DevOps vs CloudOps: Lifecycle, Best Practices and Differences

According to stats, it is estimated that approx. 95% of enterprises are already using cloud technology, and the remaining will join soon. Cloud technology has succeeded in attracting users worldwide, but before this technology came to power, there was another technology known as DevOps.

In this blog, we will discuss these two phases, i.e., CloudOps and DevOps, and find the difference between the two.

The Blog will cover the following topics:

1. DevOps
2. DevOps Lifecycle
3. DevOps Benefits
4. DevOps Best Practices
5. Cloud Ops
6. CloudOps Lifecycle
7. CloudOps Benefits
8. CloudOps Best Practices
9. Difference Between CloudOps and DevOps
10. Relation Between Cloud Ops and DevOps
11. Case Study

DevOps

DevOps is made of two words Development and Operation. It is a methodology that focuses on agility and bringing teams together to perform Software and IT operations. Using DevOps, organization enhances processes and achieves efficiency in their business.

DevOps Lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle consists of six different stages that are explained below.

• Plan — The first stage is the planning stage which utilizes agile methodology to subdivide tasks into manageable activities.
• Build- The second stage mainly involves developing the application and building a version control process.
• CI/CD- The third stage is the CI-CD phase which stands for continuous integration and continuous deployment. In this phase, code changes are updated to the central repository.
• Monitor- The fourth stage is the watch-out phase, in which integration, execution, deployment, designing, and operational activities are closely monitored, and the alert system is activated.
• Operate- The fifth stage helps solve the application bugs and maintain the application utility.
• Feedback- The sixth and last stage is about analyzing the application’s results and release. It also includes collecting user feedback to make further improvements in the application.

DevOps Benefits

Speed — Microservices help adapt to market changes, trends and meet customer demands. It also helps in delivering the results rapidly. DevOps makes sure that no process is delayed and meets the business goals.

Security — DevOps helps attain security by providing fine-grained controls, compliance and guideline policies, and configuration management practices. Using Infrastructure as a code tool, we can analyze compliance at a broader range.

Scale — DevOps helps manage, operate, and develop the service company’s infrastructure in a repeatable and scaled manner. It also helps in scaling extensive volume data with ease.

Reliability — With its continuous integration, application quality can be maintained, and changes can be updated rapidly. It also ensures that it provides real-time solutions and produces reliable results.

Rapid Delivery — Continuous delivery and accelerating the frequency help in product improvement and solve bugs faster.

Collaboration — With the help of the DevOps cultural approach, teams work effectively maintain consistency in workflow, and understand their shared responsibility. In return, it helps in saving time and increases efficiency.

DevOps Best Practices

One can get the best out of the DevOps strategy using the best practices listed below.

• Microservices — With the help of this technique, various small services conglomerate to design single applications. These services connect with the help of API.
• Continuous Delivery — This practice is an automated procedure where code changes are automatically designed, run, tested, and developed for their delivery. This practice helps in conducting the standardized test phase.
• Monitoring — This practice helps analyze the performance of the application and infrastructure and helps to take feedback from the users. It also helps in categorizing and defining issues. With the monitoring procedure, organizations can collect more insights about their application.
• Association and Communication — DevOps tools help in maintaining communication among the teams. This practice helps bring consistency in the workflow and assign responsibilities to the team. It also helps in promoting a cultural shift in the organization.
• Integration — Code changes are integrated with the central repository, which helps enhance the quality of software and helps solve the bugs.

Cloud Ops

Cloud Ops has been coined from “Cloud and Operation.” It is the process by which companies migrate their applications and services to the cloud. Cloud Ops helps in achieving the business goal and provides various benefits. Cloud Ops helps define the cloud strategy to reform and optimize IT services.

Let’s know more about Cloud Ops in detail.

CloudOps Lifecycle

Cloud Ops provides users with a bucket full of automation procedures and helps them in their application development activities. The different phases of its lifecycle are as follows.

• Collective Knowledge — This is the typical stage where different projects and customer feedback are stored. This step contributes to making Cloud Operation a self-healing system.
• Assessment — The first stage is analyzing the organization’s needs. It involves collecting all the requirements and objectives of the business.
• Build — In the second stage, applications are designed and built. During this process, test runs are conducted, and applications are made ready for their functionality.
• Operate — The third stage is where all the bugs, errors, and latency issues are identified and rectified. This process also helps in analyzing and monitoring the performance of the application.
• Support/Transfer — This is the last stage where solutions or results are provided to the customer. In return, feedback is collected for further analysis.

