As businesses navigate through today’s ever-evolving digital ecosystem, the race to deliver software applications faster, efficiently and reliably is a vital component of their ability to drive results. Welcome DevOps! — This is where DevOps enters the picture. DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), which aims to shorten the systems development lifecycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Unfortunately, this is not an easy process to embark upon when implementing DevOps without effective tools. Thankfully, the meld of tools spawned by cloud technologies can provide a helping hand for companies looking to enhance their DevOps.

In this article, we will dive into how cloud-based tools are transforming the DevOps ecosystem to be more efficient and scalable, while telling you what businesses stand to gain by using these tools to maximize their DevOps efficiency.

The Rise of Cloud-Based DevOps Tools

Today everything is moving to the cloud, well nearly everything; Cloud computing has dramatically changed how organizations build, deploy and manage applications. Software development teams traditionally suffered from working in silos, using infrastructure managed in-house that needed to be maintained, upgraded, and manually scaled. By contrast, cloud-based tools have offered a revolutionary balance of infinite scale and resources at a lower cost with increased collaboration and automation.

The various DevOps tools and services available in cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) help you to automate end-to-end development, deployment, monitoring process. Because it is flexible, cloud infrastructure makes it easy for a business to grow or shrink resources as needed by projects, which means businesses gain the agility and efficiency; things that were never achieved with on-premise systems.

Advantages of Cloud-Based Tools in DevOps

Scalability and Flexibility

The ability to expand resources precisely as required of development teams leverage cloud-native tools. ScalabilityWhen your application requires more computational power say during peak times or a release cycle, cloud services can be easily scaled up and… This removes the need to purchase expensive infrastructure that results in reduced CapEX and pay only what you use.

Enhanced Collaboration

So, describing in a nutshell, collaboration is the keyword that controls between Developers & Operations than builds and goes live faster. Cloud-based DevOps tools help in centralizing the platform for various teams to work and unite from any part of the world. Developers are using Jira, Trello and Confluence for project management; Github & Gitlab for version control, code review, collaboration in one single platform.

CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment)

CI/CD pipelines, especially the ones based on the cloud are a big enabler of efficient modern DevOps practices. The following are some of the most popular tools that we use for achieving Continuous Deployment with AWS:AWS CodePipelineAzure DevOpsJenkins All these tools automate the complete release process, starting right from the code integration itself till test execution and deployment. Using these tools, developers can commit their code to the repositories after which builds and tests can be curated in the cloud so as that commits do not fail due to manual errors hence making their releases faster and more reliable.

Cost Efficiency

These DevOps tools are cloud-based and work on a pay-as-you-go basis. This allows businesses to save in-house costs related with the management of infrastructure — like server managing, hardware upgrades etc. Through the cloud, resources can be allocated per actual use, without needing to over provision.

Automation and Monitoring

Automation is the key to efficient DevOps, and cloud tools allow for automation of repetitive tasks like code testing, configuration management or infrastructure provisioning. Automation Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — GitOps Philosophy Example: Automation tools like Terraform, Chef, and Ansible help teams automate all things infrastructure instead of doing manual configurations. Cloud monitoringMonitoring systems like (AWS) CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus and many others enable us to monitor the performance of applications and health check which helps development teams in detecting issues well before they turn into a major incident.

Core Cloud-Based DevOps Tools and Platforms

Having said the benefits of cloud-based DevOps tools now let me take you through some popular ones (in a best-of-breed fashion) and how they help generate efficiency:

AWS DevOps

AWS provides an extensive range of tools that aim to support DevOps practices, which encompass:

• AWS CodePipeline :Release Automationaws.amazon.com
• AWS CodeBuild : A fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.
• AWS CloudFormation : A service that enables developers to provision and manage cloud resources using a template.

Thanks to its worldwide infrastructure, AWS is reliable and scalable, so it caters well to companies that wish to optimize their DevOps procedures.

Azure DevOps

Microsoft Azure DevOps services is the entire platform that manage end-to-end Devops life cycle.

• AzureDevOps (used to be VsCode): 1st one is Azure Pipelines service that allows you to build, test and deploy your code from version control repository : including the ones stored in Github.
• Azure Boards : A tracking tool which is in sync with your code and gives a track of real-time progress.
• Azure Repos: Tools to help you manage code repositories and work together using version control.

Of all the platforms on our list, Azure is arguably most beneficial for enterprises that are already invested heavily in Microsoft tools and services because of its robust automation and integration features.

Google Cloud DevOps

• Google Cloud: Powerful toolset that are Kubernetes-centric and offer container orchestration and scalability.
• Google Cloud Build: It is a CI/CD tool that automate the build, testing and deployment process.
• GKE(Google kubernetes engine) : Google kubernetees engine gives you a way to start you instances in google cloud and run containers using K8s.
• Google Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver): This solution delivers monitoring and logging capabilities that provide you with near real-time feedback about application health.

One main benefit is Google Cloud’s tight integration with its AI and machine learning tools, which opens up further possibilities for DevOps automation.

How to Optimize DevOps Execution in Cloud Based Tools — Best Practices

Cloud-based tools should be used to the fullest, and for DevOps success best practices include:

Follow a Microservices Architecture

Moving to this microservices based architecture can help you divide applications into small, purpose-built services that flow freely from development through deployment and they are capable of being scalable independently. This speeds up the development process and allows new features to be implemented more quickly. Service orchestration facilitate easy management and containerization along with platforms like Docker and Kubernetes make scheduling, monitoring and scaling of microservices in cloud environment effortless.

Use an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solution

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows the provisioning and management of infrastructure through code that is versioned, tested and reusable. IaaC tools (Terraform, Ansible and AWS CloudFormation) allow to define your cloud infrastructure in configuration files so the changes you make to it remain consistent and replicable across all your environments.

Embrace CI/CD Pipelines

Use cloud-based CI/CD pipelines which shrink the time between writing code and giving users near-production applications. With code integration, testing and deployment automated away, teams can spend their time on writing good quality code and not placing emphasis on manual deployment tasks.

Monitor Everything

Visibility is key in DevOps. By keeping an eye on the applications, infrastructure and performance metrics continuously, issues can be identified promptly and resolved before they affect end-users. With cloud-based monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic, and Prometheus, you can know what is happening in your apps right now and predict any performance related issues.

Utilize Serverless Computing

Serverless: Run code on demand, i.e. Albs like AWS Lambda and Azure functions etc. Servers are claimed to be handled by vendors for these technologies. Adopting this paradigm lifts the operational overhead, and accelerates deployment by eliminating infrastructure management.

Conclusion

The digital transformation does not stop, it is a continuous process and you as an organization have to be always efficient, scalable and very agile. Cloud-based tools have provided a number of means to improve the efficiency of DevOps with scale and auto-scale, automation & ease of collaboration across teams. Whether you are working on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or other popular configuration management platforms, there is clear evidence that an increasing number of infrastructure teams are developing their own tools.

Cloud-based DevOps tools enable businesses to work more efficiently, spend less and deliver better quality in their software development lifecycle. Cloud is the future of DevOps, and if businesses with their old world approach embrace the cloud early, they will win this race in new digital era.