Let’s Architect! Architecting for DevOps

Under a DevOps model, the development and operations teams work together and share their skills and knowledge. Sometimes, these teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development to deployment.

The objective of DevOps is to deliver applications and services quickly and efficiently. This faster pace allows companies to better adapt to their customers’ needs and changes in the market.

In this edition of Let’s Architect!, we’ll talk about DevOps culture and share content to provide helpful mental models and strategies for your work as an architect or engineer.

Automating cross-account CI/CD pipelines

Companies often use the cloud to run their microservices. This means they’re working with different AWS accounts and hosting each microservice in a dedicated account.

This method can be helpful to isolate different environments for software deployment pipelines. A well-designed pipeline is fundamental to releasing software quickly because it allows DevOps engineers to automate the software deployment process.

This video shows the mindset to adopt while designing pipelines for deploying resources across different environments. You’ll learn how to design a pipeline, how to build it using AWS CDK, and see how everything looks in the AWS Console.

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture

Automating safe, hands-off deployments

Amazon adopted continuous delivery across the company as a way to automate and standardize how software is deployed and to reduce the time it takes for changes to reach production. In this system, improvements to the release process build up over time. Once deployment risks are identified, teams iterate on the release process and add extra safety in the automated pipeline.

A typical continuous delivery pipeline has four major phases—source, build, test, and production (prod). This article describes the mental models and approaches that engineer use at Amazon to help you understand the design considerations for each step of the pipeline and learn some recommended practices.

Each pipeline has these four major steps; however, more granularity is often added in the testing stage to take advantage of multiple pre-production environments

Covert ops on DevOps: Leveraging security to shift left

Architects often deal with complexity and ambiguity while designing architectures and interacting with stakeholders. Consequently, their architectures evolve and grow in complexity.

When your workload becomes more complex, security is an important area to consider and requires attention during the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This video shows some methods to add security in a DevOps culture. You’ll learn about shifting your security left to create collaborations between developers and the security team. It will also show you how to uncover vulnerabilities in the SDLC as well as the strategies to implement and automate security in the process through a security as code mindset.

At a high level, people build applications with source code, version control, CI/CD, registries and deployments, and during each step we should design to prevent specific vulnerabilities

Instrumenting distributed systems for operational visibility

Every member of a development team works like an owner and operator of the service, whether that member is a developer, manager, or another role. Software developers and architects usually work with logs to see the status of their systems. Logs act as the mechanism to share what’s happening in the software that is running. This information is used for troubleshooting and performance improvement.

This article describes some approaches to feed data into operational dashboards to measure real-time metrics, invoke alarms, and engage with operators to diagnose problems. You’ll learn some mental models and best practices to design a logging system through a set of stories, considerations, and common examples with code samples.

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture

Related information

If you want to learn more about DevOps, check What is DevOps?, a public resource with plenty of examples and introductory articles.

See you next time!

Thanks for reading! See you in a couple of weeks when we discuss strategies for applying the AWS Well-Architected framework to your workloads.

Other posts in this series

• Let’s Architect! Using open-source technologies on AWS
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for Sustainability
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for Machine Learning
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for Security
• Let’s Architect! Tools for Cloud Architects
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for Blockchain
• Let’s Architect! Architecting microservices with containers
• Let’s Architect! Serverless architecture on AWS
• Let’s Architect! Creating resilient architecture
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for governance and management
• Let’s Architect! Architecting for front end
• Let’s Architect! Understanding the build versus buy dilemma

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