As was mentioned in an earlier post in our series on DevOps transformation, a frequent obstacle is the set of tools available to the organization, especially in relation to infrastructure management and in particular with regard to provisioning and configuring development and deployment environments.
Many companies struggle with in-house scripts or disparate tools to manage deployments from development to production. This situation may be mitigated by having continuous integration and continuous deployment processes in place, which implies some degree of automation. Many enterprises, however, have been able to achieve full, scalable and repeatable automation with our assistance in utilizing AWS, which has the ideal tools and services to support a DevOps transition.
Managing Infrastructure like Code
AWS’ definitive contribution is its capability to literally manage your software’s runtime infrastructure, deployment and workload management in the same manner as your code. If development, testing and production take advantage of AWS infrastructure, everything has the potential to be managed within the company’s current CI and CD processes.
TriNimbus has found that utilizing AWS also supplies additional benefits that enhance DevOps practices overall. These include increased end-to-end transparency and consistency, plus opportunities for contributions and sharing of cross-team responsibilities. The latter goes a long way to alleviating the pain of those inevitable 3 AM calls for app maintenance or support. It further enables new approaches to introducing and managing changes more efficiently.
Improvements to Managing Change
If your company takes advantage of agile development methodologies, you already experience the benefits of rapid turnaround times, which improve your time-to-market and response to customer needs. You value the ability to promote and manage changes in a manner that speeds up delivery rather than slowing down your business.
The use of AWS for infrastructure management provides additional speed with instant availability and easy-to-use tool suites for setting up perfect-fit computational infrastructure whether it be for development, testing or released apps. Servers, services, networking and storage can be customized and allocated automatically while saving your organization both time and money.
Cost reductions are achieved by eliminating the requirement to purchase and maintain in-house servers, networking equipment and storage infrastructure. Even the most accurate projections of current development and deployment needs are unlikely to remain static and less likely to match the next project. This situation leads to either underutilized equipment or delays while new equipment is specified, approved, ordered, shipped and set up. Tear downs are nearly as onerous.
Most companies using an in-house infrastructure paradigm must live within its constraints. Monetary costs may be fixed, but there can be severe opportunity costs due to a much reduced ability to adjust to project and market demands in a timely manner.
Spend More Effectively with AWS
As opposed to the complexity of maintaining internal dev/test/deploy infrastructure, AWS provides tools that take high-level descriptions of the infrastructure environment requirements and translates those almost immediately into the compute, storage and networking configuration required. The time savings and agility AWS provides teams are equally enormous. For example, whereas in-house acquisition, provisioning, configuration and deployment of a couple of servers may take weeks, using AWS reduces this task to about an hour. This leads to infrastructure acquisition as an advantage rather than an obstacle.
Creative Ways Organizations Employ AWS
With AWS, infrastructure specification is versioned using the code’s change management system from development through production. This increases efficiency and promotes a seamless transition between development, testing and production, since each team has access to an identical environment within which to perform their tasks.
TriNimbus has helped companies employ this new-found ability to automatically specifying and configuring identically functioning infrastructure in creative ways that reduce their risks while making it easier to push through changes and improve app performance.
Test, for instance, can back up Ops by setting up an isolated, one-to-one match of the production environment within minutes. They may use this to track down bugs or to practice testing changes coming from Dev without disrupting production or live deployments. The test environments can then be torn down and deleted with no further cost.
Some organizations additionally use this ability to set up green/blue deployments to introduce new functionality and defect repairs. Once the green software and its infrastructure meet acceptance criteria, rather than replacing the current deployment, it is turned blue by simply making it the active deployment via AWS while tearing down the previous instantiation.
Staying Ahead of the Curve with AWS
Utilizing AWS as part of your organization’s DevOps strategy ensures that your deployment capabilities stay ahead of the curve. AWS has been a strong leader in supporting DevOps processes by continuously adding valuable services and tools, all of which are API-accessible. These include orchestrations services such as Ops Works and Elastic Beanstalk. There is an entire service family for managing code deployments: Code Commit, Code Deploy, Code Pipeline, etc.
Conclusion
TriNimbus has assisted countless companies in their efforts to reduce or eliminate manual acquisition and configuration of infrastructure through the use of automations tools and AWS, which provides many follow-on benefits in terms of additional efficiencies and flexibility for their DevOps environment. Their expertise makes them a leader in architecting solutions for auto-deployment and smoothly managing operations workloads. Plus, they have the ability to provide 24/7 maintenance of your AWS operations for the fastest TTM of your software deliveries.
