What is AWS DevOps?

If you are reading this article, you must be well aware of the DevOps role and why it has become so vital for development teams. But before we take a better look at what is AWS DevOps, let’s quickly refresh what is meant by DevOps on the whole.

What is DevOps? 

The term “DevOps” refers to both a position and a combination of processes applied at a company. A DevOps engineer is usually a system administrator with some specific programming knowledge. As a rule, a DevOps engineer is held responsible for:

• Planning applications and their infrastructure; 
• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines; 
• Development security monitoring and provision; 
• Development process automation. 

Having DevOps on the team ensures a smoother and easier release of a new product and supports the stability of the existing ones. 

What is AWS DevOps?

AWS DevOps is Amazon’s contribution to DevOps culture and philosophy. They have created their very own cloud platform, specific tools, and services to operate the AWS platform. As AWS folks put it: “AWS provides a set of flexible services designed to enable companies to more rapidly and reliably build and deliver products using AWS and DevOps practices. These services simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance.”

As our DevOps experience shows, Amazon sticks to the ideas they speak out. Their tools, services, and AWS cloud itself have proven to be efficient. AWS development tools allow safely storing the app’s source code and automatically creating, testing, and deploying it not only in the AWS cloud but locally. AWS core advantages include simplicity, scalability, automation, security, and package pricing. 

AWS Toolbox 

AWS offers a wide range of global cloud products that, among others, contain databases, storage, analytics, networks, mobile devices, DevOps development and management tools, Internet of Things, security. For convenience sake, AWS has divided its DevOps services according to their functionality. The abundance of DevOps tools and services AWS offers is a rich one. Here we’ll dive a bit into the core ones, available and popular for DevOps and not only purposes. 

Continuous Integration and Deployment

AWS has four specialized tools for CI/CD: 

• AWS CodePipeline is used for code configuration, testing, and deployment each time it is altered. 
• AWS CodeBuild compiles the source code, collects, tests, and builds software packages ready for deployment. 
• AWS CodeDeploy automates code deployment for any instance, including Amazon EC2 and local services. 
• AWS CodeStar is a cloud service that provides DevOps tools for easy app development, creation, and deployment on AWS. 

AWS Microservices 

There are two options when it comes to AWS microservices: containers and serverless computing.

• Amazon Elastic Container Service is a service used for scaling containers that supports Docker and allows launching and running apps in an automatically managed instance cluster Amazon EC2.
• AWS Lambda provides code running without the dedicated servers.

Infrastructure as code

Infrastructure as code is an approach that consists of four parts for AWS management with the help of code and templates: 

• AWS CloudFormation creates groups of related AWS resources and manages them. One can use existing templates or create custom ones. 
• AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides such automation instances as Chef and Puppet. 
• AWS Systems Manager provides visibility and control for your AWS infrastructure. It can also help fix OS, create system prototypes, and set up Windows and Linux Operating Systems. 
• AWS Config helps to conduct audits, analyze security, manage changes, and fix any maintenance errors.

AWS Monitoring and Logging Activities Keeping 

Hiring DevOps to control the app’s performance quality - is a common practice. DevOps monitors it and keeps a logs register. To do it, Amazon offers three instruments: 

• Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service. It provides DevOps with the data and some other useful information for apps’ health monitoring and forming a comprehensive idea of their overall state. 
• AWS X-Ray is a DevOps service that monitors application traces and gives an overview of its basic components. 
• AWS CloudTrail is a web service that records AWS API calls for your account and stores log files. By the way, Slack is using this technology, too.

AWS Platform as a Service

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is used to deploy the app’s stack, specifically for products developed using Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go и Docker, на серверах Apache, Nginx, Passenger и IIS.

AWS Versions Management 

AWS CodeCommit can be helpful for version management. It allows storing and controlling the source code. This DevOps service also makes working with Git repositories easier and allows integrating your tools into GIT.

How to Hire AWS DevOps Engineer

To hire an AWS DevOps Engineer, one should be aware of the development process intricacies and criteria: to understand the kind of work a DevOps can be responsible for, which tools a DevOps should know and use, etc. It’s vital to start the hiring process by asking these questions to find a qualified candidate. 

If you feel that you’d rather have professionals take care of it, don’t hesitate to contact us. Our AWS Certified Solutions Architect will gladly consult you on this as well as assist.