Driving Efficiency with CloudOps

Organizations migrating to the cloud need management and governance to ensure best practices in their cloud IT operations. Whether you manage modern applications built using microservices-based architectures, containers, serverless stacks, or legacy applications that have been re-hosted or re-architected for the cloud, you will realize that traditional application development and operations processes could be more effective.

Automation has always been vital for managing cloud operations, increasing efficiency and avoiding human error disruption. However, you will still observe many manual tasks in most organizations, especially IT workload management. With the rise of the cloud, automation has become more critical due to its pay-as-you-go model. Automation helps you improve productivity, resulting in substantial cost savings in human effort and IT resource expenditure. Automation has become key to reducing daily operational costs and cloud organizations...

What is the cloud operation (CloudOps) model, and what role does automation play?

CloudOps, or the cloud operational model, encompasses a collection of guidelines and safeguards that are established, tracked, and adjusted as needed to manage expenses, boost productivity, and mitigate potential security risks. It can help guide your people, processes, and the technology associated with your cloud infrastructure, security, and operations. An operational model also helps you develop and implement controls to manage security, budget, and compliance across your workloads in the cloud.

Implementing cloud automation empowers organizations to construct streamlined cloud operational models through the automated creation, modification, and removal of cloud resources. Although the concept of cloud computing initially promised the ability to utilize services as required, many organizations still rely on manual processes to provision resources, conduct testing, recognize resource redundancy...

Summary

Working in a cloud environment is different from on-premise. The out-of-the-box tools and services are available in AWS can make a huge difference when operating your workload in the cloud. To realize the full value of the cloud, it’s important to understand cloud operation and how to apply automation everywhere. In this chapter, you learned about the cloud operation model and the six pillars of CloudOps, which help you to understand how to plan your cloud operation efficiently.

Under the CloudOps pillars, you learned about building cloud governance, infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, centralized operation management, and cost optimization. You learned about various AWS services that can help you to build end-to-end cloud operation pillars. These services include AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS cost explorer.

Data is one of the important drivers of moving to the cloud. In...