Amazon Web Services (AWS) is signaling its increased interest in providing managed services spanning multiple aspects of DevOps with the launch of service that promises to make it easier to set up development projects.
At a recent AWS Summit conference in San Francisco, CTO Werner Vogels described AWS CodeStar as a means for building pipelines using templates that span more than 90 different AWS services. The templates currently support five different programming environments: JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby and PHP.
CodeStar automates configuration of a continuous delivery pipeline for each project using CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline and CodeDeploy, as well as providing integration with Atlassian JIRA Software for tracking issues via the CodeStar console. There also is a preconfigured project management dashboard for tracking activities such as code commits, build results and deployment activity.
Over the past couple of years, AWS has expanded the number of managed services it provides considerably, including databases and now various classes of machine- and deep-learning algorithms exposed as a service. In most of those cases, it is replacing a task that previously was performed by IT operations staff with an automated service. That may appeal to IT organizations that have standardized completely on AWS. But in a multi-cloud world where elements of applications are deployed both on-premises and across multiple public cloud services, it remains to be seen the degree to which organizations will want to employ managed services that only automate AWS processes.
One thing’s for certain: DevOps processes across multiple computing environments are becoming more automated. As microservices architectures become more widely employed, many organizations in the months and years ahead will become a lot more comfortable mixing and matching various cloud services as they see fit. Within that context, automation of DevOps processes will need to be multiplatform almost by definition. As a set of services exposed via application programming interfaces (APIs), it may very well turn out that the automated managed services provided by AWS can be programmatically invoked by other DevOps management frameworks.
Of course, there are plenty of organizations that, for now at least, have standardized on AWS. DevOps delivered as a managed service by AWS clearly has some appeal for those organizations. But as cloud computing continues to mature, the number of organizations employing only one cloud service is expected to decline.
While the battle of control of the cloud has been mainly focused on developers, more attention now is being paid to how application development pipelines get managed in the age of the cloud. Each IT organization will have a unique set of processes and requirements for managing those pipelines. In fact, the issue going forward will be to what degree can cloud service providers (CSP) adapt to those processes versus making the IT organization adapt to the CSP.
In the meantime, IT organizations would be well-advised to establish the roles and functions they need to manage those automated pipelines sooner than later.
