When it comes to the maintenance and upkeep of your company’s infrastructure and operations, the amount of work and skill sets required largely depend on the scope of your application.
In recent years, we’ve heard talk of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). Across the internet, there exists a lot of debate as to whether DevOps and SREs are friends or foes. Google’s general consensus is that the two work hand-in-hand “to break down organizational barriers to deliver better software faster.”
Today we’re going to go through the top priorities for each role and how stack.io’s public cloud infrastructure consultants get you the best of both worlds.
DevOps
In late 2009, the term DevOps was first used to describe the new set of software development practices intended to bridge the gap between development and operations. DevOps has remained a crucial component of infrastructure in an agile software development cycle.
Amazon defines the best DevOps practices as continuous integration, continuous delivery, microservices, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring and logging, as well as communication and collaboration.
Continuous Integration (CI). The practice of merging changes into a central repository in small increments, so that unit tests can catch bugs earlier.
Continuous Delivery (CD). The practice of automatically building, testing, and deploying all code into a test environment before going live.
Microservices. The software development technique of splitting an application into smaller, single-purpose services, so each component is independently deployable.
Infrastructure-as-Code. The process of codifying infrastructure and servers in order to speed up deployment and decrease knowledge loss in case of employee turnover or other organizational changes.
Monitoring and Logging: The process of tracking how infrastructure performance affects users experience.
Communication and Collaboration. The process of bridging the gap between development and operations.
SREs
The concept of SREs first emerged in 2003, coined by Google employee, Ben Treynor Sloss. In Google’s book, Site Reliability Engineers, Sloss summarizes the responsibilities of an SRE to include availability, latency, performance/efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning.
Availability. To Ensure that your app delivers its intended functionality.
Latency. To maintain the responsiveness of your app.
Performance/Efficiency. To maximize and optimize your app’s end-to-end execution.
Change Management. To manage change requests to your app.
Monitoring. To keep records of your app’s performance metrics.
Emergency Response. To address emergencies as a result of test, change, or process.
Capacity Planning. To determine the workload that your infrastructure needs to handle and configure it accordingly.
Public Cloud Infrastructure Consultants
stack.io defines public cloud infrastructure consultants as infrastructure experts who specialize in cloud deployment.
Our public cloud infrastructure consultants help you set up your infrastructure to meet DevOps best practices AND SRE responsibilities. Our mission is to act as an extension of your team and deliver the power of the public cloud to every aspect of your infrastructure.
Along with your infrastructure setup, we will make sure that we pass on the knowledge and documentation to the member of your team responsible for maintaining your infrastructure. But don’t worry, your in-house DevOps Engineer or SRE can rest assured that stack.io is always just a click away for any cloud projects they do not have the time or expertise to complete!
Our experience working with different DevOps and SRE teams in various verticals including e-commerce, online marketplaces, and more gives us insight into not only established best practices, but also mistakes, lessons, and hacks learned hands-on.
Some cloud projects that we can complete to help your infrastructure meet DevOps best practices and SRE responsibilities include:
Migrating infrastructure to the public cloud
Implement CI/CD pipelines in the cloud
Optimizing the use of public cloud
Deploying your applications to Kubernetes
Expanding the use of containers
And more!
What can our public cloud infrastructure consultants do for your web application? Send us a message and we can get started right away.