Get more from the cloud: Part 1: DevOps Practices

Batman and Robin. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Han Solo and Chewbacca. There’s nothing quite like a great partnership.

And we want to make a case for adding DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) to that list.

Because as far as dynamic duos go, we are hard pushed to find a better pairing within the current cloud IT infrastructure landscape. In fact, we’d even go as far as to say they’re superhero level. There are three main reasons for this. Speed. Automation. Scalability.

The way that DevOps and SRE work together in the cloud doesn’t just help businesses to “do IT better” and achieve their digital transformation goals. No, it’s much more important than that. In this first part of our look at DevOps and SRE, we’ll focus on the former.

What is DevOps?

Truth be told, defining DevOps is tricky. The term has slightly different definitions depending on the organization. We think these two general definitions, or two DevOps camps, put forward by Aater Suleman sum it up nicely:

1. Developer-friendly operations. Companies which use this definition tend to run IT operations separately. But it’s still run in a way which is much more friendly for developers (e.g. developers can provision infrastructure, etc using self-service catalogs)
2. DevOps as a single consolidated team. In businesses using this definition, developers take on operations responsibilities and vice versa.

What’s good about DevOps

OK, we realize that a lot of you may already have substantial knowledge of DevOps. But when we talk about DevOps on the cloud, it is a whole new ball game. Let’s have a look at the key benefits of DevOps on the cloud:

1. Speed. You can get your products to market faster than ever by having quicker access to development environments and streamlined developer processes.
2. Automation. Reduction in cloud complexity and system maintenance. How? By utilizing automation and infrastructure as code. In this was you can also analyze and iterate the whole delivery cycle.
3. Scalability. That magic word. And the reason why most organizations opt for cloud computing. Scalability enables businesses to increase (or decrease) capacity at the click of a button. When coupled with DevOps, scalability becomes an integral part of apps as they are developed — all this while reducing the cost of infrastructure and increasing global reach.
4. Goodbye downtime. Cloud-based continuous operations means no more downtime. Developers can build stateless applications, which increase both availability and failover capabilities. Which means enhancing business reliability and customer satisfaction.

Anything else?

Oh yes. There’s the bonus of ironclad-like security. This was too obvious to include in our top list. So it goes here as a timely reminder. Because one of the key misconceptions which continues to plague the world of cloud computing is that security is not better on the cloud. This simply isn’t true. Why? Because automation and repeated processes equal eliminating “fat-finger” error. Not only that, but you can build your security controls from day zero.

The points in all of the above is that in the end, it doesn’t matter what your definition of DevOps is. As long as its on the cloud, it’s a win-win situation. Greater effectiveness and business impact is the result, while all the while driving a meaningful IT transformation.

At Stackmasters we’re passionate about the way we handle our DevOps workflow. Watch this space next week to learn how SRE complements DevOps. And then some.