Digital transformation is the catchword these days. Amid the rising competition and market demand, it is critical for businesses to maintain agility. Thus, there is a shift from on-premises infrastructure to cloud for optimizing operational cost, build scalable solutions, improve disaster recovery & high availability, follow compliances, and more. 

Apart from moving to the cloud, there is a paradigm shift in the way digital solutions (especially software applications) are developed. Considering the current market requirement, such as faster time-to-market, frequent releases, real-time monitoring, and testing, the development and operations team needs to work in conjugation to deliver results, as fast as possible. This is where DevOps comes into the picture.  

DevOps is an extension to Agile- the popular methodology for software product engineering. It’s a cultural shift that helps to develop, deliver, and deploy software solutions through automation.  

Both cloud and DevOps are two critical, inseparable components of the software development cycle. The later segment discusses the alliance between the two and the benefits of using the cloud with DevOps services. 

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• Automation becomes Easy 

Automation is the most significant advantage of DevOps. Using a set of tools and techniques, the engineers communicate, collaborate, automate processes, optimize infrastructure, etc. Automating processes on the cloud makes them error-free, reduce cost, thereby reducing time to market. DevOps comprises of practices such as CI/CD to automate development, delivery, testing, and deployment.  

ALSO READ: Understanding CI/CD Pipeline in DevOps 

• Upfront Capacity Planning 

Just imagine this. You launched an eCommerce store that started to receive unexpected traffic. You haven't done any load test which can ultimately lead to poor user experience and application performance. This cycle of upfront capacity planning can be automated by running test plans that are provided by the cloud service providers. Moreover, some services automate the cycle of scaling up and down of resources as the demand strikes (Eg: AWS Lambda for Serverless architecture)  

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• Continuous Monitoring 

Various cloud service providers offer monitoring and observability services, specially built for DevOps engineers, developers, and IT managers. These services provide actionable insights to monitor applications, optimize resource allocation, respond to performance changes, and offer a unifies dashboard to keep a track of overall health of the application. (Eg: AWS CloudWatch, EC2 monitoring scripts) 

• Faster Time-to-Market

For continuous deployment of new software release to production, the cloud and DevOps collaboration is important. While the cloud handles the infrastructure, DevOps manages the logic. 

For example, CI tools like Jenkins can be used for maintaining a flow of cases, such as: 

• Triggering the build after passing the version control system
• Pulling the code from VCS and run automated test cases
• Trigger deployment to staging server
• Promoting tested code to staging and then to the production server

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