Cloud technologies have become an ever-important part of business strategies. As per the findings published by IDG Cloud Computing Survey 2020, 46% of the applications being developed today are cloud-first whereas nearly 56% of the on-premises environment-based applications have now migrated to all cloud-based environments. Businesses have leveraged computational and management capacities of the cloud environment to offload a major chunk of infrastructure-related responsibilities to the cloud, thereby saving cost, expanding business, improving quality, and becoming more customer-centric. Netflix, the online video streaming platform has grown multifold since moving to AWS by leveraging its managed and custom services.
With the ever-growing cloud-based solutions, realising the full potential of these services has become inevitable. This role is fulfilled by DevOps. As per the report published by Freeform Dynamics, Devops supported cloud-based software solutions see an improvement of 80% on certain KPIs.
So where does this quantum leap in productivity come from? The DevOps-based process ensures a well-architectured design of the application from the beginning. We will see how the five pillars of a Well Architectured Design are met in this process.
- Operational Excellence: This aspect focuses on the continuous monitoring of the application and providing meaningful insights using which the process and procedures can be enhanced. DevOps could effectively integrate highly automated monitoring systems in application from the day of its inception. The development team could then easily monitor and deliver the requirements without the hassle of managing the monitoring infrastructure separately. Predefined and policy-based alerts on some important triggering points could ensure bugs and issues being fixed before being escalated to the customer.
- Reliability: Quick recovery from a failure and fulfilling contracts under service level agreement makes an application reliable. This behaviour could be well realised through various services offered on the cloud. But setting them up with the right configuration to meet the business requirement could be a nightmare for the development team. DevOps comes to the rescue and automates the entire process to leverage most of the cloud services offering distributed systems.
- Performance Efficiency: A provisioned resource on a cloud should neither be over utilised nor underutilised. It should be in an optimal state of usage and scale according to the needs, DevOps, with all the in-depth knowledge and experience of cloud resources, could make a well-informed decision. Based on the business requirements and anticipated demands – the right kind of services could be selected.
- Security: Security has many aspects. The application should be secured from both internal and external threats. Within the organisation, the Principle of Least Privilege should be followed to protect assets on the cloud such as application data. Cloud services offer various tools to implement these principles but these best practices could often be ignored by the development team. DevOps could set the right security policies at the user and team level so that any unwanted data leak could be avoided. Data thefts due to unauthorised access or poorly defined access policies could result not only in business loss but lowers the overall confidence of the organisation.
- Cost Optimisation: For running a successful business everything eventually boils down to managing your costs. An application whose resources are poorly managed could dig deep holes in the pockets. Managing bills and adjusting the computational capacity of the resources becomes a key skill. A DevOps-based process could ensure that the business pays only for what it uses.
The DevOps-based process in the development of your cloud-based application can thus help you deliver a product that not only is flexible and adaptable to your needs but also guarded with best security practices.So while cloud and DevOps may seem complex, every budding entrepreneur must aspire to use them effectively and efficiently in the development of their project.
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