Cloud Solutions for DevOps | How they Work Together?

DevOps is a casket that contains automation as its basic principle. A process that was developed to automate the processes from build creation to deployment and maybe everything in between. Today, we are here to talk about the successful amalgamation of DevOps and cloud-based technologies, which is amazing in itself.

What is Cloud DevOps?

DevOps is a software engineering practice that most organizations use today to run their development processes. It enables software development teams to actively and readily build, test, and deploy applications by combining development and operations functions. This approach not only reduces the back-and-forth communication between different teams but also allows them to carry out the work in a sequential manner.

But to leverage the best possible results of DevOps, the team needs tools at their disposal. It supports transparent communication and eliminates human-prone errors. And automation helps DevOps teams get all the work done. The right approach toward automation helps DevOps engineers to communicate better, document the requirements easily, and report bugs to the right team at the right time.

Seems like cloud-based solutions to run these tools. It will host all the tools on the cloud, offer the necessary space to store data and provide secure access to authorized individuals.

DevOps and cloud-based solutions mingle in such a synchronous manner it seems like they were developed to support each other. But this is not true in any aspect.

With this post, we will throw some light on this symbiotic relationship between DevOps and cloud-based solutions. We will also talk about how this is affecting the market and the product as a whole.

Check here – Cloud Testing

Why Opt for Cloud Based Solutions and DevOps?

As a developer, while interacting with other industry professionals, I have found a few people sceptical about merging cloud-based solutions with DevOps. Cloud solutions have seen tremendous growth in the past five years.

With reasons distributed throughout the post, a lot of them think that both of these technologies are meant to be separate rather than together. While the bottom line is that they are mistaken, the following reasons would support my argument:

Extremely Fast

Cloud-based solutions are extremely fast when combined with DevOps. DevOps on their own are meant to slash down the time taken from building a patch to deploying it on the servers. Cloud computing solutions work as a catalyst in this process due to the easily available high processing power of the cloud, resulting in faster deployments.

Centralizes the Processes

DevOps is not a single system, rather it is a combination of many processes – testing, deployment, production, etc – thus, it’s better termed as a ‘distributed infrastructure’. Cloud-based solutions help to easily centralize all the distributed systems and processes and can be managed from the same place anywhere, anytime.

Cost-Saver

Cloud based solutions are extremely cheap when compared to building and maintaining a DevOps infrastructure on-premise. A survey of 1300 companies concluded that 88% of employees believe cloud computing saved overall costs.

Cloud based solutions often charge based on the usage of resources (such as running pipelines in our scenario) and not a fixed price (not all though). The cost is comparatively cheap and you only pay when you run the pipeline, which is perfect! 

Minimum Resource Set Up Required

Cloud based solutions are equipped with all the necessary resources in their system. This reduces a lot of overhead that usually accompanies on-premises DevOps.

Setting up DevOps on-premise would mean setting up a big infrastructure to maintain it. Such systems take time to build and cost money which can all be saved by going towards the cloud-based approach.

Apart from these, cloud-based solutions mixed with test automation capabilities provide a lot of benefits simplifying the overall development process. If you are confused about the diverse cloud-based solutions available in the market today, let me help you with this.

Who is Involved in Cloud DevOps?

Cloud DevOps is performed by engineers who have specialized in cloud technologies and understand DevOps software, its lifecycle, and how it connects and affects software production. They primarily work in development, management, configurational setup, support infrastructure, continuous pipeline, and software delivery processes. Apart from the configurational and storage part, the processes are often overseen by developers to verify the accuracy and point out any bugs if present at an early stage.

How do DevOps and Cloud work together?

Cloud technologies have been able to touch almost all types of services whether one belongs to the technical world or not (such as file storage). DevOps has been no exception and when the team needs to integrate with the cloud, it can be either due to some compulsion, a part of future planning, or just to enhance the process. When such a point arrives and the team starts to wonder about how DevOps and cloud work together, one or more of these paths will be the solution to it.

DevOps with cloud-based elements

DevOps is a complex infrastructure with many elements that work together to accomplish the production release. Not only does its initial setup take time but the maintenance work is time-consuming as well. For instance, as the application scales up, horizontal or vertical scaling might become a common scenario for the team. For every such request, the team has to reconfigure and initialize many elements and include them in the existing infrastructure. This is a time and cost-heavy process and is repeated at frequent intervals.

