Cloud vs. DevOps: What to know for your next career move

Most companies understand that if they want to increase their competitiveness in today’s swiftly changing world, they can’t ignore digital transformation. Businesses nowadays are seeking innovative ways to grow and accomplish their business goals. Cloud computing is extremely cost-effective, and companies can use it for their growth. The future of cloud computing is bright and will provide benefits to both the host and the customer.

One should keep in mind that the owner of the company should be familiar with the latest development taking place in Cloud technology.

DevOps and cloud computing are oft-touted as vital ways companies can achieve this needed transformation, though the relationship between the two is often confusing, as DevOps is about process and process improvement whereas cloud computing is about technology and services. Not mutually exclusive, it’s important to understand how the cloud and DevOps work together to help businesses achieve their transformation goals.

What is Cloud Computing?

Understanding the types of cloud computing resources can be time-consuming and costly. Enterprises need to buy physical servers and other infrastructure through procurement processes that can take months and support the architecture of cloud computing. The acquired systems require a physical space, typically a specialized room with sufficient power and cooling. After configuring and deploying the systems, enterprises need expert personnel to manage them.

This long process is difficult to scale when demand spikes or business expands. Enterprises can acquire more computing resources than needed, ending up with low utilization numbers.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources as services over the internet. It eliminates the need for enterprises to procure, configure, or manage resources themselves, and they only pay for what they use.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud platforms offer some significant benefits today, which are driving businesses to adopt Cloud Computing. Those major benefits include:

• Speed
• Cost
• Scalability
• Accessibility
• Better Security

1. Speed

If you want an IT resource or service from the cloud, it is available almost instantaneously, and ready for production virtually at the same time. This means that the product, service, and the go-live date hit the market almost immediately, a considerable advantage over using a legacy environment. This has helped many businesses’ services generate revenue much sooner after they go live.

2. Cost

Planning and buying the right kind of hardware has always been a challenge in the traditional legacy environment. If you purchase hardware that doesn’t fit your needs, then chances are you might need to live with that purchase indefinitely. However, this is not an issue with the cloud, since you do not need to buy any hardware. Instead, you pay to use the host’s hardware, and once it does not fit your needs, you can release it and can replace it with a better configuration. In that way, you save a lot of money since you only pay for the time you use.

3. Scalability

In a legacy environment, forecasting demands is a full-time job, but with cloud services, you can easily set up an automated monitoring tool to do the job for you. That information will let you accurately upscale or downscale the rate of work you do depending on the needs.

4. Accessibility

Cloud Computing allows you to access resources, data, services, and applications from anywhere you want, as long as you are connected to the internet. If you are not connected to the internet, some tools and techniques will allow you to access the cloud whenever needed.

5. Better Security 

Ensuring that your data is stored in a secure, durable place is a priority for all businesses. The cloud provides highly secure storage for customers’ data, yet letting it be accessed anytime and anyplace that it’s required. Also, all data stored in the cloud is encrypted and secured so that it cannot be tampered with. 

Types of cloud computing

Not all clouds are the same and not one type of cloud computing is right for everyone. Several different models, types and services have evolved to help offer the right solution for your needs.

First, you need to determine the type of cloud deployment or cloud computing architecture, that your cloud services will be implemented on. There are three different ways to deploy cloud services: on a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud.

Public cloud

Public clouds are owned and operated by third-party cloud service providers, which deliver their computing resources like servers and storage over the Internet. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud. With a public cloud, all hardware, software and other supporting infrastructure are owned and managed by the cloud provider. You access these services and manage your account using a web browser. 

Private cloud

A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organisation. A private cloud can be physically located on the company’s on-site data center. Some companies also pay third-party service providers to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network. 

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. By allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud gives your business greater flexibility, and more deployment options and helps optimise your existing infrastructure, security and compliance. 

Careers in Cloud Computing

In today’s scenario of the IT world, Cloud computing is one of the most demanding and rapidly growing career domains. Statistically, nearly 90% of companies across the world are already on the cloud and the global public cloud computing market is all set to cross around USD 350 Billion by 2021. Moreover, most organizations spend more than one-third part of their IT budget on Cloud Services. Indeed, Cloud Computing is here to rule and will require more and more skilled professionals and that should be enough to prompt you to make a career in the Cloud Computing domain!

There are various job profiles that come under a Cloud Computing domain such as :

• Cloud Developer
• Cloud Security Engineer
• Front-End & Back-End Developer
• SysOps Administrator
• Development Operations Engineer
• Solutions Architect, and various others

A cloud engineer is an IT professional tasked with developing and managing cloud infrastructure and platforms for consumers and businesses. As with DevOps, Cloud Engineers use their knowledge to determine which services to accept and which to avoid (and why), as well as the best practices for software engineering.

In fact, Cloud Engineer might be considered a subset of DevOps. However, a significant difference is that Cloud Engineers do not work on legacy code but specific cloud platform-related components.

Consequently, a cloud engineer is primarily accountable for various technological obligations inside cloud computing.

What is DevOps

DevOps is a combination of software developers (dev) and operations (ops). It is defined as a software engineering methodology which aims to integrate the work of software development and software operations teams by facilitating a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility.

The primary purpose of DevOps is to improve the quality and speed of software delivery, enabling continuous, frequent updates that deliver value to customers.

The DevOps team works together to create a consistent development, testing and production environment, and automates the development pipeline, to make software delivery efficient, predictable, sustainable and secure.

Relationship between cloud and DevOps

At the end of the day, the business case for DevOps coupled with cloud technology for a successful IT transformation is five-fold:

1. Bring products to market faster through faster access to development environments and streamlined developer processes.
2. Automation and infrastructure as code reduce cloud complexity and system maintenance.
3. Increase security with automated, repeatable processes that serve to eliminate fat-finger error and, even more importantly, build security controls from the very beginning.
4. Eliminate downtime through cloud-based continuous operations. Moreover, in the process of applying automation, developers can build stateless applications, which increase availability and failover ability, in the process increasing business reliability and customer satisfaction.
5. Increase scalability. One of the primary reasons organizations look to cloud computing in the first place, is scalability allows organizations to increase capacity with the click of a button. When coupled with DevOps, scalability becomes an integral part of apps as they are developed — all this while reducing the cost of infrastructure and increasing global reach.  

What is a DevOps Engineer?

Now, experts say that DevOps is not a job title and should be defined as a concept or mindset. However, some firms view this as a significant milestone for enhancing their digital product teams’ production of software, they rather name someone to bring this change about.

Thus, several businesses seek to employ DevOps engineers (or Development Operations Specialists). These specialists are tasked with releasing frequent incremental improvements to the code base by using continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous testing.

To assist in arming students with the deep understanding and unique skills to help mould this ever-changing industry, Hero Vired in collaboration with edX and AWS have designed a one-of-a-kind Certificate Program in DevOps and Cloud Engineering. The program will help you build fundamental knowledge and skill to design, configure, and deploy secure and robust cloud storage infrastructure.