The process of product development has become incredibly complicated over the past few years. Unlike before, business agility has now become the key to thrive among competition and market demands. Many companies are shifting away from keeping traditional hardware inventories and adopting Cloud various digital technologies for the several benefits they provide. Apart from shifting to the cloud, there has been a change in the process of developing software products. Traditionally, development and operations of software products were done separately, whereas now companies consider a quicker go-to-market strategy for both development and operations and this is where DevOps comes into play.

DevOps coupled with the cloud is a perfect match. DevOps and cloud-based delivery models are an excellent beginning point as they offer agility and speed of delivery to Businesses.

Let’s look at some of the key business benefits of using DevOps with cloud technology:

1. Easy Automation
Automation is an integral aspect of infrastructure management. Automating processes by leveraging the cloud enables businesses to improve the speed of automation, makes the process more reliable, free of any errors, robust and efficient, ultimately decreasing the time to market.

IT modernization through the cloud enables quick digital transformation. Cloud providers provide several services (tools) that enable businesses to manage their infrastructure and modernize IT. The automation process involves infrastructure provisioning, developing builds, executing test cases, generating reports with mailing alerts etc. Although cloud services can help businesses solve multiple use cases, it is difficult to manage the infrastructure without leveraging DevOps.

DevOps involves various activities that include server management, OS patching, integrating CI-CD to automate deployments, testing, report generation etc.

2. Cloud Server Replication
Each cloud provider has a set backup mechanism. Even still, there is a distinct need to launch the servers manually and restore the backup on a different environment. This process can be automated by leveraging DevOps.

Consider a scenario where a business has provided a great offer to its customers and is expecting an increase in traffic on their website but their applications have not been properly tested for traffic spikes. This usually leads to a poor user experience and eventual business loss. Load testing enables businesses to check the stability of an application. Nowadays, businesses must also consider mobile automation testing owing to the vast number of mobile users. Businesses should separate these environments temporarily (develop a replica of the production environment) and load tests them to ensure the stability of the application. This task can be easily automated by leveraging the diverse range of tools offered by cloud service providers.

Additionally, these tools help businesses define the hierarchy/ pattern of the infrastructure and outline inter-communication patterns. Without DevOps, replications can become a very difficult and complex task.

3. Orchestration
The word ‘orchestration’ is often confused with the word ‘automation’ but there is a key difference between the two.

Orchestration is a specialized method of automation. It offers complete coordination and control in automation covering the entire hierarchy within the infrastructure. Orchestration tools are among the most intelligent tools currently available in the market. They are independent of any of the cloud provider services and feature their own defined standards, but can be integrated easily with all the services offered by cloud providers. Integrating with the cloud leads to several additional benefits like automated server provisioning, auto-scaling etc.

4. Effective Monitoring
Cloud providers aim to offer all the tools (usually cloud services) from a centralized location. The services can be divided into monitoring services, backup services, automation services, acknowledgment services or infrastructural services.

Businesses generally receive everything in their package. But, cloud monitoring is usually limited to an email alert when any of the infrastructural assets behave abnormally. DevOps, in this case, can trigger custom alarms and various monitoring alerts that enable businesses to utilize their resources more effectively.

For example, when the traffic on a website increases, a load balancer adds a new server to manage the load. Businesses need to set up an alert for such new additions. Configuring such custom alarms requires in-depth knowledge of the different OSs on which the application is being run. DevOps play a crucial role in this aspect. 

5. Rapid Deployment
Cloud providers enable businesses to have rapid deployment but customizing it without DevOps is very difficult. DevOps enables businesses to solve their infrastructural issues by offering the latest tools by building custom logic and writing capabilities. DevOps enables the automation of the entire process using single-click build tools that interact with the cloud services and ensure that tasks are executed correctly without any errors.

For instance, using continuous integration tools, businesses can instill the following flow:

• Trigger the build once the new code is pushed to the version control system
• Pulling the latest code from the version control system
• Running automation test cases for code sanity
• Building deployable artifacts if the test cases are passed
• Triggering deployment on the staging environment
• Automation testing execution on the staging environment
• Promoting well-tested code to the production environment

All the steps listed above can be automated to ensure the least human interaction possible.

Cloud has certainly emerged as the new mainstream for most businesses. In our current digitally and technologically evolving landscape, cloud and DevOps are two technologies that work incredibly well with each other and improve each other as well. DevOps with cloud improves the performance of the software products developed and automates the entire infrastructure to continuously deliver better products with a quicker time to market.

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