A tutorial to AWS DevOps

What is DevOps?

DevOps, a combination of “development” and “operations,” is a collaborative approach to software delivery. It integrates teams historically segregated and emphasizes communication, collaboration, and integration. DevOps methodologies promote automation and monitoring at all stages of software construction, from integration, testing, releasing to deployment and infrastructure management. The aim is shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, aligning with business objectives. DevOps encourages a culture of shared responsibility, creating a fast, efficient, and resilient path to deliver value from idea to the customer. It’s a crucial strategy for companies aiming for high velocity and quality in today’s digital landscape.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform, offered by Amazon. It provides over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. These services include computing power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. Services range from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), to Software as a Service (SaaS), covering diverse needs like machine learning, analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT).

What is AWS DevOps?

AWS DevOps is the use of Amazon Web Services’ cloud-based tools and technologies to support DevOps, a methodology that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to streamline and accelerate the development and deployment of software.

AWS DevOps training includes a suite of tools that support a broad range of DevOps tasks, such as code storage and version control (AWS CodeCommit), automated build and test processes (AWS CodeBuild), automated deployment (AWS CodeDeploy), and continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines (AWS CodePipeline). It also offers services for monitoring and logging, such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail.

By utilizing AWS DevOps tools, organizations can build, test, and deploy their applications on AWS’s highly scalable and reliable infrastructure, enabling them to deliver software more rapidly, reliably, and with better quality.

Popular services of AWS

1. AWS Cloud Formation: AWS Cloud Formation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. It allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts.
2. AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): Amazon EC2 provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers by offering secure, resizable compute capacity.
3. AWS CloudWatch: Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
4. AWS CodePipeline: AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. CodePipeline automates the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change, based on the release model you define.

AWS DevOps Architecture

AWS DevOps architecture leverages a suite of AWS services to create a seamless and efficient environment for software development, deployment, and scaling. Here’s how these services factor into a typical DevOps architecture:

1. Load Balancing: AWS provides Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), distributing incoming traffic across multiple targets – such as EC2 instances – in multiple Availability Zones. This ensures no single server bears too much load, enhancing the application’s availability and fault tolerance.
2. Amazon Cloud Front: This is a content delivery network (CDN) that speeds up distribution of static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js files, and image files, to users.
3. Amazon Security Group: These act like a firewall for associated Amazon EC2 instances, controlling inbound and outbound traffic at the instance level. They help to secure your resources within the AWS ecosystem.
4. Elastic Caches: Amazon Elastic Cache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud. This improves the performance of web applications by allowing retrieval of information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases.
5. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): This is a distributed relational database service designed to simplify setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications.
6. Amazon S3: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It’s designed for storing and retrieving any amount of data at any time, from anywhere on the web.
7. Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS): This is easy to use, high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale.
8. Amazon Auto Scaling: This monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. It enhances application availability and allows it to handle increases in traffic without manual intervention.

By combining these services, AWS provides a robust, scalable, and efficient platform for implementing DevOps practices.

What is AWS DevOps Lifecycle?

The AWS DevOps lifecycle is a continuous process that integrates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) using Amazon Web Services’ tools. It comprises seven phases: Continuous Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Monitoring, Continuous Feedback, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Operations. This lifecycle aims to enhance software delivery speed, improve product quality, and optimize responsiveness to customers.

The AWS DevOps lifecycle consists of seven continuous phases that are essential for maintaining a streamlined, efficient, and automated software delivery process.

1. Continuous Development: This phase involves the consistent creation and updating of software code. AWS CodeCommit is often utilized during this phase. It’s a source control service that enables developers to privately store and version control their code.
2. Continuous Integration: After development, the code is regularly merged with the existing codebase. This helps to detect conflicts or bugs early in the development process. AWS CodeBuild is a service that compiles the source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages.
3. Continuous Testing: The new code is rigorously tested to ensure it doesn’t break any existing functionality and meets quality standards. Services like AWS CodeBuild and AWS X-Ray can automate testing and provide insights into the behavior of your applications.
4. Continuous Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch is used to observe the operation of the application and infrastructure, tracking metrics, collecting logs, and generating alarms for operational or performance issues.
5. Continuous Feedback: The information gathered from monitoring is used to identify areas for improvement, with feedback looped back to the developers for action. Tools like Amazon CloudWatch or AWS CloudTrail can assist in this.
6. Continuous Deployment: AWS CodeDeploy automates the application deployment process, reducing the risk of downtime and making it easier to release new features. This phase involves moving changes to production.
7. Continuous Operations: This phase includes proactive maintenance, such as regular updates and patching, plus incident response and recovery when needed. AWS managed services like AWS OpsWorks can help streamline these operations.

