Why are DevOps and the Cloud becoming two very different yet intertwined tools for businesses to utilize? What the benefits are to investing in the deployment of both these tools?
A world where development teams and production teams can work together in tangents. A world where information is available from anywhere, at any time – bringing remote teams to life. A world where businesses are able to easily automate, and promote development cycles for rapid deployment.
If we look at the business world 20-years ago, this world will have been a myth that existed only in a dream.
However, living in the digital era, this is the business world right now. So, believe it or not, DevOps and the Cloud are joined at the hip (or at least they should be.)
Through this article, we will explain exactly why DevOps and the Cloud are becoming two very different yet intertwined tools for businesses to utilize, and what the benefits are to investing in the deployment of both these tools.
The Game Is Staying the Same Really – Which Is Great
It’s no surprise that DevOps took the world by storm as it has in recent years. I mean, as a human race, we have always searched for ways to automate work and make life just that much easier.
Back in the industrial change, journalists were on a rave about machines automating work that was done in factories, and the benefits/downfalls of businesses investing in it. Today, we are talking about DevOps, which has very distinct similarities.
Why More Teams Are Using DevOps In the Clouds
Software development has always faced a singular, overwhelming challenge. Dealing with problems in real-time. Now, we are not saying that developers work in some alternate time-zone.
However, the process of developing, testing, deploying, and patching services takes time – it’s not something that can be rushed (or dev teams can say hello to countless bugs.)
This is where DevOps comes into the picture. Through improving the synergy between the development and operation departments of businesses, companies can help developers understand what problems are being faced, and create easier ways to debug blocks of code through the various DevOps tools.
On the other hand, operation teams can focus on their work, while still making sure that the needs of developers are handled as they come up. Which, in turn, helps create a continuous workflow, ensuring fast deployment, and efficient patch updates to remove any bugs.
So, now that we understand why Cloud and DevOps work like a tight-knit team, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of why it is a good idea to get your DevOps team to work through the Cloud.
4 Benefits of DevOps In the Cloud
1) Easy Automation
Regardless of what tools you decide to feature on your team, automation is still the key to success. The Cloud offers an environment where automation is welcomed. Which means it’s a more reliable, and robust system, which at the end of the day, means fewer tasks are wasting time – therefore, faster deployment to market.
DevOps teams actually have an arsenal of tools and activities that this can be used for. From server management to operation system management. As well as managing CI/CD pipelines, deployment, report generation, testing, and debugging.
2) Effective Monitoring
“Have you turned it off and on again?”
The problem is that without adequate monitoring procedures in place, finding issues can be a real pain in the neck. To put it mildly, which is another advantage of hosting DevOps in the Cloud.
Cloud providers always look for ways where they can offer a centralized collection of tools and services, including monitoring and reporting services.
How does this help?
Generally, cloud providers also offer alerts for their monitoring services, helping you identify problems before they have a chance to become a huge headache.
A prime example of this will be when dealing with a website that is running on AWS. Let’s say for some reason you get a large amount of traffic coming in compared to normal (Not a DDoS attack). Typically, it would keep climbing until eventually, the site crashes due to high-volume.
However, through integrating DevOps in the clouds, you can set up an EC2 and S3 load-balancer to handle the load. Of course, you would need to also set up alerts to keep tabs on everything, but it will still save a fortune in both resources, and time.
3) Rapid Deployment
The Cloud is famous for its rapid deployment. The only problem is setting it up individually is more than just a little bit challenging, which is where DevOps comes into the picture.
DevOps offers tools to help automate the process through click build tools that interact with the cloud service applications, eliminating any user-error.
4). Continuous Service Deployment and Delivery
DevOps is already well-known for its positive shift in production cycles. However, when you add Cloud to the picture, it becomes an entirely different story.
Teams working on the Cloud, generally have a pretty epic turnaround time on development cycles, which in turn also helps ensure the new code can be released into production more often and with fewer errors.
However, that’s just the start of the process. On top of this, there is also a massive decrease in the time it takes to collect data, and information to the time it takes to actually start developing products/software services, etc. As you can imagine, this has a rather crazy impact on the time it takes to deploy finished projects.
Conclusion
Of course, nothing in life is perfect. There are a few challenges that you will be facing when you try to implement DevOps in the Cloud. However, as you can see by the advantages in this article, at the end of the day – it will be more than worth it.
Blog contribution by Susan Ranford
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