DevOps is the combination of cultural shifts, development practices, technology and automation. The culmination of these facets can help businesses realise benefits in terms of delivery and reliability, when compared to traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.
Achieving these changes, understanding the tooling available and implementing the correct processes can be challenging.
How can we help?
We have delivered many projects for customers to help them change their development processes, increase their level of automation and adopt best practices in AWS in terms of Infrastructure as Code (IAC), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), monitoring and observability.
Processes & Tooling
DevOps is not just about technology, it is equally about a shift in culture and practices within a business.
Teams can use new practices and tooling to automate processes that previously may have been manual and slow, allowing them to manage and improve applications/systems more quickly and reliably. These tools can also help engineers independently achieve tasks, like deploying code or provisioning infrastructure, that may have required help from other teams before.
Infrastructure as Code (IAC)
Infrastructure as Code is incredibly important when managing systems as scale. Manually deploying infrastructure via a cloud providers web console is error-prone, slow and very inefficient.
Defining infrastructure as code and automating infrastructure deployments allows you to remove a lot of scope for human error, create and enforce standards and reduce the amount of repetitive configuration required by building up reusable code for particular components. It also significantly increases overall visibility and auditability of the infrastructure that is being deployed and maintained.
We are massive fans of Terraform when it comes to IAC, but we are also fluent with CloudFormation and the AWS CDK. We can help you get started with IAC or assist you migrate existing infrastructure to code and build out infrastructure deployment pipelines.
CI/CD Pipelines
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery allow your teams to deploy applications faster and with more confidence.
Continuous integration is a practice where code changes are merged into a central repository regularly. Upon each merge, automated builds and tests are run. This allows you to find and address bugs more quickly, improve the quality of your code, and reduce the time needed to have confidence in your releases.
Continuous delivery expands upon continuous integration by taking the build artifacts and deploying them to multiple environments e.g. test, staging, production in an automated manner. This allows you to conduct further testing before finally promoting the build to production.
We have extensive experience defining and building CI/CD processes and pipelines in AWS using both native and third party tooling, such as:
- AWS Codebuild
- AWS CodePipeline
- Jenkins
- GitLab
- GitHub
- CircleCI
Containerisation
Containerisation is the process of bundling application code with only the libraries and dependencies required for it to run into a single lightweight “container” that runs consistently on any infrastructure. Multiple isolated applications or services can run on a single host and access the same OS kernel. Containers are much more portable and resource-efficient than virtual machines, such as EC2 instances.
We can assist you migrate applications to a container based infrastructure on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) or AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
Monitoring & Observability
Knowing how your application is performing, alerting on any problems, and being able to easily troubleshoot issues when they do arise is of upmost importance. Likewise, having the correct amount of visibility during build, test and deployment processes allows you to operate with confidence.
We can assist you in rolling out tracing, logging and monitoring/alerting systems to ensure you are always on top of what is happening from pushing your code to source control, through to running in production.
If you have a DevOps project you want to talk to us about, then please contact us.