Organizations that provide cloud-based elements are a great way to integrate DevOps elements into the infrastructure without ever worrying about their scalability and management. Cloud solutions for DevOps are the perfect way through which the team doesn’t lose control over the processes and still works as efficiently as they would on-premise. This is also a great option to choose when the team is trying to move towards the cloud from on-premise as it is easier to shift. However, the only downside is that migration to other tools sometimes becomes tough especially when historical data also needs to be moved.

CloudSecOps (Cloud Security Operations)

Security Operations (SecOps) is a branch that deals with the security aspects of the processes. It looks at the potential threats a system can invite and closes the gates before any malicious activity happens. When the target systems of these operations are cloud-based processes or applications, SecOps becomes CloudSecOps and is an essential element for DevOps on the cloud. 

CloudSecOps has to be a critical aspect of DevOps, especially if the team has considered moving processes to the cloud. Once the elements are not on-premise and the internet is connected, a threat to its security will always hover around, posing a high risk as the infrastructure can be exposed. CloudSecOps ensures that the DevOps services on the cloud are secure and there are no hidden loopholes to attack the system.

DevOps as a service (DaaS)

DevOps as a service is the third option where another organization provides the complete DevOps infrastructure on the cloud. This is similar to SaaS and IaaS eliminating the need to develop and keep any resource on-premise and all a developer would need is a sign-up to the website. 

DaaS provides a lot of benefits to the team. For instance, requirements to develop and maintain complex DevOps infrastructure are completely eliminated. Due to this, the team members who work on DevOps are not required to have any special skills. The infrastructure also gets a high uptime, and often there will be monitoring and tracking software attached to each account for analysis.

Advantages of Cloud based Solutions for DevOps Teams

Cloud based solutions for DevOps have many major advantages that help all the different teams working on a project come have clear and concise communication.Some reasons why you should also choose Cloud based Solutions for DevOps:

• Easy communication and collaboration: At every step of the process, cloud solutions for DevOps promote transparent and ready communication. You don’t have to spend time sending files and emails back and forth. Simply log into your system and access the necessary documents, data, and tools from anywhere without waiting for a response from your teammate.
• Scalability: Your projects and teams are likely to increase with time and as your business grows. Instead of spending money and resources on moving from on-premises systems to the cloud, starting with cloud solutions will give you an edge to scale your business needs.
• Ease of adoption: It is comparatively easy and simple to adopt and access cloud solutions for DevOps. For on-premises activities, you would need to buy the server, and the tools, install them, get storage space for all your data, and do much more. With the cloud, simply purchase a plan, access the cloud platform, and then configure and set up the tool with vendor support.
• Better stability: Because you are taking a package that includes cloud-hosted services, they will provide you with better overall cloud infrastructure and improved uptime to run your projects. The cloud vendor will offer customer support, maintenance, monitoring, integration, testing, and many more services.
• Decreased ownership cost: It is cheaper and resource-effective to go for cloud solutions for DevOps rather than setting up all those tools in-house. The process offers easy access to all the projects without buying new servers, equipment, and professionals for the work.

Check here – Cloud Testing Tools

Best Practices in Cloud DevOps

The following best practices will facilitate the processes and bring down the time of execution in cloud DevOps.

• Use Infrastructure as Code: Most of the cloud-based DevOps tools provide a method to provision machines and other resources based on a configurational file. This is called Infrastructure as Code (or IaC). Without it, the engineer has to perform every provision and configuration manually including the frequent scaling work. This can waste a lot of time and since the IaC facility is available with most of the cloud tools, it is a good practice to adopt them.

• Do not miss CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery works at the heart of DevOps cycles. They get automatically triggered (often by a code push), build the executable, set up the environment, run a series of tests (like unit and acceptance tests), and verify the application’s stability. Earlier they were set up on-premise by dedicating a separate machine where job queues were placed. It is a great advantage to the team that CI/CD can be initiated and configured online for multiple teams at a central location without doing much manual work. Teams should take advantage of it and move their CI/CD part over the cloud if they have it on-premise.

• Try to stick to a single platform: Cloud solutions for DevOps do not force anyone to only use their platform and stick with all the solutions they provide in each category. They are open for integration with on-premise installation or tools from other organizations. Version control systems and CI/CD pipelines are common examples. A good practice to follow in cloud DevOps is to stick to one platform and use their solutions instead of making a complex web. It also helps keep all the data in a single place for monitoring and analysis which is very helpful. However, the only thing to remember is to use a tool from a good company like Amazon or Google that has a proven record.

