Both AWS and Azure developer tools provide key efficiencies in your DevOps environment, learn the comparison between tools, any overlap, and use cases for both. Show By: Michael Langford June 22, 2022 Read time: ( words) Save to Folio Subscribe Cloud computing has evolved to become the foundation for most organizations’ data, workload storage, and operations. Advancements in cloud technologies has been a critical driver of digital transformation, accelerating growth and productivity while reducing the operational costs of manual processes. This has enabled enterprises to scale easily without the headache of the physical addition of on-premises servers. There are several cloud vendors that organizations use to achieve this. The most dominant leaders are Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Each service holds a sizable market share and operating application workload. Since the main function of DevOps is to define development processes and software releases, it is important to optimize and automate the development life cycle wherever possible to make production more efficient. AWS and Azure offer developers vital tools to maximize your DevOps environment. This article compares these solutions and discusses how many overlap, exploring a use case for each solution while demonstrating how each solution contributes to and facilitates your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Azure DevOps Tools A cloud platform by Microsoft, Azure comes loaded with an arsenal of tools to automate rapid software development life cycles and build CI/CD pipelines. This includes Azure Artifacts, Azure Repos, and Azure Pipelines. Azure Artifacts Azure Repos Azure Pipelines AWS Developer Tools An Amazon subsidiary, AWS provides cloud computing services and APIs, offering more than 200 tools to address a range of needs. Some developer tools most beneficial to DevOps include CodeArtifact, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy. AWS CodeArtifact AWS CodeBuild AWS CodePipeline AWS CodeDeploy Similarities and Differences The major difference between AWS developer tools and Azure DevOps is the ease of configuration. Specifically, how teams can implement and integrate these tools into development workflows. In both AWS and on-premises servers, developers and consumers can reserve CI/CD pipelines from the development stage right to the deployment stage. Teams can also integrate with AWS services, such as EC2 instances and Elastic Beanstalk. Configurations and integrations remain in the AWS family. In contrast, Azure DevOps takes an integrations-based approach with various third-party packages and extensions, such as GitHub and Jenkins. This improves the developer experience and offers a substantial collection of extension ecosystems from the Azure Marketplace to improve system workflows. Azure DevOps and AWS tools provide several differentiating features, many are nuanced and subtle in terms of building, testing, deploying, and monitoring in a collaborative environment. Use Cases AWS limits DevOps tools to EC2, AWS Lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk, which many find restrictive for development processes. Those looking to round out their DevOps strategy find AWS saves time and energy. Integration with the AWS DevOps is simple and allows easy access to an already set-up environment. AWS simplifies this process by delivering existing templates for EC2, AWS Lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk. Azure DevOps and AWS Developer Tools Solutions Both AWS developer tools and Azure DevOps can simultaneously play a role in orchestrating your CI/CD pipeline. For example, Azure Pipelines and AWS CodeBuild can continuously integrate and deliver automated builds, tests, and deployments. This process allows teams to concentrate on areas that require human expertise rather than the quality of the applications and the complexities of the delivery process. Similarly, Azure Artifacts and AWS CodeArtifact offer both public and private service repositories. This allows teams to build, publish, store, and share packages. Their use of built-in tools like Maven, NuGet, and Python ensures that the processes integrate effortlessly into your development workflow. On a more granular level, there are distinctions between the two solutions that should be considered when deciding which solution will work best for your team. Overall Capabilities Additionally, Azure Test Plans enables teams to easily resolve issues, submit pull requests, and merge changes. Coupled with Azure Repos, this feature makes Azure the stronger choice for versioning software code tasks. The accessibility of extensions available at the Azure Marketplace allows for the easy use of additional services. AWS matches and surpasses these features, offering a unified interface for users to rapidly develop, deploy, and set up a continuous delivery pipeline in a few clicks. This enables faster release of code, shifting focus to other development features that require more operational time. AWS CodePipeline ensures the software release workflow is faster and more dependable. Based on the models defined during the release process, it builds, tests, and deploys code each time a change occurs. With the capability of AWS CodeBuild, software is compiled and built for automatic deployment, removing the need for scaling. This eliminates significant downtime by reducing complexity and the potential for deployment issues. Pricing The Azure features Development/Testing Pricing and Reservation Pricing. The latter allows you to pay less for the specific services you use by estimating the resource requirements and committing a period for all required resources and tools (Azure Pipeline, Azure Repos, and Azure Artifacts). In contrast, the Dev/Testing Pricing option offers discounts when running services based on the Azure DevOps API. AWS DevOps Pricing features three offerings: Reserved Instances, On-Demand Instances, and Spot Instances. Reserved Instances Pricing enables teams to choose a one-, two-, or three-year subscription where teams can reserve resources based on the subscription plan. This includes AWS CodeArtifact, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy. On-Demand Pricing allows you to pay for resources and services on a per-hour basis, while Spot Instances Pricing is based on the period during in which your instances are running on AWS. This option can represent a 90 % discount from the On-Demand Pricing rate. Role in CI/CD Discovering deployment errors can be exceedingly difficult in complex DevOps environments where application release is executed frequently. AWS CodeDeploy alleviates this burden by enabling developers to roll back changes during the deployment process so they can address CI/CD pipeline challenges as early as possible. AWS developer tools also offer AWS CodeStar, This feature increases productivity across teams by provides an interface to easily manage your software development and CI/CD pipelines. Azure Boards and Azure Repos provides an agile environment for DevOps teams and developers to collaborate while tracking the daily progress of each task. Managing pull requests, merging, and testing developers’ changes can now occur daily, reducing the time needed to release the software to the production environments. Next Steps The way teams approach improving development workflows looks different from organization to organization. It’s important to understand which suite of developer tools compliments your organizational needs and operational costs to best serve your DevOps culture and CI/CD workflow. Which AWS services can be used to integrate with other services?Application Integration. AWS Step Functions.. Amazon AppFlow.. Amazon EventBridge.. Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA). Amazon MQ.. Amazon Simple Notification Service.. Amazon Simple Queue Service.. Amazon Simple Workflow Service.. What is Developer Tool Service AWS?The AWS Developer Tools is a set of services designed to enable developers and IT operations professionals practicing DevOps to rapidly and safely deliver software.
Which tool service will help you access AWS services using programming language specific Apis?AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) accelerates cloud development using common programming languages to model your applications.
Which of the following helps you simplify integrating AWS services with your own application code?The Amazon Builders' Library
These services simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance.
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