CloudOps Benefits

Scalability — Cloud Ops helps regulate (increasing/decreasing) the capacity without requiring additional hardware for storage. In Cloud Ops, asset management and resource allocation are done effectively.

Accessibility — Cloud Operation makes it easy for architects and engineers to manage, monitor, and operate servers from any remote location.

Backup Management — As data is stored in the cloud, it conducts backup procedures automatically and prevents data loss.

Automation — It conducts automation on various stages of SDLC, which in return results in a self-healing system and allows application usability without any disruption.

Shared Resources — With the help of shared resources capability, the allocation process also becomes easy and resource optimization.

Continuous Operation — Software is updated automatically, which helps in providing continuous operation and services to the customer. Hence, it ensures that the company doesn’t face any downtime and delays its process.

Allocated Cost — Cloud Ops helps track and monitor resources allocated to the applications and servers. So, it helps companies cut down their costs and effectively optimize resources.

Disaster Recovery — Cloud Ops helps provide disaster management systems and stores the data securely. It also ensures that a proper disaster recovery strategy is developed for any unpredicted disaster.

CloudOps Best Practices

• Agility — It is necessary to enable agility in the team and work cohesively to define the guidelines and procedures for the business operation clearly.
• Change Management- It is always good practice to synchronize the security system with the change management to seamlessly work together.
• Automate Security — Automating security points and clearly defining compliance policies help achieve consistency in the functionalities.
• Continuous Improvement — Conduct regular assessments of the strong and weak points of application and services. This practice will help in improvising existing operations.
• Execute Redundancy — Execute redundancy at two different layers, i.e., at the application layer and cloud-provider layer, to ensure that applications are available to the user despite changes.
• Risk Management — Automating remediation will help identify risk and mitigate its impact.
• Machine limit — It is essential to limit the usage of the machine for running the application without interruption.
• Map Network Infrastructure — Visualizing the company’s overall network infrastructure will help adapt suitable cloud technology and strategy.

Difference Between Cloud Ops vs DevOps difference between

Relationship Between DevOps and CloudOps

Before the cloud era, organizations tend to invest in servers, so at that time, DevOps was mostly about operations and building an application. However, the emergence of the Cloud has shifted the DevOps role to monitoring, automation, and management of the application. To gain the utmost advantage for the organization, it is essential to link both these operations.

Cloud Ops uses various operations and procedures followed in DevOps when applications are migrated to the cloud. Hence, DevOps functionality in the cloud shell is to make decisions and conduct automation. In return, Cloud Ops helps DevOps to accomplish agile methodology and attain speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Together, they help deliver a secure, reliable, robust, rapid, and scalable system. Both operation helps in attaining business objectives and enhance productivity.

Case Study

Here is a case study of Amazon, which has used Cloud Ops and DevOps to grow and manage its business. Amazon is one of the biggest companies to set up business worldwide, focusing on cloud computing, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and digital streaming.

Challenges faced by the company
Amazon was using a monolithic architecture, in which all the procedures and operations are combined, and it executed these processes as a singleton service. However, with increasing functionality and source files, it became complex and difficult to manage, maintain, scale, and upgrade their procedures and applications on single servers.

Solutions for the challenges
To resolve this issue, Amazon shifted to AWS, a cloud-based server. The architecture that Amazon follows today is microservice as shown in the diagram below.

The architecture works by taking the client’s demand and request. After that, a load balancer performs an inspection and sorts the request that comes from the client. Amazon makes use of three microservices: posts, threads, and users. These microservices have target groups assigned to them that help in monitoring and tracking applications and instances.

Tools used by Amazon
Tools used by Amazon for adopting DevOps: GitHub and Git help developers keep making small and frequent changes to the code. It then follows a code deployment procedure to identify bugs and improvise them to make them error-free. With the help of AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon keeps a record of all the deployment procedures and tracks the application. Amazon also uses the Apollo tool that helps deploy particular software in different host groups. Apollo also helps in rollback testing.

Conclusion

From the blog, we can conclude that DevOps is mostly about development. It is a methodology that focuses on agility and bringing teams together to perform Software and IT operations. It ensures that continuous operation has been attained. Cloud Ops is totally about Services, where applications are migrated into the cloud computing background. For successful digital transformation, both these technologies are needed to gain a competitive advantage. Hence, integrating Cloud Ops and DevOps will provide business-enhanced applications, processes, and architecture benefits.