Cloud Computing is one of the buzz word in IT industry for past few years, and it will be holding its stature in future as well (its market size is expected to reach around One trillion USD by 2026). When it comes to Cloud we often tend to hear a number of supplement words like SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, of course all of these words are connected to application hosting/deployment a common ground or an ultimate goal for cloud vendors in one way or other.

The question here is, does the public cloud offerings are only centered around application hosting and managed services?

The clear answer to this question is No!. Almost all major public cloud vendors have offerings starting from code check-in.

In this post we're going to see few offerings that we can leverage from public cloud like AWS, Azure & GCP. We will also confine scope of this post around #CloudNative offerings that helps us to maintain our code and build the applications.

Almost all the offerings/features that we are going cover here has an equivalent offerings through marketplace of major cloud vendors in PaaS channel, the key differentiation services from vendors are not siloed and these systems are integral part of cloud ecosystem.

Some features/advantages that we've listed are mutually exclusive(certain features are offered only by certain public vendor) and collectively exhaustive (there are too many features to be listed in a single blog post).

Source Control Management (SCM)

git has almost become a synonym for SCM over the past few years and most of us would be using different implementation flavours of git through GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, GitBucket and many more! Each of these flavours comes up with various features along with price points and at this juncture we also like present you the lucrative options of course they are part of cloud offerings:

• AWS CodeCommit
• Azure Repos
• Google Cloud Source Repositories

No wonder all of these offerings are extensions of git and enables us to take the leverage of other offerings from the cloud. Let's take a look into the advantages of using these cloud offerings when compared to siloed offerings:

• Ease of access to repository source files.
• Integration with cloud CLI, SDKs, cloud management console & with your favourite IDE.
• Automatic logging, repository activities can be tracked in cloud logging that can be used for troubleshooting.
• Provides a channel for Cloud Debugging, we have also noticed that there is a room to extend this feature as the current capabilities are restricted to only few services.
• Access control managed through cloud IAM policies.
• We can also enforce some best practices like blocking push/commits with sensitive information.
• De facto features like durability, security, availability, semantic code search, collaboration, repositories mirroring are enabled in cloud SCM services.

CI/CD

Like git when it comes to CI/CD Jenkins has become a synonym, credits to Jenkins plugins, Jenkins has plethora of plugins to support various platforms and languages making it a credible as well as powerful(We could also find number of plugins helps with deployments in cloud). We in fact got the question that going around in your mind now! When there is a powerful tool why should we think about service/offerings from cloud vendors? We have leveraged few in our projects and let's have a look on how they help us after we take a glimpse of services that are offered by top three cloud providers:

• Azure Pipelines
• Google Cloud Build
• AWS CodePipeline

As agreed let's have a look into few features of cloud CI/CD offering:

• Rapid deployments
• Easy to integrate
• Pre-fabricated plugins for cloud services
• Extensions for custom plugins
• Zero setup & maintenance costs
• Pay as you go, few vendors offer us generous free tier policies
• Access control managed through cloud IAM policies.
• Vulnerabilities identification for container images.
• Support for multiple clouds.
• Can be built locally to enable debugging easier.
• Access to private pools for dedicated & secure build environment.

Software/Artifact Repository

Although cloud build services are designed to build and deploy the applications with minimum dependency and hops. we still have the requirement/need to maintain application packages in one way or other(like language packages for Java, Node & Python, container images, OS packages like RPM & Apt and many more). The following is the list of Software Repository services that's been offered by major public cloud vendors:

• AWS CodeArtifact
• Azure Artifacts
• Google Artifact Registry

It's time for us to take a look into the features that these services offer us:

• Vulnerability Scanning
• Risky image deployment prevention
• Secure and consistent with IAM policies
• