Key Ways to Automate Your AWS Cloud with DevOps

Automation is critical in today’s enterprise landscape, as it frees up time that IT and software development teams currently spend on repetitive administrative work.

Before getting started with implementing tools that support automation, however, it’s important to do an audit of your pipeline to understand what tasks should be targeted. Be thorough in your examination, so you can get started on your goals faster and more efficiently. This understanding can help you find what solutions you need. It also helps you plan for integration.

Mission, an AWS partner, helps translate business objectives into a technology roadmap with Managed DevOps. With Managed DevOps, Mission’s team of DevOps experts will help you leverage containers, microservices and IAC to increase the speed of code deploys, scale infrastructure to meet spikes in demand, recover quickly from outages, and more.

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, a core part of Mission’s Managed DevOps offerings includes discussions on how best to leverage a suite of AWS automation services and easy integrations that assist with build, deployment, scaling instances, and more. Let’s review some offerings.

• AWS CodePipeline helps users automate the build, test, and deployment phases of your release process whenever code is changed. It does this based on the release model you define, so every deployment will be consistent and based on your personal preferences. Continuous delivery is a crucial component of DevOps so automating a tedious section of the delivery pipeline is a necessity.
• AWS CodeDeploy fully automates software deployments to compute services like AWS EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers. Changes in code are introduced in increments to track application health and maximize application availability. Users can also track the status of deployments at any time.
• AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate gives users a fully managed Chef Automate server and suite of automation tools that enhance your continuous deployment. It dynamically configures newly provisioned instances by automatically registering new instances in Auto Scaling groups with your Chef Server.[3]

Automate with Containers

It’s hard to ignore containers when discussing DevOps automation. A container includes a whole runtime environment in one package - an application and all its dependencies, configuration files, as well as libraries and other binaries. Containers offer faster and more portable development opportunities, efficient resource management, smooth scaling, operational simplicity, and more. Thus, cloud resource usage will be logical and contained, lowering costs while increasing the speed of releases and updates.

An additional benefit to containers is its platform independence. Containers are incredibly portable and can move between production environments, such as on-prem to cloud or vise versa. Using an expressway analogy, this Forbes article states that  ”containers are like tractor trailers that are able to deliver many elements together without consideration for the underlying infrastructure, and in the process, they’re able to move each one faster to their destination and with less risk.”

Running containers at scale requires an orchestration layer, and Kubernetes is often considered the leading option. Kubernetes originated within Google, but it has advanced significantly since then. Now, Kubernetes is an open source platform with contributors from around the world. It has over 11,000 contributing developers, making it one of the largest open source projects ever.

Kubernetes uses automation to start, scale, and sleep workloads and services when needed. It makes containerized applications easier to deploy and manage. AWS offers services for both containers and Kubernetes.  Let’s take a look at some of AWS’ container and Kubernetes offerings.

Containers

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and AWS deployments. ECS works with CodePipeline to create an effective continuous delivery pipeline for container-based applications and microservices.
• AWS Fargate seamlessly integrates with Amazon ECS to allow users to run containers without managing servers or clusters. It keeps track of all the CPU, memory, and other resources in a cluster and finds the best server for the container based on your preferences.

Kubernetes

• Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) makes it easier to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. Any applications running on a standard Kubernetes environment can easily migrate to EKS.

When you look at the bigger picture, DevOps revolutionizes the way organizations think about their production pipelines. AWS provides a variety of tools to make your automation goals a reality, and Mission’s Managed DevOps can outline the right roadmap for your organization, paving the way so your team can be one step closer to accomplishing its DevOps goals.