How TensorIoT Uses AWS and DevOps To Deliver Next-Generation Solutions

By Nicholas Burden,?Senior Technical Evangelist at TensorIoT

DevOps is an application development buzzword that gets thrown around more and more often in the tech industry, but finding experts who understand the principles behind DevOps best practices and have experience implementing solutions incorporating key principles can be a challenge. At TensorIoT, we understand that transitioning from traditional development structures to DevOps means changing the way your company handles application development and removing the barriers between your development and operations teams. Companies are looking for a platform and partners to support their transformation, and TensorIoT uses the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver innovation. Today we’ll be exploring the core concepts behind DevOps and looking into how TensorIoT uses DevOps principles to deliver client solutions with CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment) pipelines built on AWS.?

TensorIoT uses AWS for DevOps development because building on AWS provides companies the tools they need for infrastructure provisioning, code deployment, automated software release, and even performance monitoring of your application and infrastructure. Automated deployment on fully managed AWS services allows you to focus on your core product, with inherent scalability and security.?

Building a DevOps pipeline is easier on AWS, because your team can house the architecture in AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, commonly referred to as AWS EC2. Building on EC2 creates a scalable infrastructure-as-a-service that works in tandem with other AWS technologies to create flexible, cost effective and scalable deployments. We can use Elastic Load Balancing to ensure your application always has the necessary resources to handle web traffic, deliver streaming content using Amazon CloudFront, and protect against malicious intrusion using Amazon Security groups. We can also handle backend storage infrastructure using Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS) for cloud-base relational databases, Amazon DynamoDB for non-relational databases, and handle data storage using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) with options ranging from constant use locally cached data to long-term compliance storage for infrequently accessed data using Amazon S3 Glacier.

Under a DevOps mindset, your development and operations teams work jointly to ensure operations reliability as well as optimal developer productivity. Your teams should maintain consistent communication, taking ownership of services without feeling confined by narrow scope restrictions. Regardless of the organizational structure of your business, using a DevOps model means empowering your team to consider the development and infrastructure lifecycle as a foundational element.?

So how exactly do you implement a DevOps model??

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A good starting point is to use the DevOps tools provided by Amazon! Amazon offers a wide range of tools, beginning with their AWS Cloud Development Kit, an open-source software development framework that helps you model and provision cloud application resources using well-known programming languages. Another set of tools is AWS CodeBuild, an integration service that scales continuously and processes multiple builds so that your team can build and test code with continuous scaling. This can combine with AWS CodeDeploy, an automated software deployment tool that works for your on-premises servers and different computer services like Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda, and also combine with AWS CodePipeline, a DevOps tool that automates your continuously-delivered code for rapid and accurate updates. Finally, for effortless build and testing in DevOps, AWS offers AWS CodeStar and AWS Device Farm. Codestar gives your business an intuitive user interface to help users effortlessly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS in an accelerated time frame, and AWS Device Farms gives you to means to test web and mobile apps concurrently across a wide range of devices and browsers to ensure flawless applications across real mobile devices and desktop browsers.

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Let’s look at a few of the key elements that your company can use to automate and streamline the processes of software development and infrastructure. First off, performing constant small updates, making incremental changes to your deployment instead of periodically updating the application. Small frequent changes reduce the risk of deployments by helping identify bugs more quickly. If you’re trying to find an error, having to examine 5 changes is much less time consuming than examining 50.??

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A second element companies take is decoupling their application development into a microservices architecture, taking a large complex project and converting it into more simple independent projects that function and operate independently of peer services and the application as a whole. This lowers the amount of coordination required for making updates to the application, and proves especially effective when coupled with smaller more agile service teams.?

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These two approaches can present operational challenges when trying to handle the significant increase in deployments, which makes the third element critical to smooth operation. The third element useful in DevOps practices is the implementation of CI/CD, using continuous integration and continuous delivery for rapid resolution with safety and reliability. As an APN Advanced Consulting partner, TensorIoT provides expert guidance and implementation of best practices to help clients gain an AWS-based CI/CD pipeline to accelerate application development and to reduce production defects.

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There are many benefits for companies implementing a CI/CD pipeline. Using this process helps to accelerate time to market, decrease the time required to bring new features to your customers. CI/CD also empowers you with the ability to make rapid iterations and improvements to quickly and effectively improve your application.Using continuous integration and automated test execution allows for early identification of defects and reduces the time required to bootstrap a new application.

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Another element of a good DevOps model is the automation of infrastructure, an area that is especially easy to manage using AWS. By using infrastructure as code and configuration management, you can adapt rapidly to frequent changes, and fully managed AWS monitoring and logging with services like CloudWatch and Cloudtrail helps engineers track the performance of applications and infrastructure so they can react quickly to problems.

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Together, these DevOps elements help organizations deliver faster, more reliable updates to their customers. Whether you’re just starting your company’s journey with their first AWS application deployment, or expanding their cloud application footprint, the value of a scalable and repeatable CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment) pipeline cannot be understated. CI/CD is an excellent solution for the problems that new code integration can cause for your development and operations teams. For maximum benefit, your CI/CD pipeline should be evolving as your application evolves, which using AWS robustly supports. Let the DevOps experts at TensorIoT help you deploy the right CI/CD pipeline to take your process to the next level.?

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Together, TensorIoT and AWS provide powerful holistic IoT, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other advanced solutions for companies just like yours. With AWS as the foundation and guidance from top TensorIoT experts, your company can implement DevOps best practices and improve your application development.

To achieve more with TensorIoT & AWS, visit our DevOps Site?here