DevOps-as-a-Service

In the traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry, around 2013, companies had three distinct organizations: Development, QA and Operations. Developers built the code for the application that was tested by QA and the operations team was responsible for deploying it in production and managed the uptime of the service. Applications were largely monolithic with very few moving pieces. It was fairly easy for development teams to come up with deployment topology along with operations. The topology also largely remained unchanged through the release cycles. Cloud, microservices, and containerization were not mainstream.

While this was state-of-art then, inside AWS in Amazon which was already 8 years old, there was a different application technology and supporting that was a different organization structure and culture. They had mastered what was known as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Applications were broken down into scores of sub-modules called services which interacted with each other using APIs.

SOA soon came to be known as microservices, there were two obvious advantages

• The release cycles were exponentially faster because individual services had a smaller footprint.
• Failures in one service had a limited impact on the overall system.

This new way of doing things significantly increased the infrastructure and operations complexity simply because of the number of moving pieces, the associated configuration management and distributed security footprint. The silos of development, QA, and operations could no longer scale. There would have been too much back-and-forth between developers who owned the configurations and APIs and operators who were responsible to apply these and maintain uptime. AWS solved this problem by creating a culture that came to be known as “DevOps.” The literal meaning of the word ‘DevOps’ is Developer Operations i.e., Developers owning the full lifecycle of the software application from coding and deployment to operations that includes maintaining uptime.