What is DevOps and How Can It Help Your Organization?

Your IT department is under pressure to deliver. The name of the game is getting to market faster while being agile, efficient, and secure. Introducing DevOps, an acronym given to the combination of Development and Operations used to streamline and accelerate the development and deployment of new applications using infrastructure as code and standardized, repeatable processes. DevOps increases the ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software and infrastructure processes to enable organizations to see ROI faster.

By using DevOps, your organization can securely automate processes that have traditionally been manual and cumbersome. Apps Associates’ certified engineers and solution architects can get you to market faster with:

• Migration and Deployment into AWS
• Database Deployment and Clones
• Infrastructure Deployment
• Application Deployment to AWS
• Automated Operating System Patching

By working with Apps Associates your organization can benefit in numerous ways. We utilize Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) to execute fast build and deployment of applications. You quickly realize immediate business value from the DevOps automated processes which include:

Increased Agility

• Reduce new environment deployment time from days to hours
• No physical hardware boundaries
• Scale number of environments as needed
• Faster on-boarding onto cloud platforms
• Common set of tools and frameworks
• Standardized processes

DevOps Ready

• Infrastructure as Code one-click deployment
• Cloud Formation or Terraform templates enable easy updates
• Minimal involvement from Ops teams
• Cloud ready

Change Management Friendly

• Immutable environments / infrastructure
• Faster deployment cycles for security updates
• Loosely coupled infrastructure and applications

AWS Native Services combined with DevOps is helping IT organizations become business enablers, focusing more on core business goals and less on maintaining infrastructure. Unfortunately, industry analysts continue to report that IT organizations spend more than 70% of their time making sure their applications are keeping pace. As a result, customers and prospects are exploring moving their legacy applications, databases, and technology to the cloud. The goals are simple: reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and eliminate long-term contracts.

Read our most recent story of how Apps Associates helped our customer leverage AWS native services and DevOps to solve their critical business need using our DevOps expertise.

Our customer was looking for a low cost, secure solution for integrating Oracle Service Cloud (OSC) with their on-prem Oracle E-Business Suite environments. Security and cost were the overarching themes throughout the solutioning process. Based on their existing AWS Footprint, they could combine CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancing, and Web Application Firewall to create the desired low cost, secure, and reliable integration.  The initial cloud environment was built using CloudFormation which allowed for quick deployment of future environments with minimal change and one-click functionality.

Once the integration was operational using CloudFront, the next step was to lock down access to the load balancers.  To do this, the AWS published CloudFront service IP addresses were added to the load balancer security group.  However, since this list of known IP addresses could change at any time, a solution was needed to keep the security groups up to date in near real time without any manual intervention. The team turned to AWS Lambda to devise a custom solution that had the ability to monitor the published list of IP addresses for changes and when a change was noticed, trigger a function that would modify the load balancer security groups with the necessary changes.  The Lambda solution also included email notifications via AWS Simple Email Service (SES) so that all parties involved would be aware of the changes.

The possibilities are endless when using DevOps to build and maintain your cloud infrastructure.  To learn more about how Apps Associates can help you – click here.