flexibility
• Prove the Backup & Disaster Recovery plans
• Review your Infrastructure

Ultimately, cloud computing must deliver increased business benefits or reduce IT costs overall without reducing functionality, unless your business is prepared to make sacrifices to improve your bottom line.

Efficient Software Defined Storages are much more flexible and cost-effective than conventional storage systems. Therefore, they enable an on-premises infrastructure that can be even when all additional costs are included way cheaper in comparison to the public cloud solutions of the SaaS service providers.