In today’s competitive enterprise landscape, it is more important than ever that

businesses are able to iterate quickly in order to deliver new products, features, and

services to customers at a faster pace. Additionally, many organizations are also facing

decisions about whether to use a managed service that involves moving their data

centers to the cloud, or sticking with their on-premise data centers.

This is where the importance of a DevOps approach comes in to play. Companies

utilizing AWS managed services are able to leverage DevOps resources that automate

infrastructure management tasks and accelerate the production and deployment of

quality work. How? Let’s take a closer look. Understanding these critical benefits will

likely bring into focus, by comparison, why many on-premise data centers tend to fall

short.

Faster Turnaround Times

When companies utilize managed services in an AWS environment, everything happens

faster, from building and monitoring environments to deploying applications.

Provisioning of servers is also easier, since AWS has deployed virtually unlimited

compute resources that are available on-demand. Furthermore, companies working in a

managed AWS environment have access to a variety of DevOps tools dedicated to

developing customized automation solutions, fast. Trusted teams like Mission can help

you determine which of these DevOps tools will work best for you. A couple of examples

include:

• AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate: This service provides a fully managed Chef

Automate server and suite of automation tools that give you workflow automation

for continuous deployment. It also dynamically configures newly provisionedinstances by automatically registering new instances in Auto Scaling groups with

your chef server.

• AWS CloudFormation: This service provides a common language to describe

and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment.

Modeling your infrastructure in a cloud file helps standardize infrastructure

components across your organization. Additionally, AWS CloudFormation

provisions your resources in a safe, repeatable manner, allowing you to build and

rebuild your infrastructure applications without performing any manual actions.

Dow Jones & Company, a global provider of news and business information, migrated

from an on-premises environment to AWS, and thanks to the host of resources

available, was able to successfully accelerate output. “Our overall product development

velocity has increased by at least 30%,” Dow Jones & Company’s Chief Information

Officer and Global Head of Technology Stephen Orban said.

Increased Productivity

Since AWS is responsible for managing and operating the infrastructure that runs all of

the services in the AWS Cloud, customers utilizing AWS-managed services and

DevOps tools have more time to focus on what they do best: their core business. “Using

AWS gives us the freedom to be agile…why should I want to spend my time learning

how to operate a database or a Hadoop center when I can have predictable costs on

the AWS Cloud and avoid unnecessary operational responsibility?” Orban said. “My

preference is to have my team build products rather than running data centers…Now

that data center is a commodity, that’s exactly what they’re able to do.”

Conversely, traditional managed service providers have to perform updates, monitoring,

and maintenance in-house. This entails a lot of tedious, manual work, such as making

phone calls, ordering parts, and waiting for shipping, increasing headaches as well as

the potential for human error.

Cost Optimization

Managed services in an AWS environment lead to increased agility and productivity, but

the benefits don’t stop there. They present significant cost optimization opportunities.Traditional managed service providers have a tremendous amount of costs to consider,

such as paying for space, hardware, software, power and cooling distribution, and a

team of trained IT personnel. This can lead to wasted expense, particularly if you pay

for more space and capacity than you use.

Conversely, AWS provides a way to acquire and use infrastructure on-demand, so you

only pay for what you use. Furthermore, AWS utilizes the economy of scale to

continually lower costs, offers a model choice to support variable and stable workloads

and delivers greater savings as workloads grow. As an example, InfoSpace, a leading

provider of metasearch and monetization solutions for customers and partners

worldwide, moved from colocation facilities in Washington and Virginia over to AWS and

reported reducing their 2013 capital budget by 72%.

As you can see, utilizing all of the resources and DevOps tools in a managed AWS

environment can have a beneficial impact on your organization in many different ways.

Working alongside a trusted team like Mission, you can architect a customized plan

perfectly suited to meet your company’s key objectives.