AWS for DevOps: tools, benefits & best practices
February 27, 2024
AWS DevOps architecture encompasses AWS tools and infrastructure companies use to set up continuous software development, integration, and deployment.
Itransition provides AWS DevOps services to help companies implement AWS DevOps tools to make the software development life cycle faster and more efficient.
AWS DevOps architecture components
The architecture and tools for DevOps on AWS can vary depending on the project’s requirements and specifics. For example, here are the components used when deploying software on Amazon EC2, a popular cloud infrastructure service used by millions of businesses globally.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that allows companies to deliver web content, live and on-demand videos, and software updates to users faster by using a globally distributed AWS data center infrastructure. The integration with AWS Web-Application Firewall enables DevOps teams to protect their web apps and APIs from common cyber threats, including DDoS and account creation fraud, with just one click in CloudFront’s console.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon S3 is a scalable cloud storage that is used for data management and backup, disaster recovery, high-performance computing, and machine learning training data. Amazon S3 provides multiple classes of highly available cloud storage (99.5% availability and more), which helps companies ensure seamless operations for their websites and apps.
Elastic Load Balancing
With this AWS service, IT teams can effectively distribute traffic between virtual servers, as well as monitor server, container, and service health. For example, teams can use Application Load Balancer to run health checks to quickly identify and resolve issues such as the inability to communicate data between EC2 instances, S3 bucket misconfigurations, or enabled legacy metadata endpoints on Kubernetes clusters.
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon RDS is a managed SQL database service that allows teams to manage, migrate, and back up data by using the AWS Management Console or the AWS Command Line Interface. One of the main advantages of Amazon RDS is the automation of data management routine tasks, including data backups and replication, issue discovery, or resource allocation.
Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service that can handle millions of queries simultaneously and automatically scale database capacity based on the on-demand or provisioned capacity pricing models. In the case of on-demand scaling, a company pays per request its app performs for reading or writing data. The second option implies that IT specialists specify the number of data writes and reads that are expected to be executed by an app’s backend.
Amazon Auto Scaling
This tool monitors AWS solutions and automatically scales the required cloud computing resources on demand, including Amazon DynamoDB tables and Amazon EC2 instances. IT teams can create comprehensive scaling plans based on a company's unique goals and easily monitor the average consumption of all scalable resources via a unified user interface, getting overall visibility into AWS DevOps architecture.
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53 is a DNS service that helps automatically redirect end users to web applications, including those outside of the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Latency-based routing is one of the tool’s core features that allows it to automatically avoid any network issues when redirecting end-users to apps, thus helping companies mitigate customer churn due to high latency.
AWS security groups
A security group is a charge-free AWS firewall service that regulates and tracks incoming and outgoing traffic among EC2 instances based on predefined security rules. Teams can easily create new security groups via AWS Management Console, AWS CLI (Command Line Interface), or AWS SDK and switch them off when they’re no longer needed.
DevOps best practices
To understand the essence of DevOps better, let us explore its best practices that can be used in AWS and other cloud infrastructures.
Continuous integration (CI)
Conventionally, developers commit changes to a central repository only when a substantial part of the work is done. In turn, continuous integration implies that development teams should routinely submit code changes into a central repository to be able to identify and fix bugs much faster and update software more frequently. Following the continuous integration practice, developers merge their work regularly, which results in fewer bugs and improved software quality.
Continuous delivery (CD)
Continuous delivery goes hand in hand with continuous integration. This is a practice where the code changes are developed in short iterations, automatically built and tested, and prepared to be deployed to the production environment at any time. Since standardized testing ensures its reliability, issues are identified timely and the code is always ready to be deployed. Continuous integration is often challenging in on-premises deployments due to limited scalability and resource constraints, while the cloud allows for almost unlimited testing environments.
Microservices
Microservices architecture is a software development method that splits an application into a series of small services that typically communicate with each other through APIs. Each microservice serves a single purpose, is typically managed by a separate development team, and can be modified and scaled up independently. Compared to the monolithic architecture, microservices provide better scalability, enabling IT teams to deliver new features more easily.
Infrastructure as code
Essentially, the infrastructure as code (IaC) approach implies that developers should treat infrastructure the same way they treat code. Instead of relying on scripts and manual processes, engineers should use familiar code-based tools, a version control system, and highly standardized practices. This would allow IT teams to easily change and distribute infrastructure configurations and ensure that each configuration is properly documented.
Continuous monitoring
With DevOps in place, IT teams should monitor user experience after the application is released to the production environment. Thoroughly analyzing the data generated by applications, DevOps specialists can quickly resolve issues and accurately assess how software updates impact user experience.
