In recent times, there has been a huge shift in the way organizations manage their cloud environments and applications. This is in response to the ease of operating in the cloud, availability of infrastructure on-demand, and cloud-based PaaS services that can readily be leveraged within your applications. The overall speed and number of deployments have increased greatly, thereby requiring significant levels of automation in application builds, infrastructure provisioning, and deployments. Software development and release is evolving into continuous delivery environments (enabled by features and services provided by cloud vendors).

In such environments, it is important that tasks and processes be highly repeatable, resilient, flexible, and robust. Amazon provides numerous tools, APIs, and services to enable you to create highly-automated DevOps pipelines. These pipelines can help you handle your infrastructure requirements, including provisioning your technology stacks, performing deployments dynamically with zero downtime, and supporting your end-customers at scale. Some of the major AWS services in these areas are AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS CloudWatch. These are described in more detail in the subsequent sections.

Besides AWS tools and services, it is also important that we upgrade your skills and try to stay as current as possible in terms of the new services and features released by Amazon. This is important because the roles of application developers and infrastructure engineers are also evolving rapidly. Increasingly, application developers are taking on end-to-end responsibilities for their specific applications. These responsibilities include tasks that were typically handled by specialized operations and infrastructure teams earlier. At the same time, infrastructure engineers, specialists, and administrators are focusing more on network architecture, infrastructural policies, templates, generic patterns, frameworks and models, AWS service usage guidelines and principles, cloud security, and so on.

We strongly recommend that you actively engage with Amazon architects throughout the development lifecycle. They have done this before and they can help you get it right the first time. In addition, ensure you document everything including your design, code, scripts, infrastructure, templates, policies, processes and procedures, and so on. This will help with your team’s technical understanding of the cloud environment, aid the rapid on-boarding of new team members, and help establish standards and guidelines in your organization.