Top AWS DevOps tools,
their benefits & adoption challenges

Amazon Elastic Container Service

Amazon Elastic Container Service, often referred to as Amazon ECS, enables engineers to build, manage, and run containerized applications in the AWS cloud without the burden of infrastructure management. This service supports automatic on-demand scaling of containers and allows deployment of applications across multiple availability zones so that they can maintain continuous availability and consistent performance as its load increases. What’s more, with Amazon ECS, engineers can strengthen the security of containerized apps by utilizing features like application isolation, IAM, automated patching, and data encryption as well as integrating other native AWS security mechanisms.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless service designed to run code for almost any type of application or backend service (including web applications, mobile backends, or integration services) without the need to provision or manage servers. Instead, developers upload code as individual functions, and AWS Lambda automatically manages the infrastructure and its scaling, patching, and availability needed to execute that code in response to specific events like API calls or database changes from other AWS services (e.g. Amazon S3). Since companies are charged only for the compute time the code execution consumes, creating apps with AWS Lambda helps reduce operational costs associated with idle infrastructure and wasted capacity.

AWS CloudFormation

Using AWS CloudFormation, developers and system administrators can automate the provisioning and management of cloud resources, such as storage, databases, and networking components, using AWS sample or custom-built code templates. Based on these templates, AWS CloudFormation provisions, configures, and scales the defined resources as a single unit (called a stack), eliminating the need for a manual setup. Such automation reduces infrastructure configuration errors and ensures repeatable and predictable deployments across AWS accounts and regions, maintaining infrastructure alignment with the company’s policies.

The IaC processes can be further simplified with AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), which allows developers to create CloudFormation templates using familiar programming languages like Java or TypeScript instead of YAML or JSON.

AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager serves as a centralized hub for tracking and managing all compute resources across the organization’s AWS, multicloud, and hybrid environments. This tool automates common operational tasks like tracking resource and software inventory or applying operating system patches using predefined or custom scripts. With the help of Systems Manager, companies can reduce system maintenance time and effort and improve consistency and security across the infrastructure.

AWS Config

A configuration management service, AWS Config is used to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources. With this tool, teams can monitor and record changes in configurations, check the compliance of the configurations with the company’s policies and best practices, and correlate configuration changes to particular events. This way, AWS Config helps ensure security, governance, and operational control in AWS environments.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch helps monitor the performance of AWS applications and infrastructure components by recording their metrics, logs, and events and visualizing them in dashboards.

With this operational data, teams can identify the root cause of incidents to speed up issue resolution and keep their systems healthy. Moreover, CloudWatch sends alerts and automatically triggers necessary response actions when metrics, such as CPU utilization, memory availability, or error rates, exceed predefined thresholds, helping minimize downtime.

AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray helps teams analyze the performance of distributed applications, including those built on microservices, and find areas for improvement. The tool collects data on the requests your application handles and generates a unified service map that helps cloud engineers visualize dependencies between different system elements, detect bottlenecks in the app architecture, and debug serverless apps in real time.

AWS CloudTrail

With AWS CloudTrail, organizations can monitor AWS API calls and account activity across their AWS account. CloudTrail automatically generates event reports that include any actions and changes made via AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), Amazon Software Development Kit (SDK), and other AWS tools. These logs create an immutable record of activities, helping organizations prove compliance with applicable regulations, improve their security posture, and streamline operational auditing.

Amazon DevOps Guru

Powered by Amazon’s proprietary machine learning models, Amazon DevOps Guru helps organizations improve the availability and performance of their serverless AWS applications. The service detects the app’s abnormal behavior, provides contextual insights about it, and recommends remedy actions, reducing manual monitoring workload and helping prevent performance degradation.