What DevOps engineer jobs does Convox make easier?
Published: 2022-06-01 12:32:08

Successful DevOps teams have a lot to account for. First, they need organized processes that streamline the delivery of core services - builds, internal tooling, quality checks, testing, deployments, and automation. But this need also creates a gap for powerful DevOps tools to support engineer roles and empower  them to manage dynamic workflows.

When it comes to DevOps engineer roles, coding isn't all there is to the part. The job also involves workflows and processes such as releasing to web servers, load balancing, testing, version control systems, etc. These processes are time-consuming and require utmost precision. One mistake and the TTM (time-to-market) increases significantly. 

So, how can Convox help to reduce the time spent on each task while increasing operational efficiency? Let’s find out:

## What is Convox?
Convox is a cloud-agnostic PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) that DevOps engineers can use to deploy applications to the cloud more efficiently. Convox streamlines the entire deployment lifecycle by integrating cloud providers' services with other open-source tools to make up a highly reliable platform. This gives you your own PaaS with total privacy and control without the unpredictable pricing structure typical of other platforms. 

## Key Features of Convox:

- Open-source platform 
- Cloud-agnostic, supporting AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, etc.
- Accelerates [deployment](https://convox.com/blog/kubernetes-deployment/).
- As the build engineer pushes to GitHub, it automatically triggers the creation of new cloud services and containers for branch testing.
- As the engineer merges to GitHub, it automatically triggers the rollout of new images and containers toward production.
- The app automatically scales up or down depending on the load.
- Cloud services automatically replace or discard components of the cloud stack due to detection of failure.

## Why Choose Convox?
DevOps is an automation culture that bridges the gap between developers and operations teams. A good DevOps culture promotes the execution of parallel development and testing workflows within the development lifecycle.

Today, the DevOps culture is embraced by many businesses to streamline workflows, keep up with market demands, speed-up upgrades and accelerate software delivery for cloud applications. But, manually running this procedure is complicated and time-consuming. 

Enter automation. 

Automation helps to take the efficacy of DevOps processes to a whole new level by facilitating faster software releases. With the help of tool integrations, DevOps automation reduces the time spent in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and allows for more precision, consistency, reliability, and acceleration in deliveries.

Now, why should you choose Convox to streamline your DevOps tasks?

Convox solves two of the main bottlenecks that arise within the internal tooling of businesses:
1. Building a tailored system is costly and distracts you from core business goals, as you have to manage hiring, R & D, maintenance, and so on.
2. Private solutions offered in the market are based on experimental software.  These platforms also lack maturity.

These problems often demand substantial upfront investments and may uncover new issues in the long run for the DevOps team.

Here's where Convox excels.

Convox replaces lengthy and complex code development processes and simplifies various DevOps engineer jobs by automating repetitive tasks related to code deployment, testing, upgrades, maintenance, and more. 

## What DevOps Engineer jobs does Convox make easier?
Convox is a PaaS solution that addresses DevOps pain points and vitally reduces time spent managing cloud resources. It retains your standard processes and tasks while causing minimal disruption. Not only does it substantially save the number of hours spent in monitoring, but it also reduces costs, enhances resource management, and more.

Here’s how Convox simplifies DevOps Engineer jobs:

1. Faster deploys to aid the build and release engineers.
Convox can install ‘’Convox Rack”- a power-packed PaaS into your cloud account in just a few minutes. It efficiently manages your servers, data, and networks, which means that you deploy and scale applications using just one command.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/684kr42hcaz5wyrqhr34.png)

The `convox install` command will configure a production-ready infrastructure with the best and latest AWS services for your applications. EC2, ASG, CloudFormation, S3, Lambda, ELB, VPC, etc., play a vital role within the system. Convox manages the tasks of testing, researching, and integrating all of these services, thereby reducing complexity.

Use `convox deploy` command to deploy any twelve-factor application upon AWS. Convox leverages build and release API to create images, load balancers, and containers.

