With product delivery pipeline efficiency depending pretty much on infrastructure uptime, performance and stability these days, DevOps & Cloud fusion is a feat for software development. Some level of operational efficiency comes with a DevOps process running on cloud. Thanks to the scalable, uninterrupted and highly performant features of the cloud.
The Fusion: DevOps Meets Cloud
DevOps, in its own culture, is a software development process focusing primarily on enhancing software as a product delivery pipeline, in other words, an implementation that leverages state-of-the-art tools, technologies and principles which form a culture. Its significant uptake is driven by this culture which takes advantage of cloud to further streamline software development.
Imagine a DevOps team operating in an in-home or traditional environment, so to speak, and there is a requirement for significant hardware upgrade. This is likely going to hurt if not halt the development process, leading to downtime, instability and more. Against this backdrop, an organization may experience a serious disaster.
In tandem with DevOps on the contrary, Cloud seeks to eliminate the challenges of implementing DevOps in a traditional environment. Likewise, much of what we call DevOps takes place on cloud with availability of such capabilities as scalability, real-time monitoring, zero downtime, automation of various things.
In addition, DevOps adoptions depends on four essentials practices:
- Continuous Planning
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
DevOps & Cloud As A Solution
Cloud allows the full automation of these practices to streamline a DevOps workflow and more importantly, reduce error factors and a product time-to-market. Thus DevOps & Cloud can go hand in gloves as:
DevOps as a Services: automation and delivery of continuous integration and continuous deployment in a SaaS (software as a service) fashion with the entire premise of streamlining DevOps adoption. Most leading cloud platforms have this option integrated with some of their cloud services.
DevOps + Cloud: cloud implementation of DevOps solutions using IAAS or infrastructure as a service model for the automation of software operation. It fosters rapid delivery because of the efficiency of the cloud technologies used.
CloudSecOps: Implementation of cloud security as a hardening practice for DevOps with emphasis on stability, security and speed.
In conclusion, proper implementation of DevOps helps maximize the efficiency of an entire DevOps lifecycle down to delivery. Things can get quite messy on the other hand when something goes wrong with the process. For that reason, DevOps adoption incorporates cloud as means for fostering agile delivery pipeline especially, on enterprise level, where production workload must be effectively managed.