What is DevOps?

DevOps combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products faster than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to serve customers better and compete more effectively in the market.

AWS provides 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.

Is DevOps Right for You?

The average organization adopting DevOps sees a 20 percent improvement in time-to-market, a 22 percent improvement in software quality, and a 17 percent improvement in the frequency of application deployments—all leading to 22 percent more customers and a 19 percent increase in revenue.

In the application economy, every business is a software business. This is why DevOps is quickly becoming one of the most valuable disciplines for your business. It’s focused on improving the quality and speed of delivering new apps. And it’s about tightly integrating development and operations to do so.

This is driving businesses everywhere to take a second look at what they may have initially thought was just a buzzword – here one day and gone the next. Now everyone is wondering, “Can we adopt a DevOps method ourselves? And will it work for us?”

DevOps Challenges and Problems

It doesn’t matter whether you are in Cloud, Enterprise, or Mobile. For each of you, stable software delivery on time is the key to your business success. Some of the severe issues blocking your software delivery are:

• Building and maintaining servers – Time-consuming and unproductive
• No environment management – Differences in development and production environments
• Deployments are a blocker – Upgrade risk due to manual management of multiple application configurations and versions – Dependency on specific deployment engineer
• Hacking – Fixing directly in production (instead of a proper hotfix process) and forgetting to check into the source control

The 7 Cs’ of DevOps

The simple Mantra of DevOps is – “People over Process over Tools.” With the right people, establish the proper process and choose the right tools to deliver the results:

We can have a seamless, agile delivery by embracing the following 7 C’s.

1.     Communication
2.     Collaboration
3.     Controlled Process
4.     Continuous Code Inspection & Integration
5.     Continuous Deployment
6.     Continuous Testing
7.     Continuous Monitoring

DevOps and AWS Well-Architected Framework

As more and more Organizations integrate DevOps strategies into their workloads, there is no shortage of technologies that can help them transition and ensure successful adoption. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading Cloud provider globally and offers the most advanced options for creating cloud computing infrastructure and features available to businesses. Their Well-Architected Framework has been developed to help Solution Architects build secure, high-performing, efficient, and resilient infrastructure for their applications. The AWS Well-Architected Framework supports and enhances many of the same best practices that DevOps encourages. Read the DevOps and AWS Well-Architected Framework article to learn more about how AWS supports DevOps and its advantages.

DevOps Case Studies

DevOps enables enterprises to eliminate the traditional linear processes and replace them with processes characterized by synchronicity and symmetry. With so many business benefits of DevOps to achieve, it is no surprise that DevOps tools are emerging as powerful enablers of digital transformation plans for organizations. Click here to read DevOps Case Studies.

[Recommended Reading: Evolution Of DevOps: From A Niche Concept To Business Imperative]

Bonus – Introduction to DevOps on AWS e-Book

Download this free guide to learn more about how you can seamlessly transition from traditional development methodology to DevOps Solutions and Optimize Your DevOps Strategy on AWS.

To get the latest insights, research and expert articles on AWS Services, Cloud Migration, DevOps and other technologies, subscribe to our Blog Newsletter here. For AWS Case studies and success stories, visit Case Study Section

The post What is DevOps – A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Rapyder.

This session is all about securing web applications and DevOps environments using NGINX and cloud technology. If you are an application developer, DevOps engineer, SecDevOps engineer or professional in Kubernetes, having a look at this session will definitely give you a clear insight into how NGINX works.

NGINX helps you accelerate your IT infrastructure and application modernization efforts while delivering enterprise-grade capabilities that provide robust reliability and security. This session highlights the point efforts of the Rapyder and F5 teams.

Go ahead to learn how to enhance your OSS functions in each environment, also know about the benefits that come from an efficiently managed NGINX OSS with a centralized control panel and monitor the health of all the NGINX OSS deployed in your environment.

What to Read Next?

Riding The Digital Transformation Wave

[Case Study] SQUAREPANDA ENJOYS SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN THEIR TIME-TO-MARKET WITH AWS

STAY UP TO DATE WITH OUR NEWSLETTER

Sign-up for our Newsletter to receive insights, research and expert articles on AWS Services, Cloud Migration, DevOps and other technologies.

