Cloud DevOps Services and DevOps Consulting

Several AWS products help your business with DevOps. For example, continuous integration (CI) allows for improved developer productivity, easy finding and resolving bugs, and faster delivery of updates. Furthermore, with AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild, we can better build workflow and code changes every time developers commit their code.

Continuous Delivery (CD) allows automatic builds, testing, and push to production. When implemented correctly, your developers can rely on the workflow of a deployment-ready build artifact that is proven to comply with your standardised release process. Microservices allow serving enterprise applications by splitting functions into more manageable codebases. They are often HTTP API-based, making them ultralightweight and allowing for independent deployments instead of one monolith application.

AWS offers container service (Amazon ECS), which aids in launching thousands of containers by undertaking provisioning, compliance, and excellent governance. They go hand in hand working with your existing CI/CD tools. The advantage of using a container service is the ability to deploy in hybrid environments, batch processing of workloads, and easily scale services.

In conjunction with this, they also offer AWS Lambda, which allows for developing mini services deployed across AWS Infrastructure. With no servers to look after, it’s ideal for serving requests up to thousands per second and saving businesses money by charging only for compute time (Per millisecond). In addition, it allows your enterprise applications and services to be more event-driven and gain powerful ML insights adding to your product value. Microservices are triggered from custom events and scale limitlessly, making them powerful.

Another DevOps practice that AWS supports is Infrastructure as Code (IaC). For example, developers can code computing capacity provisioning and allow administrators to interact via AWS API to scale and configure resources. The engineers treat the infrastructure similarly to their codebase, quickly provision testing environments, and duplicate their setup to production in repeatable ways. The customers experience the latest and greatest software while your team patch and release version updates on the go. AWS CloudFormation is the name for such an offering where you can write code to provision servers across all AWS regions through simple operations. Automating, testing, and deploying infrastructure via templating and running Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) instances is easy.

Configuration management is another area AWS integrates well - Automating the operating system, host configuration, operational tasks, and code changes can be maintained using structured code. The code allows for a repeatable, standardised, and compliant way to deliver software quickly. AWS OpsWorks is a service for such a task where it uses managed instances of Chef and Puppet, which use code to automate the configuration of your servers, so they perform the same no matter the deployed server. This allows businesses to deploy while keeping compliant and secure continuously. Writing configuration code will also ensure that using Puppet to patch, update, and back up your servers automatically. AWS Systems Manager is another tool to use hand-in-hand to centralise operational data, automatically resolve application issues, and address any security-related events.

Finally, monitoring and logging capture important events generated by your infrastructure. Proactive monitoring allows identifying issues that may arise and addressing them before downtime. Active monitoring is essential as downtime costs businesses money and a bad reputation. You can always stay on top of things using real-time alerts and analysis. AWS CloudWatch is perfect for this as it lets you monitor all your AWS resources and applications hosted on-premises from one place. Collect metrics on EC2, EKS, Lambda and other services with tight integration. You can use machine learning to identify any anomalies in behaviour and have your team react proactively for peace of mind.

For example, CI/CD for Azure Virtual Machines allows you to utilise world-class cloud hosting on Windows or Linux. The programming languages that make up your business’s applications and services do not matter. They can be in ASP.Net, PHP, Java, Node.js, or others. We can help you configure it to push changes to the provisioned computing capacity easily.

Similarly, you can use CI/CD to push application code changes straight to the Azure Apps service allowing your business to deliver significant value to your customers. You can also configure Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) with dynamic policy controls, feedback loops and ongoing monitoring with real-time observability. Configure your build and release pipelines for multiple environments and easily apply audit and compliance configurations using the Azure Pipelines product. Automate the workflow using Github Actions which tightly integrates with Microsoft Azure Ecosystem. Azure simplifies the use of Jenkins by hosting it to help extend your configuration and help in creating fast and repeatable deployments using Azure Spinnaker.

Increased communication and collaboration is key to any business success and an essential aspect of DevOps practices. To help align with company goals and projects, development teams can use communication channels, chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis. Azure facilitates this through Azure Boards to help define, assign, and track tasks. In addition, it allows better management of backlogs, creating custom dashboards to follow the project’s progress, and gaining better analytical insights and reports into team and project progress.

Github is the most popular solution for code repositories. It allows easy versioning of applications so the teams can work on a reliable codebase that is current and up to date. Its features include code and issue tracking, code review facilitation, continuous integration tools, and hundreds of apps from GitHub Marketplace to fulfil any need. It is also for secure collaboration and sharing of code and tightly integrates with other tools. Azure Repos add to that in terms of flexibility and limitless scaling for large and small code repositories.