• Think beyond the current scenario: Sometimes a team finalizes a tool that satisfies their current scenario. With time they realize that their infrastructure has now scaled up or has changed its working methods and now a few more elements are required. For instance, one may move towards containerization and orchestration. At that time, they either migrate or integrate, both of which will demand time and costs from the user. It is better to choose such a platform (even if it may cost a little more) that provides much more than just CI/CD and code repo from the start and avoid future hassles.

• Speed is not important: Cloud DevOps is one of the few areas where one is recommended to sacrifice speed if quality is being compromised. This should be kept as one of the best practices to follow while working on DevOps. Practically, DevOps infrastructure works internally and end-users are not affected by its working. For these internal teams, if the software takes two minutes more than usual, nothing will be affected. However, to save two minutes per process if quality is compromised, it will propagate to the end-user and will hurt the business reputation.

These best practices specific to the cloud solutions for DevOps can improve the quality of the structure and help the team move ahead in the most optimized and proven way possible.

Best Ways of Combining the Cloud and DevOps

While it is advisable to put all your DevOps infrastructure on the cloud, this might not always be possible due to various restrictions. In such cases, the following cloud and DevOps combination will help.

DevOps native applications

The most efficient method of combining cloud solutions for DevOps is to use a native application available over the cloud. Such native applications provide all the solutions required to achieve a cloud-based DevOps infrastructure. These solutions will span from providing a source code repository for version control systems to scaling options with auto-scaling features to containerization and orchestration methods. DevOps native applications are the best options to achieve DevOps on the cloud except for the costs it bring with us. Such solutions are heavier on the pocket and since such costs will grow as the application scales, it can be a concern for individuals, and small and mid-scale businesses.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

One of the primary reasons for considering the operations of DevOps in the cloud for the team is because of CI/CD pipelines. The on-premise arrangement of a CI/CD pipeline is extremely messy with many sub-pipelines and complex parameters working to run each of them. Interestingly, rarely one can find a single person who would know everything about all the pipelines running in the project. In addition, they take up a lot of space because pipelines run on dedicated machines that cannot be used for other purposes.

Leveraging the power of continuous integration and continuous delivery over the cloud can be a beneficial deal for DevOps as it is one of the most resource-intensive and commonly used elements of DevOps. Almost every organization deals with CI/CD and managing it through the cloud can bring down project costs and free up precious resources for the team as well.

Adopt IaC paradigm

DevOps requires a lot of configurational management that connects different elements. The team is also required to keep scaling up according to the requirements and initialize new resources (or disconnect) based on usage and requirements. Cloud solutions for DevOps provide the functionality of “Infrastructure as Code” which means instead of manually working through the configurations and initializations, the cloud platform will accept a configurational file (which has a standard format) and will configure and initialize new machines based on the file. 

This is not only an easy method to work through DevOps but also the safest one. IaC does not require long manual work which reduces any errors in the infrastructure and takes a lot of time and costs to manage and repair.

While these are just the popular methods of working with cloud solutions for DevOps, there are other ways too that the team can leverage based on their requirements. For instance, DevSecOps deals with the security of DevOps infrastructure and if the team is concerned about the vulnerabilities in their system, this can be a safe way to go.

What are the Cloud DevOps Tools?

Some of the commonly used cloud solutions for DevOps are:

AWS DevOps Tools

AWS is a cloud computing platform (or one can say a cloud solution for DevOps) provided by Amazon that comes with a suite of applications that help in DevOps processes. Each tool targets a few specific processes (one or more) and the Cloud DevOps engineer is expected to provision them and connect as per the requirement of the team.

• AWS CodePipeline: This is a continuous delivery tool used to build, test, and deploy the application to the users. AWS CodePipeline is used to model the software release processes, help automate the release process, and speed up the software delivery cycle with significant improvements.

• AWS CodeBuild: This is a fully managed DevOps tool used to build and manage source code on the cloud. It can compile the code, run unit tests, and produce artifacts that are ready to deploy. It also provides customizable build environments that contain programming languages like Java and build tools like Maven.

• AWS CodeDeploy: This DevOps tool is used to deploy application code from servers to Amazon EC2 instances, on-premises instances, serverless Lambda functions, or Amazon ECS services. The engineers can deploy a variety of application content such as code, lambda functions, or executables but the content has to be available in Amazon S3 bucket, GitHub repositories, or Bitbucket repositories.