The post Webinar: Building Applications Immunity & DevOps Environment Using NGINX appeared first on Rapyder.

To put it simply, businesses that adopt DevOps services help deploy software 200 times as quickly as the ones that are still watching from the sidelines. Software deployment using DevOps services is marked with faster production cycles, easier management, 60 times fewer failures, and faster recovery. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the last few years have witnessed many organizations fully embracing DevOps.

So, what is it about DevOps automation and services that elevate the results to such a level of efficiency and speed?

Speed and stability being achieved concurrently

Unlike a traditional software development model where shorter release cycles inevitably mean operating within a largely unstable environment, DevOps solutions foster a development environment where continuous deployment is shadowed with continuous testing and monitoring, test-driven techniques, and business processes are driven by agility and automation. Combining all these factors leads to faster time-to-market delivery and reliable operating environments.

Early detection and faster resolution of errors

Engineers have access to real-time data to track the system’s performance, thus ensuring faster detection and resolution of problems. The collaborative approach to development and constant monitoring leads to the discrepancies in code, infrastructure, and configuration getting highlighted earlier in the development phase.

Innovation outside silos

There was a time when anything innovative and “ahead of the curve” resulted from a ton of time spent in seclusion. Transparency and collaboration was not the hallmark of innovators, but thanks to the agile way of doing things, innovators have conditioned themselves to collaborate across teams. Today, barriers have been brought, and developers and operations work as one team using the most advanced technological tools. Agility is the buzzword, and it has made the environment much more conducive to creating new things together. DevOps automation is one concept, in particular, that has boosted the interaction between different teams and individuals and added a sense of structure to how new processes are defined and carried out.

Key Metrics to Measure the Success of DevOps Solutions?

While DevOps requires companies to gauge their resources so that transitioning to a model that can facilitate fast and continuous delivery is easy, it is imperative to track some key DevOps metrics so that you don’t find yourself going off the rails.

• Lead time: DevOps-powered deployment keeps shorter release cycles as its key DevOps metrics. Lead time is measured from the day development starts to the day of deployment. Once you have figured out the average time to production, it can be used as a benchmark for future deployments.
• Automated test pass %: The hallmark of an agile development environment is frequent code changes and continuous unit and functional testing. Now, automation is one of the critical drivers of DevOps, and code changes can often cause tests to break, so it becomes almost imperative to track the effectiveness of the automated tests continuously.
• Defect escape rate: DevOps practices aim to ship code faster than ever, which increases the risk of software defects passing undetected during QA and finding their way to production. So keeping a tap on the defect escape rate is a crucial metric when incorporating DevOps, as you want to keep bugs out of production.
• Service level agreements: While most organizations have service level agreements (SLA) as their fundamental agreements with their customers, tracking compliance with those SLAs might be lacking. It is essential that whether or not you have formal SLAs, you do operate as per certain service agreements that serve as formal terms and conditions as per your work with customers.
• Failed deployments: Businesses do their best to ensure deployments do not cause an outage or software does not malfunction or crash for users, but as the age-old saying goes – hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Deployment may fail at some point in time or other; it thus becomes imperative not to let them escalate into a disaster. To this end, companies should track the occurrence over time, which can also be called tracking mean time to failure.
• Application performance: Delivering consistently high performance is the most important metric for every application deployed. Therefore, pre-deployment checks are recommended to identify possible performance problems, hidden issues, and other discrepancies. In addition, even after an application is deployed, it would help to keep an eye out for any changes in its performance. Observing deviations in how specific SQL queries or web service calls are used is expected. Several third-party tools are available to help you identify the problem.
• Meantime to detection (MTTD):  As said earlier, failures and issues will likely happen despite the best efforts to ensure otherwise. So when an issue creeps up, it must be identified timely so it does not escalate into a major disaster. The monitoring systems should be in place, and it should also be ensured that they are being maintained for continuous performance so that issues get spotted without fail or delay. Also, do not waste time to resolve issues once spotted.
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR): Businesses that are prepared for failures have the necessary infrastructure to ensure quick recovery from failures. While you are strategizing every second to ensure zero to minimum failures occur, make it a priority to create a system that does not let failures linger on and hamper the business with long-term repercussions.

