I am presenting again! This time, I will build on my previous presentation and share my personal story of how AWS SDKs promote automation of infrastructure provision. Through my experience, I truly started believing that the old way of writing software, then having someone build it, and then having someone else deploy it, test it and finally have another party move it into production just will not work. That old way of doing things is just, simply, too slow. Too slow, too expensive and too far detached from customers.

Consider disruption potential.

History shows that companies that move really fast on really small budgets are usually the disruptive force in an industry. A large undertaking with consensus driven, risk averse culture only enables incremental innovation while others try to disrupt.

Consider lean software enterprise.

The basis of lean is in the ability to produce steady iterations of minimal innovative feature sets which allow the company to pivot or persevere. Will a long cycle SDLC process allow you to produce frequent iterations that can be A/B tested with customers?

Consider customer satisfaction.

Customers want service quickly, easily and continuously. Any bugs, performance problems, downtime is perceived by customers as poor customer service. How can a multi week production cycle help an enterprise fix a bug or improve performance?

DevOps Automation - what can it do?

At the basic level, DevOps Automation promises to reduce the time taken between writing a line of code and using it in production. In some enterprises, it can take up to 10 person years (yes, 10 person years). Regardless of how long it takes, most IT professionals are familiar with processes and gates that are ubiquitous in SDLC. Even as enterprises switch to agile methodology and automate many aspects of software development, they still depend on a large amount of manual work to test, move, deploy & operate software & infrastructure. With a good plan and a strategic shift in goals and cultural mindset, DevOps promises to automate all aspects - I mean all aspects - of taking software to production.

AWS - SDK and Automation

Amazon web services is built, from the core, for automation. Almost all aspects of infrastructure provisioning on AWS can be done with an API call. In most cases, a DevOps Engineer can chain API calls to provision dependent infrastructure and can also utilize third party tools such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible on AWS. AWS also has products that specifically are built for automating the build lifecycle. If DevOps is a key part of your game plan you will learn about how to take it to the next level. If you want to make DevOps the center of your IT strategy, this presentation will get you started. Do not miss it.

Head over to the IJUG - NW meetup site for registration and venue information! Special thanks to Illinois Java Users Group for organizing this and their generous hosts Nielsen.