How To Automate DevOps in the Cloud

The term DevOps (a combination of software development and operations) refers to a set of practices, tools, and cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the work of software development and IT teams.

Marrying the cloud with your DevOps practice can accelerate the work you’ve already accomplished. When used together, both DevOps and the cloud can drive your company’s digital transformation.

You’ll see results as long as you emphasize the priorities of DevOps: people, process, and technology. The cloud — along with other tooling — falls squarely into the technical part of your DevOps implementation.

Cloud computing enables automation for your developers and operations folks in a way that simply isn’t possible when you manage your own physical infrastructure. Provisioning infrastructure through code in the cloud — which is a system referred to as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — enables you to create templates and repeatable processes.

When you track changes to your infrastructure code through source control, you permit your team to operate seamlessly and track changes. IaC is much more repeatable and automated — not to mention faster — than having engineers click around a portal.

Even instructions on the portal aren’t fool-proof. You risk making small, yet significant, changes to infrastructure setup if you consistently build the same setup through the portal rather than a YAML file.

Taking your DevOps culture to the cloud

People often speak about DevOps and cloud computing as if they are intertwined and, in many ways, they are. Be aware, however, that you can adopt DevOps — or begin to transform your engineering organization — without going all in on the cloud. It’s perfectly reasonable that you first establish the standards, practices, and processes for your team before you shift your infrastructure to a cloud provider.

Although people speak as though everyone is already on the cloud, you are still on the cutting edge of the shift to the cloud. Cloud providers are becoming more robust by the day, and engineering companies are slowly transitioning their self-hosted services to the cloud. With that in mind, an organization seeking to adopt DevOps would be wise to strongly consider utilizing the services of a major cloud provider.

Anyone with DevOps experience wouldn’t likely call the cloud a NoOps solution, but they might call it OpsLite. Cloud services often abstract complex operations architecture in a way that makes that architecture more friendly to developers and empowers them to take more ownership of their components.

If you’ve ever grumbled that developers should be included in an on-call rotation, you’re right — they should be. Including developers in the on-call rotation is a great way to ramp up their knowledge of deploying code as well as managing and provisioning the infrastructure on which their services run. This reduces operational overhead and frees up the time of operations specialists to work on proactive solutions.

Learning through DevOps adoption

If your team is capable of adopting DevOps and shifting toward utilizing cloud computing at the same time, you can use these shifts as learning opportunities for both developers and operations folks.

While your team shifts to the cloud, developers have the opportunity to familiarize operations specialists with code — perhaps even specific languages — and source control, and operations folks can teach developers about infrastructure. When both groups are both the experts and the newbies, neither group has to deal much of an ego-damaging transfer of knowledge.

The trust, rapport, and healthy dynamic that emerge from these interactions will galvanize your team and last much longer than the immediate work took. In many ways, you’re reinforcing your DevOps culture through tooling your DevOps practice.

Benefitting from cloud services in your DevOps initiative

Modern operations is changing and evolving. Your competitors are already adopting new ways of innovating faster and accelerating their software delivery life cycles.

Cloud computing represents a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. By outsourcing much of your infrastructure and operations requirements to a cloud provider, you reduce overhead and free your team to focus on delivering better software to your users.

Here are six common reasons organizations are turning to cloud computing services:

• Improving affordability. Cloud providers allow you to select only the services you need, when you need them. Imagine if you could access cable TV but pay for only the channels you watch. You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Most DevOps team members would! Cloud providers do just that while also providing you with the most up-to-date computing hardware housed in physically secure datacenters.
• Automating deployments. Changes to the system — deployments — are the most common contributors of outages or service disruptions. Cloud providers make releasing code an automated, repeatable process, significantly decreasing the probability of making mistakes in manual releases and introducing bugs. Automated deployments also enables developers to release their own code. Ultimately, automated deployments simplify the process while reducing site downtime and reactionary triaging in production.
• Accelerating delivery. The cloud reduces friction along nearly every phase of the software delivery life cycle. Although set up is required, it often takes no more than double the time required to do the process manually, and you have to set up a service or process only once. Accelerated delivery gives you a ton of flexibility.
• Increasing security. Cloud providers make security part of their offering. Microsoft Azure, Amazon web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) meet different compliance standards and provide policies, services, and controls that will help you reinforce your system’s security. In addition, if you utilize a deployment pipeline tool within the cloud, you can add security checks before new code is released to an environment, thereby reducing the possibility of security vulnerabilities.
• Decreasing failure. Through cloud build and release pipelines, your team is capable of creating automated tests to confirm functionality, code quality, security, and compliance of any code introduced into your systems. This capability decreases the possibility of bugs while also reducing the risk of problematic deployments.
• Building more resilient and scalable systems. The cloud allows organizations to scale up, scale out, and increase capacity within seconds. This elastic scaling enables spinning up compute and storage resources as needed, no matter where in the world your users interact with your product. This approach permits you to better serve your customers and more efficiently manage infrastructure costs.

The DevOps approach is all about creating a cyclical method where you benefit and learn from the process each time you go through it.