Accelerating Your DevOps Journey with AWS

Digital transformation is key to the success of any modern business that wants to deliver great products and delight its customers. It involves the integration of digital technologies and solutions across all areas of the organization. To be successful in this journey, the majority of organizations leverage software automation. This helps them stay ahead of their competition, innovate faster, and reduce the lead time to produce something valuable for the end user. However, just moving fast is not sufficient. Moving fast, and executing well, every single time is where the real magic happens.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DevOps are two such enablers that spearhead organizations with fast and controlled growth. They are representative of high-performing teams and agile cultures. Both are often misunderstood in different ways.

DevOps is a human-centered approach that aims at improving communication between people, while software and automation contribute to this goal. It aims at removing silos that block organizations from delivering software faster, and with increased quality. Adopting DevOps requires a change in culture and mindset. The core idea is to remove barriers between development and operations – the two traditionally siloed groups. By frequently communicating with each other, these take complete ownership of their deliverables, often going beyond the scope of their job titles. In some organizations, there might not be any difference between development and operations; they are just seen as one product team that owns the complete life cycle of the software – they build it, they run it.

AWS, on the other hand, is a public cloud provider that helps users get rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. It provides managed services that help you focus on what you do best while it takes care of everything else. However, it is important to understand that the benefit you reap from these services will largely depend on how you use them and the level of AWS expertise within your organization. Some customers end up increasing their costs while others are able to reduce them. Some might make their application architectures more resilient than before, and others may not. In addition, people mostly view the cloud as a replacement for their on-premises IT landscape, but its real value can also be seen during seamless integration with your existing or future platforms. Sometimes, it just sits there, alongside your data centers, providing you with core differentiating capabilities.

To keep it short, DevOps is not just about automation and tools; DevOps is not just about the cloud. There’s a lot more to it. But if you are a software professional, using AWS anyway, and want to accelerate your DevOps adoption, this book is for you. We want you to be successful in accelerating your software delivery by using AWS. The intent is not to have answers to all the problems you will ever face, but rather to ensure a strong foundational understanding and strategy that you can apply to a variety of problems on AWS, now and in the future.

In this chapter, we will go through some practical solution implementations and DevOps methodologies and will discuss how AWS fits into the overall picture.

The main topics in this chapter are the following:

• AWS and DevOps – a perfect match
• Key AWS DevOps services