Migration to cloud has led a way to heavily automate the deployment process. Teams rely on deployment automation for not just deploying regular updates to their application, but the underlying cloud infrastructure as well. There are various deployment tools available in the market to set up pipelines for almost everything that we could think of. Faster delivery, less manual efforts, and easier rollbacks are now driving the agenda for Zero Touch Deployments.

What does Zero Touch in Cloud mean?

We would love a cloud environment where workload AWS accounts especially a production account require no console login to design, implement and operate the infrastructure and application resources. The team could have read access to view the resources but that’s as far as they can go. This helps in avoiding human errors such as forgetting to check the resource ARN before modifying/ deleting the resource on AWS CLI command. This happens with a lot of developers. Resolving these issues is what is the idea behind Zero Touch. Using pipelines and IaC (Infra As Code) tools, it becomes easier to apply it practically.

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In picture (a), the IAM role “Shared-Deployment-Role” in the “Shared Deployment” account is assuming IAM roles in the workload accounts to deploy resources. The workload accounts could have additional roles to allow users to assume and login into a specific account. Users may have read-only access in Prod account to view services and resources. The “Deployment-Role” in each workload account is created along with the initial infrastructure layer using the IaC tool (AWS CloudFormation/ Terraform/ AWS CDK) and Pipelines (CodePipeline/ GitLab/ Jenkins/ BitBucket). AWS CodePipeline is configured in the Shared Deployment account and IaC templates are stored in the AWS CodeCommit repository for version control.

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Picture (b) gives a high-level understanding of hoe Application deployment and Infrastructure deployment pipelines would look in AWS Cloud.

Infrastructure Layer:

Using CloudFormation templates, CodeBuild and CodePipeline; we deploy resources like and are not limited to IAM roles for deployment, VPC, Subnets, Transit Gateway/ Attachments, and Route53 hosted zone(s). These services and resources are necessary to deploy and launch the application. The resource ID/ ARN values are stored in Parameter Store for consumption by IaC templates for the application. Parameter Store helps in developing re-usable IaC templates. How? The answer is to create Parameter Store keys with the same name across all the workload accounts and allow Infrastructure templates to update the values dynamically. Deployment of the infrastructure layer is generally managed by the organization’s IT team with approved AWS services and the organization’s cloud best practices.

Application Layer:

Every application in an organization can differ in the services required to host it in the cloud. Application developers or DevOps teams can choose any one or combination of approved CI/CD and IaC tools to design and host the application in workload accounts. Teams can leverage CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy in Shared Deployment account to build and deploy applications in workload accounts by assuming respective “Deployment” roles. Remember that the IT team had created parameters that hold resource id(s)/ ARN(s) of resources that could be consumed by application templates. The Agile model for development, test, and deploying application templates are encouraged to be adopted ensuring only clean and tested code/template(s) go into Production.

Conclusion:

There is no one “the best” way of designing infra and application deployment. Size, complexity, cost, and time could determine what is optimal. A Zero Touch Cloud Deployment strategy can comprise various permutations and combinations of infra and application components. However, the motive behind the approach could help in minimizing human errors and many sleepless nights.

DevOps is a term that is not new for the software world. However, it is certainly the magical wand which has really sped up the digital transformation. In a sense, the entire SaaS products story is written with the help of DevOps . In today’s VUCA world, digital services aren’t simply nice to have but are a basic expectation from consumers and enterprise customers alike. In the whole digital transformation journey DevOps clearly aligns well with the business goals, ensuring that the experiences they deliver form a seamless and customer-delighting part of the entire journey.

Continuous delivery and integration with magnificent tools have allowed the companies to create entire products as individual chunks. These individual chunks of functionality, captured by user stories, can be developed, and deployed into production in a day or two, not in weeks or months. That has really changed the game while we look at product development.

The Product Led Approach (PLA) driven by DevOps has created a culture in which the final goal has converted into the delivery of a fixed set of requirements, on-time, and on-budget scenarios. Scripts that can set up the entire deployment infrastructure, including software-defined networking, are managed just like the source code of the services running on them. Business-centric services that can evolve quickly and independently, combined with frequent and reliable releases, finally put the old dream of reusable and re-combinable components in reach for the companies.