Azure DevOps Tools

Azure DevOps tools is a comprehensive suite that helps in the development and maintenance of a DevOps infrastructure on the cloud. Three of the primary tools in this suite can be as follows:

• Azure Boards: Sprint board management is an essential tool today as teams move towards the agile method of software development. Azure Boards help manage backlogs, and assigned tasks, monitor progress, and scale up without worrying about managing workloads. The team can also connect their GitHub repository to link the commits and PRs instantly to Azure Boards.

• Azure Pipelines: This DevOps tool by Microsoft brings the process of building, testing, and deploying the executable to the cloud. The cloud pipeline can be connected to GitHub as well and monitor the changes in the repository automatically.

• Azure Artifacts: This DevOps tool helps in storing packages on the account and sharing them with the team from a single location. The packages can vary between Maven, npm, Python, Rust, etc., and can be integrated into any pipeline for continuous integration and delivery.

Google DevOps Tools

Google DevOps tools is a cloud solution for DevOps provided by Google over the cloud to streamline the application build, testing, and deployment processes. 

• Google Cloud Build: This DevOps tool, as the name suggests, is used for building the executable across all programming languages including Java, Python, Go, Node.js, etc. Google Cloud Build gives the flexibility to perform hundreds of build operations concurrently chosen across 15 types of machines and deployed across multiple environments like Kubernetes, VMs, serverless, etc.

• Google Cloud Deploy: This DevOps tool by Google is made specifically to fulfill the application deployment requirements. The team can deploy directly to the Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Run with an option to create a pipeline on these tools. The tool comes with security and analytical components to monitor the metrics as well.

• Artifact Registry: Google’s Artifact Registry serves as a centralized repository where the team can store their packages, artifacts, and container images. This tool can be then integrated into Google Cloud CI/CD services or personal CI/CD tools as well.

GitHub DevOps Tools

GitHub started as a version control system but has always been open to integrating new technologies that help facilitate software development. Its transformation in the DevOps area has been remarkable, with exciting tools helping developers deploy their applications easily.

• GitHub Actions: This DevOps tool helps build a workflow on GitHub that can build, test, and deploy the code all from the GitHub repository. The team can also integrate CI/CD tools, introduce branch management, and conduct code reviews all from a single place.

• GitHub Packages: Used alongside the source code repository and available in all three plans of GitHub, GitHub Packages allow the team to store their packages and use them as dependencies in the project. These packages can also be hosted publicly for all and can be extended to store container registries as well.

• GitHub Copilot: This DevOps cloud solution is an artificial intelligence-integrated software that provides multiple applications for the team. It can write code and create documentation just by receiving the input in textual form. GitHub Copilot also lets the user choose the AI model to use rather than restricting them to a single model for their satisfaction and preference.

Conclusion

DevOps has changed the way the industry used to work before. With the introduction of automation into every process, we have delivered better quality software in these times.

On the other hand, cloud-based solutions have contributed in their own way by skipping the process of downloading heavy software, using multiple tools for functionality, and maintaining the infrastructure. If DevOps and cloud solutions are the second-best ideas to revolutionize, what would be the best one? Join them together!

DevOps is a friend but takes a lot of maintenance. Merging DevOps with cloud-based solutions not only removes the infrastructure overhead and external tool installation but it speeds up the overall process. DevOps with a cloud-based solution is a method to improve and shine more than ever.

With test automation capabilities and features to satisfy every type of user, a cloud solution looks like it is made specifically for DevOps from the start. It would not be wrong to say that they play a symbiotic relationship role in the industry today.

But these are probably my experiences with professionals and my thoughts on the same. I am eager to listen to what your experience has been and would love to see some interesting hacks in the comment section!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How is the cloud used in DevOps?

DevOps is a software engineering practice suited for cloud computing. It integrates development with IT operations to enable instantaneous deployment of products and services on the cloud.

Do we need the cloud for DevOps?

By using cloud solutions for DevOps, your team will be able to communicate better. It facilitates clear collaboration among different teams, so they don’t have to wait around for work to get done.

What is cloud deployment in DevOps?

Cloud deployment in DevOps is the process of deploying applications through one or more hosting models. It consists of software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and/or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to leverage the benefits of the cloud.

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