Cloud computing is on-demand access to resources such as physical or virtual servers, networking capabilities, data storage, software, application development tools, AI-powered tools, and many more over the internet with affordable pricing. This model also offers customers greater scalability and flexibility than traditional on-premises infrastructure.
In this article, we will understand the concept of cloud computing, how does DevOps in the cloud work, benefits of using cloud services for DevOps and best practices for cloud services for agile development.
What is Cloud Computing? And How Does DevOps in the Cloud Work?
Cloud computing plays a vital role in our day-to-day lives, whether accessing any cloud application such as Google Gmail, playing any cloud-hosted video games, or streaming any movie on Netflix.
Cloud computing brings collaborative workflow tools to facilitate the DevOps teams.
Moreover, the cloud acts as the centralized repository to store all the important information, deployments, and code regarding the application. This allows access to the entire team without any need for communication.
In addition, the DevOps approach to cloud provisioning enables the creation of stateless applications that run in the cloud and increases availability. Let’s know some of the interesting benefits of using cloud Services for DevOps.
Benefits of Using Cloud Services for DevOps
Compared to traditional on-premises IT, which involves the company owning and maintaining the physical data servers to access data storage, computing power, and other resources, cloud computing offers many benefits, including some of the following.
1. Cost-Effectiveness
Cloud computing lets you offload the expense and effort of purchasing, configuring, installing, and managing mainframe computers and other on-premises infrastructure. And you’ll have to pay only for the cloud-based infrastructure and other computing resources as you utilize them.
2. Increase Speed and Agility
Cloud computing helps your organization to use enterprise applications in a few minutes rather than waiting for weeks or months for IT to respond to requests, purchase, configure supporting hardware, and install software. This feature empowers users ( specially DevOps and development teams) to support infrastructure and help leverage cloud based software.
3. Scalability and Elasticity
Cloud computing enhances the reliability of the development process. Simultaneously, operations teams prioritize software stability and performance. Leveraging ready-to-use cloud infrastructures, DevOps teams effortlessly scale up or down the resources without requiring capital investments or delays.
DevOps teams utilize the cloud and navigate the resource allocation for the specific applications, ensuring optimal balance. This flexibility enables swift adjustments as required evolve.
4. Monitoring and Logging
Cloud-based monitoring solutions offer real-time visibility into the health and performance of applications, infrastructure, and services. DevOps teams can monitor key metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, network traffic, and application response times to identify potential issues and bottlenecks.
Core Components of Cloud DevOps
1. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Pipelines
Continuous integration and continuous deployment are the set of ideas, capabilities, and processes that permit the software changes to be delivered timely to users in a repeatable as well as secure manner by introducing automation into the software development processes.
Benefits of Installing the CI/CD Pipeline :
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Higher Efficiency
Higher efficiency is one of the leading benefits of the CI/CD pipeline. You should automate the process if you have a review process, including deploying code to testing, development, and production environments and entering multiple commands across various domains. This creates a need for the CI/CD framework.
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Reduced Risk of Defects
You can deploy and test codes more frequently by using the CI/CD pipeline, giving the QA engineers the power to identify the errors and fix them as soon as they occur. This way, you are effectively reducing risks in real-time.
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Faster Product Delivery
When CI or CD is used, the team’s efficiency increases, including the release of some new features. Businesses can address security challenges, market shifts, financial pressures, and consumer needs faster.
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 Log Generation
Observability is vital for DevOps. Observability is one of the technical tools that aid in this endeavor. Logging information plays a pivotal role in the observability. A CI or CD pipeline generates lots of logging data at every level of the software development process.
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 Better Planning
A CI/CD pipeline allows organizations to adapt to the rapid changes in dynamic business conditions by ensuring a well-organized surplus of items and a continuous line of communication with their clients.
2. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is a process of managing and provisioning the computer data centers with the help of machine-readable files rather than any interactive configuration tools or physical hardware configuration.
Benefits of IaC Solution :
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Speed
IaC lets you quickly set up the complete infrastructure by running the script. You can do everything from development to production, QA, passing through levels, and more for every environment. It can make the lifecycle of the entire software development more efficient.
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Consistency
Manual infrastructure management will always result in discrepancies, no matter how much you try. IaC solves this problem by having the config files — the single source of truth.
This way, you guarantee the same configurations will be deployed repeatedly without discrepancies.
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Accountability
Since you can version the IaC configuration files, you have full access to the changes that occurred. No more guessing games now.
Best Practices for Cloud DevOps
1. Security and Compliance
In cloud computing, DevOps teams ensure security and compliance by following these best practices:
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Incorporate Security
DevOps teams prioritize security and compliance from the beginning of the development process and incorporate security in every pipeline stage. This includes vulnerability scanning, security testing, and code reviews.
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Using Automated Security Testing Tool
DevOps teams use automated security tools, like dynamic and static application security testing (DAST and SAST), to reduce the risk of security breaches and detect code malfunctioning.
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Implement Access Controls
DevOps teams implement access control to ensure only authorized users can access sensitive data and systems. This includes using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access control (RBAC).
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Implement Encryption
DevOps teams implement encryptions for data at rest and protect sensitive data from unauthorized access.
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Stay Up-To-Date With Security Patches
DevOps teams apply security patches and updates to address security vulnerabilities in their cloud computing environment. By following these practices, DevOps teams ensure the security and compliance of their cloud computing environment.
2. Cost Management Strategies
DevOps cost optimization can help enhance efficiency, boost profitability, and reduce expenses. As DevOps environments are complex, cloud costs can rapidly surge.
Below are some cost optimization strategies for DevOps in the cloud.
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Identify Unused Resources
One of the ways to optimize the cloud costs is by identifying the unused resources. Identifying such resources that are not in use and removing them can be a good starting point for cloud cost optimization, and every organization can benefit from this.
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Rightsizing Instances
Rightsizing allows you to analyze and modify the computing services according to the most efficient size. As there are many possible combinations, graphics, database, memory, and storage capacity, it is complex to size instances manually. However, you can use rightsizing tools to get recommendations across instance families. It helps in optimizing cloud usage and reducing cloud costs.
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Use Reserved Instances
Reserved instances are the prepaid computer instances that offer good pricing discounts. When you purchase RIs from any cloud provider, select an instance type and availability (typically a region) and continue using that instance for 1 to 3 years. In exchange, most cloud providers offer discounts of up to 75%. Before you pay up, you must do the proper research and plan based on the historical instance usage.
Conclusion
Today, Cloud service providers have many cloud-based tools to facilitate the DevOps approach. These tools enable better application management during the lifecycle and optimize the development tasks. Cloud computing complements DevOps processes due to its automation procedures and fine-grained control they offer. Cloud service providers also provide tools to automate the various DevOps practices, allowing them to focus on the development of applications.