DevOps and Cloud - Why Are They Better Together

The development community is constantly seeking the best tools, techniques, and approaches to build and deploy the best solutions. Cloud computing is a flexible and scalable path to success for many of today's most innovative creators.

Cloud solutions offer new options for automation, growth, and security. DevOps integrated into cloud computing can help companies compete more effectively in an evolving market. To successfully incorporate cloud services, engineers must execute and adopt best practices.

In many cases, this involves updating the underlying architecture and modernizing an environment for cloud deployment. This article will discuss what it means to move DevOps into the cloud for modern businesses.

What Is DevOps and How Does It Work?

DevOps doesn't isolate operations and development teams as opposed to other development environments. Team members may even merge into a single unit where they can work across the entire application lifecycle, from development to deployment and operation.

Teams in a DevOps environment use various techniques to automate processes that previously required manual work. This enables them to develop applications more quickly.

How Are DevOps and the Cloud Related

Both DevOps and cloud have their benefits in an agile business environment. Through cloud technology, businesses have access to an endless range of features and solutions at a pace that suits their needs. A company's access to functionality is practically limitless with the cloud.

The same goes for DevOps, which helps encourage an agile environment for everyone. Each solution offers its unique advantages in terms of speed and productivity. When cloud and DevOps work together, they reinforce each other's strengths, allowing them to offer even more value.

Benefits of Combining Cloud-Centric DevOps

You'll have an environment built for flexibility and agility with cloud solutions and DevOps. The cloud can dramatically improve the software development process when combined with DevOps. Let’s look at some specific advantages of combining the two approaches.

Improved Operational Efficiency

By combining DevOps principles with cloud adoption, operational maturity can be achieved more seamlessly and effectively. In particular, businesses transitioning from startup to scale-up need to consider this issue.

The adoption of proven best practices can accelerate progress in this area. AWS and Azure's Well-Architected Frameworks are effective starting points.

Using Well-Architected's five pillars — Performance Efficiency, Cost-Optimization, Reliability, Security, and Operational Excellence — you can plan, build, operate and optimize your cloud effectively. A targeted and organized rearchitecting of systems will make it possible to ‘bake in’ the operability to support and accommodate future growth.

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership

Due to the rapid adoption of various types of cloud computing, cloud cost optimization has become a top priority for CTOs. Fortunately, DevOps and cloud computing can assist here as well.

In traditional on-premise settings, excess capacity is usually provided to handle peak demands. The volume of traffic in your industry might spike annually (e.g., during Black Friday), monthly (e.g., at the beginning of each month), or weekly (for example, during weekend grocery shopping). There are also other factors outside your control that can cause it to peak unexpectedly.

In other words, you are charged for this peak capacity every day of the year. Despite turning off servers to save power during non-peak hours, you still have to pay for rack space, software licensing, and network provisioning.

Cloud computing's rapid elasticity can help DevOps turn this around. You only pay (and use) the capacity that you need when you need it by automating critical parts of provisioning, application deployment, and orchestration. The total cost of ownership decreases because you only pay for the capacity you need.

Scalable Infrastructure

The cloud allows you to quickly scale up or down your infrastructure without spending much time or money on those systems. Developers will benefit from DevOps' high level of scalability, which makes it a great way to introduce new features, new functionality, and more growth opportunities.

By combining the cloud with DevOps, you can access endless possibilities for development within your organization.

Centralized Platform

Companies can deploy, monitor, and operate their production workloads from the cloud since it offers a centralized platform for all their testing, deployment, and monitoring needs. This makes it easy to keep track of everything in the same place.

Compliance and security can be easily managed with all your DevOps information in one location. It can also help you make smarter decisions and get more business intelligence. Supported with a powerful dataops platform, you will be able to generate and deliver the right data at the right time to the right stakeholders, which helps in automating the democratization of data.

Cloud-Based Automation Options

DevOps efficiency depends heavily on automation. Several cloud platforms offer advanced tools for automating DevOps processes like continuous integration and development.

There are several tools used for continuous integration, such as Travis CI, GitLab, CircleCI, and Jenkins. With these tools, there is less human interaction, and the environment is more consistent.

Stability and Uptime

Due to their focus on uptime and stability, cloud providers can take care of all management and maintenance for you.

By focusing on product development, IT companies can improve performance, provide better user experiences, and reduce time to market. It would be best if you chose a cloud provider that has the capability of delivering your business with reliable levels of uptime.

How Cloud-Based DevOps Helps Improve Productivity and Control

While DevOps can be agile under the right circumstances, it is often slowed down by lengthy processes outside of the cloud. Even if the development process is managed elegantly, purchasing hardware and software slows things down significantly.

An application development team must wait for all the infrastructure to be built before deploying it in a traditional environment. Cloud scalability provides an added boost to DevOps that enables it to reach its full potential.

DevOps automation continues to evolve into a cloud-centric and immersive practice as teams recognize more benefits. Most cloud computing providers offer a complete and integrated toolset for this purpose. Most cloud service providers provide continuous development and integration tools as well.

CI/CD integration for Automating DevOps will result in significant cost reductions compared to on-premises solutions.

Besides improving efficiency and productivity, DevOps solutions in the cloud also provide a more efficient and centralized governance environment. In turn, this facilitates more elaborate deployment processes within companies. Furthermore, developers participating in these processes are less likely to experience security issues or other problems.

Many DevOps professionals find that managing all their processes centrally in the cloud is far more accessible. Maintaining ownership over various components is much easier with more control and a more app-specific infrastructure.

The cloud offers a variety of tools and services that developers can use to automate specific tasks and processes. Team members can improve various development processes by using code to manage and provision resources.

As a result, developers have the opportunity to build variants of their solutions that can be optimized for a particular use case. Development time and queues are virtually eliminated through the DevOps environment in the cloud, resulting in a more efficient integration and deployment process.

Best Ways of Combining the Cloud and DevOps

Using the right cloud provider is the key to making DevOps in the cloud as effective as possible. To help your development team be successful in their new environment, you need to ensure that you understand all their needs.

Determining your development team’s requirements and the DevOps processes will assist you in deciding what type of cloud environment you need. It's essential to keep in mind, however, that your DevOps team's processes and demands change frequently.

DevOps is agile, which means the cloud must be flexible enough to adapt almost instantly.

It is also essential to ensure that all your team members are on board with the DevOps concept. Every organization should be doing everything possible to integrate DevOps and have it drive the right kind of cloud-native development.

First-time cloud and DevOps implementations can often present a challenge for organizations. Initially, you might be better off implementing the cloud and introducing your team to DevOps possibilities later.

You will need a carefully chosen strategy for implementing new DevOps solutions and cloud systems if you want to drive new business opportunities as you move into the DevOps era.

Conclusion

In recent years, the cloud has become increasingly popular in all aspects. Cloud environments offer scalability and flexibility to companies of all sizes, allowing them to grow at the right pace.

In the same way that cloud communication is continually growing, cloud-based development and application management processes are becoming increasingly attractive, especially if your development team can start using the cloud for DevOps.

As soon as you implement DevOps practices throughout your team, you'll notice that you're becoming more efficient. You will see your team's performance and efficiency so