AWS Cloud Operations and Resource Monitoring

CloudOps is about how to create smooth, consistent operations in a cloud environment and encompasses automation, monitoring, security, cost management, and other topics closely related to DevOps, like CI/CD, scalability, and resilience. DevOps and CloudOps are complementary and related—their chief distinction is that DevOps is focused on the development cycle and its operations, while CloudOps focuses on the management and optimization of your overall AWS  environment.

A great way to distinguish this is to look at how much of your operations work requires manual intervention and how much is automated. Are there significant hours dedicated to the typical management tasks of your environment? Do you have clear visibility into the health, performance, and security of your systems? Are you able to clearly attribute your spend when reviewing costs and budgets? Are your compliance processes taking advantage of the self-documenting tools and monitoring of AWS? Your answers to these questions can indicate where you may have CloudOps gaps or opportunities to improve your operations.

There are several different opportunities for the automation of CloudOps processes. Using Infrastructure as Code, through tools like AWS CloudFormation or AWS Cloud Development Kit in conjunction with a CI/CD process (with tools like the AWS Code Family, GitHub, and others) can greatly reduce maintenance and management burdens for CloudOps teams. Take advantage of AWS Systems Manager configuration management. Use AWS Lambda with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail logging and monitoring and to document your systems for compliance.

One of the most important dimensions of this question is how much of your team’s capacity is used in managing these tasks? If you’re at a point where CloudOps has become a distraction from your business focus and is taking engineering talent away from critical initiatives or slowing down your overall operations in your environment, it may be time to consider letting a partner handle them. And if these kinds of operations have simply never been a core strength or focus for your company, it can be significantly more cost-effective to engage a partner than to build up a team internally.

Every AWS environment will have some kind of operational tasks that fall under the banner of CloudOps. But there are environments which may just have less overhead in these regards. For instance, architectures which heavily leverage serverless services like AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, will have fewer management tasks because AWS is handling so much more of the infrastructure management. Small, disposable, or highly static workloads can also have little need for operational oversight. But even in these scenarios, there will still be CloudOps needs, because considerations like cost, security, compliance, and monitoring are never going to truly disappear, even in highly automated or serverless environments.