How DevOps can help in Digital Transformation?

  • Maturity Model: DevOps is the aggregation of cultural philosophies, practices, and gear that will increase an organization’s potential to supply programs and offerings at high velocity. This results in evolving and enhancing merchandise at a quicker tempo than businesses using the conventional software processes. Enterprises are moving from large, monolithic applications to smaller, loosely coupled microservices. This enables clients to act faster, better adapt to changing markets, and grow more effectively to achieve their business goals. Companies use DevOps continuous delivery practices that help teams take ownership of these services and then release updates faster.
  • Break Organization Silos to Collaborate: DevOps helps in driving the collaborative thought-process and change in mindset. DevOps helps organizations achieve digital transformation by changing the social mindset of the market, cutting off silos, and covering the way for continuous innovation and agile experimentation. With a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “isolated”. In fact, DevOps encourages better communication between the two teams and creates development channels that enable continuous integration. The software problems are identified, resolved and deployed faster.
  • Organize Process around Customers: The increased speed allows companies to better serve their customers and be fair in the marketplace. Processes can be seamlessly designed and finalized based on customers’ business needs, helping them achieve higher value growth. When combined with rich digital telemetry from modern monitoring and observability tools, we end up with a strong knowledge of our systems that helps reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR), allowing teams to really take ownership of production services.
  • Build an experimental mindset: Experimentation is the fundamental need for success in today’s rapidly changing technology stack. DevOps can help create the speed of experimentation at which the business can reliably implement these ideas and launch them into the market to start learning again.
  • DevOps and Cloud: Cloud is part of almost every digital transformation journey. DevOps and cloud are completely synergetic to each other. This powerful combination has empowered the developers to respond to the business needs in near real-time. The latency of software development has become a part of past. The partnership of DevOps with cloud has given rise to a new term generally called ‘CloudOps’. The overall advancement in CloudOps has lowered the total cost of ownership for the organizations. This has made a direct impact not only on the top-line revenue and market share but also on its innovation capabilities and response time. Cloud was created majorly to tackle the challenges of Availability, Scalability and Elasticity goals based on dynamic demand. CloudOps uses the DevOps principles of CI/CD to realize the best practices of high availability by refining and optimizing business processes.

Cloud Cost Optimization:

Cloud has a decentralized model of consumption where each department or BU has visibility into their cloud consumption thanks to fine grained Account creation and control and billing segregation. The decentralized model has raised costs for organizations exponentially, and often without any control over the spiralling bottom line. Businesses will have to start to get a handle on these costs as cloud usage grows, streamlining the expenditure that they are not utilizing to full effect, and cutting out duplicate spending or unnecessary overheads.

This also provides an opportunity to vendors who can build their tools and services around cloud optimization services.

Hybrid Cloud environments take a big jump with Focus on Automation:

With cloud-native computing [and] container-based workloads gathering steam, enterprises will want to build solutions that take advantage of their on-premise resources and cloud resources equally adding that in some organizations cloud utilization will be driven by specialized circumstances or use cases rather than as the default setting. Serverless architecture driven by containerization and orchestration engines will hybrid cloud approach easier.

Managing complexities arising from multi cloud environment is possible by automation tools along with comprehensive dashboards that provide a holistic view into cloud operations

Delayed migrations due to Insufficient IaaS skills:

According to Gartner “Through 2022, insufficient cloud IaaS skills will delay half of enterprise IT organizations’ migration to the cloud by two years or more. Today’s cloud migration strategies tend more toward “lift-and-shift” than toward modernization or refactoring. However, lift-and-shift projects do not develop native-cloud skills. This is creating a market where service providers cannot train and certify people quickly enough to satisfy the need for skilled cloud professionals”.

To overcome the challenges of this workforce shortage, enterprises looking to migrate workloads to the cloud should work with managed service providers and SIs that have a proven track record of successful migrations within the target industry. These partners must also be willing to quantify and commit to expected costs and potential savings.

Security, reliability, and flexibility drive cloud strategies :

The early convention of cost savings by moving to cloud is no longer the only one although an important one. However security , reliability and flexibility have become key driving factors in mutli-geographic and multi-vendor environment.

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