Impact of Bringing Automation through DevOps on Business?

DevOps is proving to be instrumental in blurring the lines between requirement gathering and production, thus transforming the production cycles in an unprecedented manner. The DevOps workflows enable synchronization between production cycles and IT mechanisms within an organization, thus streamlining them. In this context, the business benefits of DevOps are immense.

As per the maturity model created by Coleman Parkes and CA Technologies, businesses that have overcome technological and infrastructure challenges use version control for all production artifacts was highly correlated with crucial IT performance metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and mean time to recover.

Moreover, using continuous delivery practices- deployment automation, continuous integration, testing, and version control for all production artifacts- predicted lower levels of deployment pain, higher IT performance, and lower change failure rates.

DevOps has been instrumental in giving even large enterprises room to be scalable. The automation functions have further led to cost savings and allowed companies to focus on their core functions and improve the overall Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Advanced DevOps adopters can deliver new capabilities to market 42% faster- Coleman Parkes.

This directly translates into enhanced customer loyalty, as customer satisfaction has increased due to the better quality of apps.

Conclusion

With the clear-eyed business benefits of DevOps that a host of critical metrics can easily measure, more and more businesses are incorporating DevOps practices and building highly mature models to maximize results.

DevOps enables enterprises to eliminate the traditional linear processes and replace them with processes characterized by synchronicity and symmetry. With so many business benefits of DevOps to achieve, it is no surprise that DevOps tools are emerging as powerful enablers of digital transformation plans for organizations. Click here to read DevOps Case Studies.

[ALSO READ: WHAT IS DEVOPS – A BEGINNER’S GUIDE]

To know more about how you can seamlessly transition from traditional development methodology to DevOps Solutions, download this free guide.

The post Evolution of DevOps: From a Niche Concept to Business Imperative appeared first on Rapyder.

AWS Elemental Media Services are cloud-based services that can ingest seamlessly, process, package, and deliver video content. There are three major services from this family.

Using these AWS video streaming services, users can eliminate video delivery challenges. But when it comes to implementing these standard configurations and setups for multiple channels or pipelines for frequent demand, then the automation of orchestration becomes unavoidable.

Noticeably, the AWS Elemental Media Services

Services orchestration has been automated so that a new pipeline gets created at the click of a button.

1. Video ingestion pipeline with HLS streams produced by AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaPackage for just-in-time packaging.
2. Packaged video broadcast on the core platform using CloudFront services.
3. The parallel harvesting activity is performed and stored in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket for VOD.

Unique AWS live streaming sessions are provided for each new user through deployment automation and authenticating viewers at the edge. The requests for media pipeline provision are generated from the web portal, and request data elements are passed through APIs. These data elements primarily carry the configuration details such as duration, users, quality, unique identifiers, etc. These are getting consumed by Lambda function and, finally, actions to trigger the CloudFormation template, which has been created with a desired federation of different services of AWS to provision a pipeline for the defined time for a predefined set of users. The pipeline consists of AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and precise actions of video harvesting for live to VOD and finally save the harvested videos inside the S3 bucket. The combination of Lambda and CloudFormation helped us in achieving complete automation. However, there are a few more ways to automate it and to automate monitoring throughout the video pipeline.

The solution has provided tremendous benefits of Automation, and the complete provisioning process can be accomplished with just 3 data field entries and one final click of submit button. Live streaming on AWS or VOD video pipeline would be available in another ~15 minutes to broadcast a show.

There are many exciting automation avenues, out of which I will cover monitoring automation for VOD in my next blog.

Stay tuned for our next update, especially on media services, to know more innovations brought by AWS and Rapyder.

Written By,

Abhinav Abhishek

Solutions Director, Rapyder Cloud Solutions

Want to know? Contact us now for a free consultation

The post Automate Your Elemental Media Services For Live Or VOD appeared first on Rapyder.