🚀DevOps on AWS From Beginner to Advanced (With Examples & Tools)

🌱 What is DevOps?

DevOps combines Development and Operations tools that increases an organizations ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity.
The key ideas are

• Automation of builds, tests, and deployments
• Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
• Monitoring and feedback loops
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

☁️ Why DevOps on AWS?

AWS offers native DevOps tools and deep integrations with popular open source tools. Benefits include:
✅ Scalable infrastructure ✅ Pay-as-you-go pricing ✅ Security and compliance support ✅ Integration with GitHub, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.

🛠️ AWS DevOps Toolchain (Beginner to Advanced)

Let’s break DevOps down into phases and map them to AWS tools.

DevOps Stage	AWS Services	Open Source / 3rd Party
Plan	AWS CodeCommit, AWS Project Management	Jira, Trello
Develop	AWS Cloud9, CodeCommit	GitHub, GitLab
Build	AWS CodeBuild	Jenkins, GitLab CI
Test	AWS Device Farm, CodeBuild	Selenium, JUnit
Release	AWS CodePipeline	Spinnaker, ArgoCD
Deploy	AWS CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk	Terraform, Helm
Operate	CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray	Prometheus, Grafana
Monitor	CloudWatch, AWS Config, CloudTrail	ELK Stack, Datadog

🚦 Beginner: Start with CI/CD on AWS

Let’s start simple: Build a CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline.

✅ Use Case:

Deploy a static website hosted on S3 every time you push to a CodeCommit repository.

🧰 Tools:

• AWS CodeCommit (Git Repo)
• AWS CodePipeline (CI/CD Orchestration)
• AWS CodeBuild (Build process)
• AWS S3 (Static hosting)

🔧 Steps:

1. Create a CodeCommit repo and push your static HTML/CSS files.
2. Create a CodeBuild project that packages your files (if needed).
3. Create an S3 bucket with static hosting enabled.
4. Set up CodePipeline :
   • Source: CodeCommit
   • Build: CodeBuild
   • Deploy: S3

Every push to your repo now triggers a new deployment.

⚙️ Intermediate: Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation / Terraform

Hardcoding resources? Not anymore.

✅ Use Case:

Define an EC2 + RDS + Load Balancer stack as code.

🧰 Tools:

• AWS CloudFormation (YAML/JSON templates)
• Or use Terraform for multi-cloud compatibility 🧩 Example CloudFormation snippet:

Resources:
  MyEC2Instance:
    Type: AWS::EC2::Instance
    Properties:
      InstanceType: t2.micro
      ImageId: ami-0abcdef1234567890

TIP: Use AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) if you prefer Python/TypeScript over YAML.

🚀 Advanced: Containerized DevOps with ECS / EKS + GitOps

Now we go pro. Automate deployments to Kubernetes using GitOps on AWS.

✅ Use Case:
Push code to GitHub → automatically deploy to EKS using ArgoCD.

🧰 Tools:
Amazon EKS (Managed Kubernetes)
ArgoCD (GitOps controller)
AWS CodePipeline or GitHub Actions
AWS ECR (Container Registry)

🔄 Flow:
1.Code pushed to GitHub → triggers CI
2.Build + Push image to ECR
3.GitOps tool (e.g. ArgoCD) detects change in Helm chart repo
4.EKS cluster automatically updates with new deployment
This is enterprise-grade DevOps used by top tech teams.

📈 Monitoring, Logging, and Feedback

Observability is crucial.

Tools:
-AWS CloudWatch Logs: Centralized logs
-CloudWatch Alarms: Automated alerts
-X-Ray: Tracing microservices
-CloudTrail: Audit logs

Combine with Grafana + Prometheus for custom dashboards.

🧭 Learning Roadmap: DevOps on AWS

📍 Beginner:

Git + CodeCommit
CodePipeline + S3 deployments
Cloud9 IDE
IAM basics

📍 Intermediate:

CodeBuild & Docker
CloudFormation / Terraform
EC2, RDS, VPC setup
Basic monitoring with CloudWatch

📍 Advanced:

EKS (Kubernetes)
GitOps with ArgoCD
Custom CodePipeline integrations
Multi-account IaC (Terraform workspaces)
SRE practices: SLIs/SLOs