AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Enhancing DevOps Efficiency on Amazon EKS with Devtron
By Abhinav Dubey, Solutions Architect – Devtron Inc
By Gaurav Malhotra, Senior Solutions Architect – AWS
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| Devtron |
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In today’s competitive technical landscape, adopting DevOps practices is essential for success. Efficient development workflows are crucial for organizations to deliver software faster and with greater reliability. With the increasing complexity of modern applications, managing these workflows is challenging. This is where DevOps automation platforms, like Devtron, play a vital role. Coupled with the power and scalability of AWS, Devtron offers a comprehensive solution to streamline and enhance development processes and significantly reduce the mean time-to-market by 60%. With Devtron, application launch timelines is reduced from months to just four weeks.
Devtron stands out as a leading DevOps platform, designed to simplify Kubernetes management and improve developer productivity by 60%. AWS provides a powerful and reliable cloud infrastructure that seamlessly enhances Devtron’s capabilities, enabling streamlined DevOps workflows and efficient application management. Together, they create an environment where development teams can excel, addressing common pain points and driving operational efficiency. This blog will explore how Devtron on AWS, with seamless integration into Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), can transform development workflows, addressing critical challenges and paving the way for enhanced productivity and agility.
Challenges of development efficiency
In the Kubernetes ecosystem, development teams encounter challenges that can hinder efficiency despite advancements in DevOps practices. Kubernetes complexity presents a steep learning curve; developers must manage components like pods, services, and ingress, which can slow progress. Resource management and scaling add to the difficulty, as balancing CPU, memory, and storage requires precise tuning. Without a clear grasp of terms like storage class, PVC, PV, and HPA, developers risk over-provisioning, increased costs, or performance issues. Deployments also suffer, as manual processes commonly causes to inconsistencies and deployment failures, extending release cycles and raising the chance of bugs in production.
Configuration management across environments, along with slow feedback loops from lengthy build cycles, delays bug resolution and reduces coding time. Debugging is challenging due to ephemeral pods and containers, and developers ideally should focus on code rather than Kubernetes internals. Dependency management for microservices is also complex, with version conflicts causing delays, while fragmented tooling requires switching between multiple tools, which impacts efficiency. Lastly, while ephemeral environments are valuable for testing, they introduce challenges in maintaining persistence and state, complicating consistency across environments. Setting up ephemeral environments in Kubernetes with visibility across clusters remains difficult, limiting an efficient and consistent development workflow.
These challenges hinder development speed and agility, making it difficult for teams to deliver high-quality software quickly. In the following sections, we will explore how Devtron on AWS addresses these pain points, providing a strong solution to enhance development efficiency and productivity.
Streamlining the Development Process on Kubernetes
Devtron simplifies this by abstracting Kubernetes, enabling developers to focus on coding and streamlining DevOps workflows. Designed for Kubernetes, Devtron unifies Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and Day-2 operations with an intuitive interface and integrates seamlessly with tools like ArgoCD, Amazon Managed Grafana, and SonarQube. It eliminates tool fragmentation, boosting developer efficiency and freeing DevOps to focus on infrastructure.
With native AWS integration, Devtron can optimize costs using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and automate builds triggered by commits to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. It also integrates with Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) for image management, and scanning the images, and enables policy enforcement, ensuring secure and reliable deployments.
For deploying microservices, you can create a fully customizable application catalog tailored to specific user requirements. This catalog allows you to define code owners, on-call personnel for sprint cycles, microservice communication methods, and target deployment environments. Figure 1 shows the information is entered through a GUI or in JSON format and is extended to include a custom metrics panel for comprehensive monitoring.
Figure 1 – Application Catalog
When working with microservices, each microservice is dependent on other microservices, while others may rely on it downstream. This web of dependencies makes it challenging for developers to understand a microservice’s connections and its role within the larger architecture. As shown in Figure 2, Devtron maps upstream and downstream dependencies for each microservice, removing the need for multiple dashboards or complex spreadsheets. Each microservice’s dependencies is defined and shared within the Devtron dashboard, enabling team members to access and understand critical inter-service relationships easily.
Figure 2 – Microservices Dependencies
When a microservice is deployed on Kubernetes, effective observation and debugging are essential for addressing issues. Debugging extends beyond simply checking pod events and logs; it includes running commands within pods, monitoring resource utilization, and reviewing metrics from security scans. Devtron enhances debugging and troubleshooting by simplifying Kubernetes deployments.
As shown in Figure 3, with just a few clicks, developers can deploy applications, access logs, open terminals directly from the UI, and efficiently resolve issues. It also streamlines the management of ephemeral environments, allowing developers to create, test, and deploy without setup or cleanup concerns, as Devtron manages these automatically. With built-in autoscaling configured by DevOps, developer teams can focus on coding. Additionally, developers can seamlessly switch branches and follow existing branching strategies, ensuring smooth workflows and minimizing disruptions. These capabilities streamline development through a unified dashboard, enabling GitOps-based deployments, fine-grained access control, approval workflows, and policy-driven pipelines. Devtron also offers one-click hibernation of entire infrastructures or specific applications, optimizing efficiency for teams managing complex Kubernetes projects.