Infrastructure as code allows developers to code their way into provisioning various computing instances provided by Azure in various regions worldwide. Azure Blueprints product will enable you to define your cloud resources and capacity requirements descriptively and then let you deploy those resources safely, repeatably, and reliably, all of which you can administer and govern easily.

Additionally, using OpenSource tools like HashiCorp Terraform and Ansible means your team can work with tools they would have used in the past without having them learn a new set of code declarations. Instead, they can bring their knowledge in the field to work in a few minutes as they are fully supported to work with provisioning Azure resources globally. In conjunction with this, Azure works well with popular configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet to your entire fleet of computing instances. As a result, it is easy to enforce desired machine states, roll out company-specific configuration updates, and automate unexpected changes and issues. Furthermore, performing these actions using these tools allows for rollbacks to reverse changes effortlessly.

Capturing logs generated by your applications and services gives you the ability to stay ahead by continuous monitoring and using ML to gain actionable insights. You can configure actionable alerts across a range of Azure services you use through configuring Azure Monitor. It allows collection, querying, and analysis of logs to help mitigate issues and prevent downtime. Additionally, Azure offers container monitoring to quickly implement with the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

You can provision these offerings in multiple regions across the globe, and they are ever-expanding. Google Cloud DevOps capabilities are ever-growing, making it easier to adopt CI/CD processes fully when automating the software development lifecycle. Some of their key achievements include increasing the speed of deployments, with statistics showing teams deploying 973x more frequently and 6750x more speedily. The speed of recovery from incidents are just as significant - nearly 6570x faster and fail rates that are three times lower. They are also big on security, helping high-performing teams achieve a 50% reduction in security-related incidents. Their team, DORA - DevOps Research and Assessment, identified four key metrics that indicate software delivery performance in businesses and found four key metrics that Google focuses on improving. The four metrics are deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore services, and change failure rates. They based their report on open source projects across Github and Gitlab repositories.

Cloud Build fits into the CI/CD suite, allowing you to build, test, and deploy onto a serverless platform. Regardless of their choice of programming language (Java, Go, Node.js), your team of developers can choose from various computational capacities (High-CPU VMs) to run hundreds of concurrent build pools. After successful builds, we can configure Cloud Build to automate deployment across multiple environments of choice from Virtual Machines (VMs), serverless (Cloud Functions) platform, Kubernetes clusters, or Firebase. Have a more complex pipeline? Google allows the use of Spinnaker in conjunction with their suite to allow for the building and execution of the complex set of pipelines. The entire suite is hosted within your private network, making it secure and keeping your data at rest within the geographical region of compliance. You also have Google Artifact Registry for securely storing, managing, and securing your container images and language packages, making them secure, consistent, automated, native, highly available, and highly performant.

In addition to the great features offering of image registry, Google focuses highly on security introducing an option of securing them through binary authorisation. With this type of authorisation, the signing of images by trusted authorities occurs during the development process and is then validated for authenticity while deploying these signatures. This allows for a standardised container release practice and reduces the risk of unintended or malicious code deployed to the production environment. They also verify images through vulnerability scanning before pushing into the image registry, furthering their efforts in proactive security measures. In addition, there are a whole host of features that allow for an enterprise-level of security and reliability, including integrations with popular suites like CircleCI, CloudBees and more. They also offer their continuous open-source integration and delivery system named Tekton and fully support GCP products.

Google Cloud Deploy addresses the continuous delivery aspect well through built-in metrics, approvals, and security in deploying to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You can configure deployment pipelines in minutes, assured of enterprise-level security and audit functionality and full support with the rest of the GCP suite. They have full support for world-class tools developers most often use, like Jenkins for CI, allowing for a unified developer experience. Configuration management is provided through declarative writing, allowing coders to do what they are good at - code their way through the infrastructure they would like to provision. You can code based on desired end states and leave the figuring out to Google Cloud Deploy for management. It also allows for easy rollouts and rollbacks for peace of mind, knowing that we can rectify incidents quickly.

Finally, Google Operations Suite supports monitoring and logging, which lists products like cloud logging, cloud monitoring, managed service for Prometheus, cloud debugger, cloud trace, and cloud profiler. All application and platform data can be collected and digested to take actions with ease using their logging product, allowing for performance improvements, troubleshooting, security, and business insights. The monitoring suite monitors important metrics, events, and metadata to help visualise data on charts and dashboards and alert appropriate teams for taking action. Prometheus quickly gains visualisations but has added benefits as administrators can query data using PromQL. Its most used tool helps personnel do their jobs more efficiently with the tools they already love and use.