2. Automated Workflows 
Automated workflows are [easy to design and execute](https://console-docs.convox.com/console/workflows#deployment-workflows) with Convox, and they help engineers manage the regular deployment of applications to staging and production. 

Here’s how Convox simplifies the delivery engineer and automation engineer’s tasks:

- Every update made to the application triggers the creation of a deployable release
- Rolling deploys take care of timely upgrades with zero downtime
- Easy rollbacks to a previous version using just a single command
- Creates CI/CD pipelines for all applications via a unified console. 
- Easily automate deployments to one or more clouds.
- Offers source control integrations for GitLab and GitHub.
- Integrates with Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/a41yw5qyvuw1cn5hv166.png)
3. Helps SysAdmin with Role-based Access Control
With Convox, SysAdmins can control team members’ access levels with multiple access roles that help granulize control and secure your environments. Convox manages this seamlessly by leveraging hardware two Factor-Authentication (2FA).

     4. Aids DevOps Engineers with 360-degree visibility including audit logging
Test engineers and agile coaches can use Convox to reduce the time taken for bug fixes or to get upgrades live in several ways:

- Build engineers can start and change any application with convox start. 
- Use ‘Convox Integrations’ to ship patches to GitHub > CircleCI > Production > Slack Notification.
- Use convox scale to scale a service.
- DevSecOps engineers can use convox rack updates to apply infrastructure security updates across the board.
- Test engineers can use convox exec to debug the live app
- Quality engineers can use convox proxy to analyze an application’s private database

These agile processes call for detailed audits to track team members’ activities. This is where the Audit Log comes in.

5. Convox creates detailed logs of all the changes made to the applications to maintain compliance requirements. 

Its ‘self-hosted’ option helps test engineers seamlessly comply with the GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, and SOC2 standards.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/wrmaaao3eq1f7u34iwoa.png)

- Monitor and manage your infrastructure throughout cloud environments
- Check health and load of the applications via one console
- Features Syslog Forwarding, Log Aggregation, and Metrics Dashboard
- Provides a complete audit log of every change done and by whom
- Check the entire history of application changes and roll back with a click

6. Single API access

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/52imersesa0gumr2xjqs.png)
Convox also provides engineers with a single API to access or upgrade resources and keep track of all API calls, even the sensitive ones.
 
7. Use Convox Console to streamline modern DevSecOps workflows
Console goes one step ahead of the Convox Rack. It comes with intuitive, web-based tools that allow you to switch between Racks, integrate with third-party tools, control developer access, etc.

Convox Console comprises three core features, namely:

- **Rack Sharing:** Rack Sharing allows teams to share Racks using CLI commands. This is vital for allowing or restricting access of individual engineers to resources. For delicate systems, DevSecOps engineers must ensure that team members have exclusive credentials with authentication via an ‘API key’ through Grid’s interface. 

- **GitHub Integration:** Console seamlessly integrates with GitHub to simplify the setup of CI/CD workflows. As you push code to master on GitHub, it triggers automatic building and deploys to your Convox app. 

- **Slack Integration:** Businesses often leverage robust chat services like Slack for seamless collaboration amongst DevOps teams. Grid offers an ‘Add to Slack’ button, where engineers can opt-in to get critical notifications about specific Racks.

## Final Word
[Convox](https://convox.com/) is one of the best PaaS platforms for growing businesses that do not yet have the resources and capacity to handle a large team of DevOps engineers. The platform offers a perfect solution for companies that manage multiple client projects with a limited number of DevOps engineers onboard.  

By simplifying the creation of standard tasks and workflows, Convox speeds up the delivery lifecycle and drives timely product releases. It saves time and expenses with single commands that automatically trigger rollout deployments, faster rollbacks, modern twelve-factor apps, etc.

Convox helps businesses gain operational efficiency, with a limited pool of DevOps engineers. This primarily benefits those chained by mundane, repetitive manual tasks – who desire to reach their core business goals and deliver true value via automation. If you want to to use Convox to make your job easier, [register for a free account](https://console.convox.com/signup) today.