Communication & collaboration
Communication and collaboration are essential cultural components of the DevOps philosophy. By establishing a knowledge management strategy and company-wide standards for information exchange, businesses can ensure effective communication between traditionally siloed units like development, marketing, and operations teams.
Planning to implement DevOps using AWS tools?
AWS DevOps tools
Choosing the right tools is critical for establishing an effective AWS DevOps architecture. Here are key AWS DevOps tools classified based on their roles in the SDLC:
AWS CodePipeline
AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that allows organizations to model and automate every stage of the application release process by building CI/CD pipelines. It enables companies to update applications faster and timely address the ever-changing customer demands. With AWS CodePipeline, companies can easily test frequent and incremental code updates, which prevents bug escalation and reduces the amount of time and resources needed for fixing issues. Importantly, AWS CodePipeline is easily adaptable to a company’s specific needs. For example, it allows teams to use such repositories as Github and Atlassian Bitbucket or the company's own third-party Git source repositories.
AWS CodeBuild
AWS CodeBuild is a continuous integration service that streamlines code compilation and testing. AWS CodeBuild scales build servers depending on companies’ current needs and can compile multiple builds at the same time. What’s more, companies can use their existing build tools in AWS CodeBuild environments, so the integration requires minimal effort and becomes more cost-effective.
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS CodeDeploy allows companies to introduce application changes in small steps and thus significantly reduce downtime and solve challenges commonly associated with software deployments. Regardless of the deployment platform (EC2, Lambda, or on-premises), CodeDeploy easily integrates with organizations’ existing DevOps tools like GitHub and Jenkins. With AWS CodeDeploy, IT teams can automate software deployment across multiple test and production environments and have a full view of the software’s deployment status.
AWS for microservices
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that allows developers to execute code in response to certain events as functions and automatically allocate necessary computing resources to them. With a serverless computing service like AWS Lambda, companies no longer need to worry about server scaling.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
Amazon ECS helps teams build software based on the microservices architecture by enabling the deployment and scaling of containerized workloads in the AWS cloud.
AWS for IaC
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation is a tool for managing infrastructure as code that allows engineers to use familiar JSON and YAML formats to provision both AWS and third-party resources. IT teams can also create a collection of AWS resources for specific purposes and use them as a template for similar applications. This makes CloudFormation essentially a resource management automation tool.
AWS OpsWorks
Developers can also automate server configuration based on predefined sets of rules using AWS OpsWorks. To audit and analyze resource management for further improvement, developers can apply AWS Config, which continuously monitors the changes in AWS resource configurations. Both OpsWorks and Config work are programmed with code.
AWS for continuous monitoring
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch allows developers to continuously collect operational data from resources, applications, and services in AWS or on-premise services and perform a data audit in a single platform. CloudWatch helps IT teams to instantly react to anomalies, visualize logs and metrics, and use this operational intelligence to gather actionable insights.
AWS X-Ray
AWS X-Ray is a monitoring service aimed at solutions built with a microservice architecture that helps developers map microservices, outline the dependencies, and quickly identify any performance issues. X-Ray closely monitors user requests and allows for the addition of annotations and metadata to traces, enabling developers to identify issues easily and pinpoint delays in data communication.
AWS for version control
AWS CodeCommit
AWS CodeCommit helps teams collaborate on their code securely by providing Git integrations and features such as versioning, identity and access management (IAM), and encryption.
Benefits of AWS DevOps
AWS DevOps practices help companies mitigate the drawbacks of the traditional development approach and gain tangible business advantages.
Revamp your SDLC with AWS DevOps tools
When implemented properly, AWS DevOps architecture can bring tangible improvements to software development by streamlining aspects like code deployment, infrastructure provisioning, and app monitoring. From a business perspective, AWS DevOps helps companies reduce testing, designing, and maintenance costs and proactively cater to customer needs by accelerating product and service delivery. However, decision-makers should remember that DevOps implementation is often disruptive for IT teams working with the traditional software delivery model, as they have to adapt to new workflows implying more frequent releases and automation. A transformation that is too rapid or inconsistent can negatively impact IT teams’ productivity, reducing the overall ROI of DevOps implementation. So companies should turn to certified AWS consultants such as Itransition to ensure successful implementation of AWS DevOps architecture.
We help you create the right AWS DevOps architecture
FAQs
How is AWS used in DevOps?
AWS provides a wide range of tools and resources that are used at all stages of a DevOps lifecycle, from planning, development and integration to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Can an IT team enable DevSecOps with AWS?
Yes, you can integrate security into the DevOps lifecycle using proprietary AWS tools (such as Amazon CodeGuru and Amazon Inspector) and third-party software from the AWS marketplace (SonarQube, Mend.io, etc.) for blue/green deployment, static application security testing (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and dynamic application security testing (DAST).
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