Figure 3 – Application Details along with Pod Operations
Benefits of Devtron with AWS
Devtron simplifies Kubernetes management on AWS by offering a unified platform that integrates seamlessly with Amazon EKS and a comprehensive suite of AWS services. By leveraging Devtron, teams can reduce operational overhead, streamline workflows, and accelerate application delivery while upholding security and compliance standards.
Figure 4 illustrates the reference architecture, highlighting how Devtron connects with AWS services to enhance Kubernetes management. With this integration, teams can oversee the deployment, scaling, and security of applications through a centralized platform that leverages AWS services for observability, automation, and compliance. Devtron’s unified dashboard allows teams to monitor resources, scale infrastructure on demand, and automate routine tasks.
Figure 4 – Reference Architecture with Amazon EKS and Devtron
At the heart of this setup, Devtron Core—the engine driving Devtron’s capabilities—delivers essential operational functions, while the Devtron UI provides a centralized interface for managing all aspects of EKS clusters. This powerful combination simplifies Kubernetes operations, enabling teams to effectively manage their EKS environment without deep Kubernetes expertise. Together, Devtron Core, the UI, and EKS maximize operational efficiency, security, and agility, empowering organizations to fully harness the potential of Amazon EKS. This powerful architecture enables organizations to unlock a range of transformative benefits, including:
Streamline Kubernetes Management: AWS offers an extensive range of services, including Amazon EKS , Amazon Elastic Container Cloud (ECS), Amazon S3, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and AWS CloudFormation, making infrastructure setup and management straightforward. With Amazon EKS, AWS’s managed Kubernetes distribution, it’s easier to get started with Kubernetes. Devtron, a Kubernetes-native solution, enhances Amazon EKS by adding management and automation through an intuitive interface for deploying and managing applications. It also simplifies integrating EKS with other AWS services, streamlining CI/CD, rollbacks, auto-remediation, monitoring, and Day-2 operations.
Cost Optimization: AWS equips teams with tools for Kubernetes cost savings, such as AWS Graviton, EC2 Spot Instances, and Karpenter for autoscaling. Devtron complements these with multi-arch builds for Graviton and auto-scaling CI via Karpenter. It also reduces costs through ephemeral environments, time-based scaling, and off-hour hibernation of non-production workloads. Devtron’s zero-scaling solution for idle workloads, combined with AWS cost optimization, enables substantial cloud savings.
Scalability and Reliability: AWS provides scalable, reliable infrastructure across multiple regions, ensuring Kubernetes workloads can scale seamlessly to meet demand. Devtron complements this with automated rollouts and advanced deployment strategies, like canary and blue-green, enabling reliable application releases and efficient scaling operations.
Faster Development Cycle: Devtron streamlines development and deployment with automation and real-time monitoring, enabling teams to accelerate releases and receive faster feedback, enhancing overall productivity.
Enhanced Security: AWS provides secure infrastructure with Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for precise access control. Devtron builds on this with fine-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), enabling workload-specific permissions. It integrates seamlessly with IAM roles for AWS services and, as a self-hosted solution, offers full control over on-premises security for Kubernetes deployments.
Getting Started with Devtron on AWS
Getting started with Devtron is straightforward. It includes a Helm package and is installed with just a few commands. The only prerequisite before installation is a Kubernetes cluster with Helm set up on the bastion host.
For installation of Devtron, please use the following command:
helm repo add devtron https://helm.devtron.ai
helm repo update devtron
helm install devtron devtron/devtron-operator \
--create-namespace --namespace devtroncd \
--set installer.arch=multi-arch \
--set installer.modules={cicd} \
--set argo-cd.enabled=true
For detailed information about the installation of Devtron on AWS using Amazon S3 as blob storage, please refer to the well-maintained documentation.
Conclusion
In the current tech landscape, adopting DevOps practices is essential for organisations aiming to enhance development efficiency and accelerate software delivery. Despite advancements, development teams face challenges like Kubernetes complexity, inefficient resource management, manual deployments, configuration overhead, slow feedback loops, and tooling fragmentation. Devtron addresses these issues by providing an intuitive interface that streamlines CI/CD processes and automates day-2 operations, enabling developers to focus on coding rather than managing complex deployment processes. Together, Devtron and AWS EKS simplify Kubernetes, boost productivity, optimize costs, and enable faster, scalable, and secure software delivery.
Devtron – AWS Partner Spotlight
Devtron is an AWS ISV-A Partner and AWS DevOps Competency Partner that provides an open-source “platform engineering in a box” product which simplifies the adoption of Kubernetes by developers and DevOps teams. It is a production-ready kubernetes-native application management platform that covers all requirements on Kubernetes, such as continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), GitOps, observability, troubleshooting, security, and governance.