Each phase feeds into the next, creating a cycle of continuous improvement aimed at rapidly delivering features and improvements while maintaining high operational performance and security.

AWS DevOps Tools

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a suite of DevOps tools to help organizations streamline and automate their software development and deployment processes. Here are some key tools:

1. AWS CodeBuild: A fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy, eliminating the need to set up, patch, and manage your own build servers.
2. AWS CodeDeploy: This service automates software deployments to a variety of computer services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers, making it easier for you to rapidly release new features.
3. AWS CodePipeline: A fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
4. AWS CodeStar: This service enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS by providing a unified user interface, enabling you to manage your software development activities in one place.
5. AWS Cloud Formation: A service that provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment, enabling you to automate and manage your AWS resources.

Azure DevOps vs. AWS DevOps

Criteria	Azure DevOps	AWS DevOps
Service Integration	Deep integration with other Microsoft services, and supports third-party integrations through its marketplace.	Deep integration with AWS services and offers options for third-party tools through AWS Partner Network.
Infrastructure	Provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Serverless computing.	Primarily Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) but also offers Serverless computing and some PaaS services.
Best Features	1. Comprehensive end-to-end DevOps toolchain. 2. Seamless integration with Visual Studio and other Microsoft products. 3. Azure Boards for tracking work items. 4. Azure Test Plans for planned and exploratory testing.	1. A comprehensive set of DevOps specific tools that integrate well with AWS ecosystem. 2. AWS Cloud Formation for infrastructure as code capabilities. 3. AWS CodePipeline for continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Benefits of AWS DevOps

Implementing DevOps practices with Amazon Web Services (AWS) can provide several benefits:

1. Increased Speed and Agility: AWS enables you to quickly and securely deliver software, allowing for more frequent and reliable deployments. Its robust toolset aids rapid provisioning and de-provisioning of resources, thereby accelerating the entire development lifecycle.
2. Improved Collaboration: By breaking down the traditional silos between development and operations teams, AWS DevOps promotes a culture of shared responsibility, enhanced communication, and faster feedback.
3. Enhanced Security: AWS offers a set of security capabilities designed to help satisfy compliance requirements and protect sensitive data, which are crucial for DevOps practices. Using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), teams can define roles with a precise set of permissions.
4. Cost-Effective: Pay-as-you-go pricing models, the ability to match resource usage to actual demand, and automation of operational tasks reduce overall IT costs.
5. Innovation: The AWS DevOps model encourages experimentation by making it easier to provision and manage infrastructure, deploy application code, automate software release processes, and monitor application and infrastructure performance.

Course FAQ’s

Q1: Who is the target audience for this course?

The AWS DevOps course is aimed at professionals such as Systems Administrators, Software Developers, IT Managers, IT Operations staff, and anyone interested in learning about DevOps practices in the AWS environment.

Q2: What are the prerequisites for this course?

It’s recommended that you have a basic understanding of AWS services and operations, as well as some experience in IT or software development. Familiarity with Linux or Unix administration can also be helpful.

Q3: What will I learn in this course?

The course covers an overview of DevOps, the DevOps lifecycle, AWS DevOps tools and services, continuous integration/continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and monitoring and logging practices.

Q4: Do I need to know how to code to take this course?

While coding knowledge can be beneficial, especially for understanding concepts like Infrastructure as Code (IaC) or writing test scripts, it may not be strictly necessary. The course often focuses on the use and management of AWS tools and services, which don’t always require coding.

Q5: How can I practice what I learn?

AWS provides a Free Tier that includes a wide range of services, which you can use to practice your skills and apply what you learn in the course.

Conclusion

The AWS DevOps online training & certification course by Multisoft Virtual Academy provides an excellent foundation for professionals aiming to understand and implement DevOps practices in an AWS environment. The AWS DevOps certification course offers a well-rounded overview of key AWS DevOps tools and principles, providing practical knowledge to enhance your software development and deployment processes. It is carefully designed to cater to a variety of learners, whether you’re a developer, systems administrator, or an IT operations staff member.

With the knowledge gained from this course, you can increase the speed, efficiency, and quality of your software delivery, ultimately driving business value and customer satisfaction.