How to apply the DevOps approach with AWS?

What is the DevOps approach and its link to AWS?

Several definitions exist to talk about DevOps, sometimes a methodology, sometimes tools, or even an approach to information development.

DevOps Definition

DevOps is the contraction of developers (dev) and operational (ops). The DevOps methodology, therefore, consists of having developers and ops communicate and collaborate on your projects. The goal is to increase an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity and with better quality.

The DevOps approach has many advantages, among them:

• Fast delivery of new features (CICD: automation of software release and deployment process);
• Reliability of the infrastructure (monitoring and logging in order to have real-time performance monitoring, quality of updates);
• Infrastructure scalability (IaaC which allows more efficient management of development, test, and production environments);
• Better collaboration between the technical teams, thanks to the sharing of responsibilities between the development and operations teams (reduction of transfer times between the development and operations teams);
• Improved infrastructure security through automated compliance policies, tighter controls, and configuration management techniques.

AWS Definition of DevOps

Launched in 2006, AWS is a cloud provider that offers on-demand cloud computing services for businesses and individuals. It offers both a scalable infrastructure essential to a DevOps approach and a suite of tools allowing developers to easily and quickly set up automation of their integration and deployment processes.

AWS offers more than 200 services with infrastructure technologies such as computing, storage, and databases, but also machine learning and artificial intelligence or analysis and the Internet of Things.

How to set up a DevOps approach with AWS?

Several tools exist in order to set up a DevOps approach with AWS, we will focus on the ones linked to the CICD chain. More specifically, we will study 3 main tools: AWS Codecommit, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeBuild.

AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit is a managed, secure, and scalable source control service.

This tool has many advantages:

• It allows technical teams to securely collaborate on code, with contributions encrypted in transit and at rest;
• It allows servers to be automatically sized to meet changing project needs;
• It supports standard Git features, which ensures excellent compatibility with existing Git tools;
• It enables good collaboration between technical teams through the implementation of workflows. These include default code reviews and comments, as well as controlling who can edit given branches;
• It increases the speed and frequency of the development lifecycle. It’s due to fine management of the repositories near your development environments, test, and production, within the AWS cloud.

AWS CodePipeline

AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that automates delivery pipelines for fast and reliable deployment of application and infrastructure updates.

This tool presents several advantages : 

• It allows you to quickly modify the code based on the feedback received and send new features to customers more quickly. Automating the build, review, and release process makes it quick and easy to test every code change and catch bugs when they're still small and easy to fix. Thus, ensuring the quality of the application or infrastructure code easily;
• It enables easy testing by modeling the different stages of the software release process using the console interface, AWS CLI, AWS CloudFormation, or SDK;
• It allows easy integration with third-party services like GitHub or with a custom plugin.

AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages.

This tool has many advantages:

• It allows multiple builds to be scaled and continuously processed at once, so none of them sit in a queue;
• There is no software to manage or install and therefore eliminates the need for technical teams to configure, deploy patches, update and manage their software and build servers;
• It allows pay-per-use: billing is based on the number of minutes needed to perform a generation. (No need to pay for generation server capacity that is not used)

AWS offers many tools to enable technical teams to adopt a DevOps approach. We have seen 3 tools that can accelerate and improve the CICD chain, but AWS also offers Infrastructure as Code, monitoring, or security tools that also allow a DevOps approach.

If you have more specific questions, or if you want to give us information to complete this article, do not hesitate to write to us via our contact form!