Cloud Computing and How it Aided DevOps

By CIOReview | Tuesday, April 3, 2018

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The relationship between developers and operations teams would be very different without cloud computing and service-based platforms—to the extent that it can be assumed that DevOps would not have happened without cloud. DevOps seeks to script away manual interactions with operational tasks and automate processes as far as possible.

Cloud computing platforms like Microsoft Azure and AWS can be easily exploited by DevOps because the interactions can be handled programmatically. Operations can be managed by online application tools or easily written scripts. The availability of a flexible cloud-based platform makes software developers’ tasks easier by reducing the length and complexity of programs they need to write to accomplish the same. The complexity around getting the required platform—say the new Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE)—provisioned and configured, is reduced. This is because a program can be easily written to connect to AWS and bring in the instance of the new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This would have taken much longer with traditional in-house data centers—which would include not only a lengthy procedure for allocation and configuration but a flurry of official activity to permit the same.

Cloud computing technologies came as a breath of fresh air in 2008, which enabled software developers with a basic knowledge of scripting and AWS account access to handle previously lengthy and time-taking manual processes. The path for DevOps got paved slowly and gradually with newer developments in technology as the operations team discovered how to automate an otherwise manual task using the cloud. Eventually, when developers required new server instances, the operations team could simply run a mail to that effect. While developers came up with newer automation techniques, the operations team started using development tools, gradually blurring the line between the two teams—and cloud computing was the driving factor for this.