With the rise of cloud computing and modern distributed systems, we also witnessed the rise of a new practice area: DevOps.
Despite being fundamental for smooth cloud operations, a dedicated DevOps practitioner is a luxury most teams canāt afford. Salaries average $130K in San Francisco, for example.
When a dedicated DevOps practitioner is not available in our team, what should we do?
The answer could unfold a multitude of aspects. Below are two main areas we think every development team should give a good deal of thought:
Keep it simple
The KISS (keep it simple) principle, well-known among developers, also applies to infrastructure decisions.
End-users donāt really care about Docker, Kubernetes, servers, etc. As long as it meets the purpose. Not having a dedicated DevOps means you need an infrastructure as simple as it can get. Not the hottest tech necessarily.
Simplification releases time to create value for users. Thatās how youāll beat the competition.
ServerlessĀ is a relatively new cloud paradigm where infrastructure set up and management are shifted to the cloud providerās hands. By usingĀ AWS Lambda functions, for example, we are outsourcing most operational hassle to the AWS DevOps team.Ā For pennies of a dollar. Do you think you have the budget to beat AWS in their own game? Think againā¦
That was precisely the case of Blow Limited, a startup based in London I had the opportunity to work with. With a small development team, they are growing fast in the beauty services market. As you probably guessed, they are leveraging the power of serverless.Ā Check out their case study here.
Monitor like a Pro
Serverless can abstract away most infrastructure management, but the application is still on our hands.
Our code may fail, networking could disrupt connection with a third-party API, databases can be a bottleneck. In other words: many things can still go wrong.
A proper monitoring tool is necessary to detect and alert of anything requiring attention or fixing, which reduces theĀ average time to discoveryĀ of issues. This tool should also enable an efficient debugging process in order to reduce theĀ average time to resolveĀ issues.
Dashbird, for example, is the pioneer in serverless monitoring and has been monitoring hundreds of thousands of Lambda functions in the past years. Although AWS will provide CloudWatch as a standard monitoring tool, it stillĀ misses several important features. Think of Dashbird as your very own DevOps guy, workingĀ 24ā7Ā and letting you know anything going wrong in your application within seconds.
Previously published at https://dashbird.io/blog/when-dedicated-devops-is-not-available/