Introduction to AWS DevOps

We are in the information age. We can also name this age “Computer Age” or “Digital Age”. Also, at this age, everything is related to information technology. Computers, mobile phones, the internet, games, and social media encapsulate us. We can not even think of a life without them.

This is not our main topic. The question is what is happening in the background. First, of course, we consume the internet. We already know a lot of things about information technology. But can we have a career in this area? The answer is yes; we can. We can have a career in IT. Plus, it is not required to be a computer engineer or a genius. Everyone can have a career in this area. So, in this way, we discuss some basic modern concepts of today, AWS DevOps.

There are two words. AWS and DevOps. Let’s analyze these terms.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

In its simplest definition, AWS is a cloud computing company. And, what the heck is cloud computing. Once in a time, every company and user buys, owes, and maintains their IT resources like computers, storage, databases, etc. To purchase and maintain hardware is very tedious and expensive. This is where cloud companies come into play. Cloud companies supply our infrastructure requirements. Instead of buying and maintaining self data centers, we can get them from cloud companies as we need. The main concept is pay-as-you-go.

Amazon defines itself:

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally.”

Development and Operations (DevOps)

Let’s scrutinize the second word DevOps. Let’s go to the good old days. Once in a time again, there are two separate teams, developers and operators. Developers develop an application. And, operators deploy this application to servers and maintain it on a server. These days, everyone was happy. After the application is developed and deployed, there is no need to update much. It would take too long to adapt to changes and make updates on our software. As a result of this, developers and operators are two different teams. But time changes like everything. The change is inevitable. In our modern times, We witness that applications are constantly updated. So, it leads the IT companies to a new culture, called DevOps.

DevOps has combined developer and operator cultures. Development and operations teams are no longer separated. It arises a new job area, DevOps engineer.

What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?

A DevOps Engineer follows the all software development cycle, from the beginning until deployment, deploys the production to infrastructures like cloud or on-premise, defines what and how many resources are needed. Even after deployment, DevOps engineers monitor the applications. During this journey, there are some tools used by DevOps engineers.

Let’s try to understand what a DevOps engineer does with an example. And we will see what tools must be learned. Assume that we have a software team, and we aim to create an application. Developers begin to program the applications. Then they need a lot of tools, programming languages, etc. Also, they will have a repository to store their codes. And, there will be a lot of versions of software. So, they will need a version control system like git. We do not need to know developer tools, but we must get familiar with how the application is configured.

Firstly, we need to learn version control tools like git to follow the updates of the application. During the development and deployment of the application, there will need many different infrastructures for developers, testers, and production. Therefore, we need to learn Infrastructure as a Code Service like terraform and ansible.

We will launch our infrastructures in a cloud environment. So, we need to use the infrastructures of cloud companies like AWS. So, we must learn about cloud computing services.

As we say before, applications have updates every time. Therefore, there is a requirement for continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment(CD). And, it is required to learn the CI/CD tools like Jenkins.

In this modern era, we are using microservices architecture to deploy our applications. For this reason, it is so crucial to learn container tools like Docker and container management tools like Kubernetes.

AWS DevOps

We discussed the meaning of AWS and DevOps. AWS DevOps is a combination of these two concepts. In other words, AWS DevOps is the DevOps culture adapted to AWS. In its simplest definition, AWS DevOps is using AWS DevOps services as DevOps tools.

According to AWS:

AWS provides a set of flexible services designed to enable companies to more rapidly and reliably build and deliver products using AWS and DevOps practices. These services simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance.

List of AWS DevOps tools:

How can I be an AWS Certified DevOps Engineer?

AWS is the pioneer in cloud computing, and today it holds a large part of the market. Especially if the company we want to work with uses Amazon infrastructure, we may need to use AWS-specific DevOps tools as a DevOps Engineer. AWS has its native DevOps tools, and it also allows the use of some DevOps tools that are frequently used in the IT world today.

To become an AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, you are required to get three main skills.

• Get familiar with IT fundamentals
• Learn Cloud Computing
• DevOps tools

If you do not have a background in AWS and DevOps, enrolling in IT fundamental, AWS, and DevOps course for up to 1 year is one of the best methods. However, if you have an IT and cloud engineer background, starting directly with the DevOps course would be the most logical approach.

Last Updated on December 30, 2023