DevOps and Its Role in Cloud Deployment

In a way, DevOps and Cloud serve similar purposes. Both promote automation, enhance the speed of development and deployment, facilitate communication and collaboration and so, it can be said that the two go hand-in-hand.

DevOps, a combination of the terms ‘development’ and ‘operations’, stands for the collaborative or shared approach taken by the application and IT operations team to perform their tasks. It facilitates greater communication and collaboration between teams while enabling iterative development of software, automating the process, and enabling programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance.

DevOps speeds up the process of software development by 50%. In combination with the cloud, it is known to be faster by 80%.

Cloud computing provides DevOps automation with a centralized platform for testing, deployment, and production. It reduces the number of leveraged resources that need to be accounted for — while tracking costs and making adjustments as required. Broadly speaking, the combination of cloud deployment and DevOps increases efficiency and cost-effectiveness of digital transformation efforts.

Bringing Agility to Cloud Adoption

GitLab’s Fifth Annual Global DevSecOps Survey reveals that DevOps led to 2x faster release of code by 60% of developers. Of the 4,300 respondents surveyed from across the globe, a majority experienced a dramatically faster pace of technology adoption due to DevOps and 84% of developers reported faster code release than ever before. As against 8% in 2020, 55% of operations teams reported that their life cycles were either completely or mostly automated.

Apart from speed, some of the other advantages include:

● Ease of Automation: DevOps services can simplify the automation of infrastructure management on the cloud as it enables server management, OS patching, implementing CI/CD for deployment automation, testing, and report generation.

● Replication of Cloud Server: Using DevOps, the complex replication process can be automated. Also, whenever a backup is taken, the servers have to be launched manually. This can be automated with DevOps, which can also provide tools to define the hierarchy/pattern of the infrastructure and define inter-communication patterns.

● DevOps Orchestration: DevOps orchestration tools such as Ansible, Chef, and Puppet facilitate the complete coordination and control of automation of the entire hierarchy in the infrastructure. By integrating with the cloud, functions such as automated server provisioning and auto-scaling become possible.

● Effective Monitoring: Cloud monitoring typically involves receiving an email alert in case of any infrastructural assets deviating from the norm. By integrating with DevOps, it is possible to customize trigger alarms and other alerts enabling better utilization of resources.

● Rapid Deployment: As discussed earlier, speed is one of the greatest advantages of DevOps. When clubbed with the cloud, rapid deployment becomes simpler as it helps with solving infrastructural problems using the latest tools and building custom logic and writing capabilities. The whole process can be automated and error-free using single-click build tools that interact with the cloud services.

To ensure the successful integration of DevOps and Cloud, some of the prerequisites include:

● Defining your development requirements by assessing your current needs and future roadmap.

● Define the business case and the expected ROI.

● Define the initial DevOps processes, solutions, and the target cloud platform or platforms.

● Take a top-down approach to embrace the cloud as well as DevOps if both are new to the organization to get the buy-in of the resources.

You might be interested in: https://www.indiumsoftware.com/blog/process-of-devops-on-a-cloud-platform/

Best Practices to Make DevOps Possible for Cloud Deployment

To leverage DevOps for cloud deployment, both need to be understood and implemented well and decisions regarding DevOps tools and cloud platforms should be done in an integrated way. It also requires a change in the development culture of the enterprise and needs corresponding budgets.

Some of the best practices to ensure the successful use of DevOps for Cloud Deployment include:

● Improve teamwork and communication by connecting the workflows of development and operations teams using automation.

● An application’s technology stack can be managed and provisioned using techniques such as continuous integration or version control.

● Any problems that arise can be handled by managing logs and monitoring application and infrastructure performance.

● Automate tests and builds by combining code edits within a shared archive on a routine basis.

● Microservices architecture makes it easier to build and manage applications and adding functionalities quickly.

Indium — To Enable DevOps in Cloud Deployment

Indium Software is a rapidly growing technology services company with deep digital engineering expertise across Cloud Engineering, Data and Analytics, DevOps, Application Engineering, and Digital Assurance.

We bring to the fore deep expertise and experience in DevOps as well as cloud and can speed up your digital transformation efforts by integrating the two efficiently. Indium’s comprehensive set of DevOps services facilitates high-quality throughput of new capabilities and covers:

CI/CD Services

Create block-free code pipelines that ensure smooth value stream – from development, integration, testing to deployment

Deployment Automation

Contain the complexity of deployment with automation, freeing up time for value-added tasks

Containerization

With packaged executables, build anywhere, deploy anywhere with confidence.