A look at AWS DevOps and platform engineering services
In the ever-evolving landscape of software development and operations, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and platform engineering practices have become indispensable methodologies. When combined with the capabilities of Amazon Web Services (AWS), these disciplines enable organizations to optimize their processes, improve reliability and scale their applications efficiently.
But, first of all, let’s look at some cross-cutting concepts that will give us the necessary context. These explanations provide a concise overview of each term, capturing their basic concepts and their importance within the field of software development and operations.
What is automation?
It refers to the process of using technology to perform tasks and operations with minimal human intervention. It aims to optimize repetitive manual processes, enabling faster and more reliable execution of tasks, such as software creation, testing and deployment.
What is Continuous Integration (CI)?
It is a development practice in which developers regularly merge their code changes into a shared repository. With CI, each code change is verified through automated build and test processes, ensuring that changes integrate smoothly and without conflict.
What is Continuous Deployment (CD)?
It is a continuous integration extension that automates the release and deployment of validated code changes in production environments. Using Continuous deployment ensures that software is always available, allowing teams to release new features and updates quickly and reliably.
What is Continuous Delivery (CD)?
Continuous delivery is an approach to software development that emphasizes frequent and reliable software releases. It encompasses a set of practices and tools to automate the delivery process, from code commit to production deployment. Using continuous delivery mechanisms ensures that software is always available, allowing teams to release new features and updates quickly and reliably.
Continuous delivery vs. deployment: what’s the difference?
“Continuous delivery automates the deployment of a release into an environment for staging or testing. Continuous deployment automates the distribution of each release through its pipeline (including testing) and production,” explains Carl Caum in Puppet Blog.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a collaborative culture and set of practices that brings development and operations teams together to simplify software delivery. It promotes close cooperation, shared responsibilities and automation throughout the software development lifecycle, enabling teams to deliver high-quality programs more efficiently.
What is platform engineering?
A discipline that focuses on building and maintaining the infrastructure, tools and services that enable development teams to deliver software applications effectively. It involves designing and providing a platform that offers standardized capabilities, such as deployment automation, scaling, monitoring and security, allowing application teams to concentrate on building and delivering their software rather than managing the underlying infrastructure.
List of services
AWS has a wide range of services oriented to the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from code storage and versioning to deployment according to the continuous delivery paradigm. We review them below to get a global perspective that allows us to locate the right tool in each case. However, many of them are designed to work with each other and that is how they provide the most value.
Finally, it should be noted that these services are oriented to software implementation, and in the SageMaker platform there are others that are more oriented to MLOps that we will not discuss here.
Specific tools for development
AWS Cloud9
A Cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows developers to write, run and debug code in the cloud. It provides a collaborative environment with features such as code editing, debugging and collaboration tools. The most striking point is that it supports several out-of-the-box programming languages and can be accessed through a web browser.
AWS CodeGuru
Developer tool with machine learning technology that provides automated code reviews and performance recommendations, helps developers write high quality code and improve application efficiency. Analyzes code quality, identifies potential problems and suggests improvements to optimize application performance.
AWSCodeStar
A fully integrated development toolset that allows you to develop, build and deploy applications on AWS. It provides project templates, integrated CI/CD pipelines and collaboration tools. CodeStar helps you quickly configure and manage the entire application development lifecycle.
AWS CodeWhisperer
It is an AI coding companion that generates real-time, single-line or full-function code hints in its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to help you create software quickly.
AWS CodeCommit
Fully managed source code version control service that enables secure hosting of private Git repositories. It provides a scalable and highly available Git-based repository with features such as branch management, access control and integrations with CI/CD pipelines. In a nutshell, CodeCommit helps teams collaborate when writing code and manage version control efficiently and very economically.
Specific tools for development
AWS CodeBuild
A fully managed Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) service. It compiles source code, runs tests and produces deployable artifacts. It can also integrate with other AWS services and supports industry standard build tools. It allows you to automate build processes, ensuring consistent and reliable software builds.
AWS CodeDeploy
Deployment service that automates code deployments to multiple compute resources, including EC2 instances, Lambda functions and local servers. Allows you to define deployment configurations, rollbacks and automatic scaling. Helps achieve consistent and reliable application deployments.
AWS Artifact
It is a fully managed artifact repository that allows you to store, publish and manage software packages and dependencies. It integrates with popular package managers such as Maven, npm and Python pip. Artifact helps simplify package management, improves artifact availability and ensures the integrity of your software supply chain.
AWS CodePipeline
A fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release processes. It allows you to build, test and deploy your applications with fast and reliable pipelines. It also integrates with various AWS services and third-party tools, providing flexibility and automation in the software release lifecycle.
Amazon CodeCatalyst
It is a service that provides a comprehensive management platform for our developments in AWS, from our AWS ID Builder, which is personal and not tied to an account, we can develop applications with a multi-developer environment that integrates the other AWS development services and some third-party integrations.
AWS Proton
A fully managed deployment service for containerized and serverless applications. It simplifies and automates the process of deploying, managing and monitoring applications in a consistent and repeatable manner. This service helps development teams accelerate application delivery while maintaining best practices and standards.
Native Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools
AWS CloudFormation
The native AWS IaC (Infrastructure As Code) service allows you to provision and manage AWS resources using templates. It allows you to describe your infrastructure as code, making it easy to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources. Like any other IaC tool, your templates can be versioned, shared, and reused, providing consistency and scalability in resource provisioning.
AWS Service Catalog
This service allows organizations to create and manage a catalog of IT services that users can provide within their organization. It provides a self-service portal where users can browse and launch pre-approved services.
Some management and governance services more related to this context
AWS OpsWorks
A configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet. It allows you to automate infrastructure deployment, configuration and application lifecycle management. These services help teams and enterprises manage complex application stacks and automate operational tasks.
AWS AppConfig
A service that allows you to deploy and manage application configurations. It allows you to create, manage and deploy configurations with the ability to perform controlled deployments and updates. AppConfig helps you separate configuration from code, making it easy to manage and change application configurations without redeploying them.
Monitoring and alarming services
Amazon DevOps Guru
This machine learning-based service from Amazon helps you identify operational problems and improve application reliability. It analyzes application telemetry data to detect anomalous behavior, provides feedback and offers recommendations to proactively remediate problems. It is geared to help optimize application performance and reduce downtime.
Amazon Managed Service para Prometheus
Offers a scalable, highly available and fully managed Prometheus-compliant monitoring service. Provides a reliable and secure solution for collecting, querying and visualizing Prometheus metrics.
Amazon Managed Grafana
A fully managed service that simplifies the implementation and operation of Grafana, an open source analytics and visualization platform. It allows you to create and explore dashboards, visualize data and obtain information from various data sources.
AWS X-Ray
A service for analyzing and debugging distributed applications. Provides end-to-end visibility into requests as they flow through various AWS services and components. Helps identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot problems, and understand application behavior. The downside is that you need to include some code in your application, but the information it provides is very useful.
Finally, remember that if you want to make the leap to the Amazon cloud, with the AWS by Altostratus Cloud Consulting service we help you in all phases of your project: Cloud Migration and Adoption, Managed Services, FinOps and Cost Control, Backup & Disaster Recovery, Self-Managed Reselling, Security and Compliance.
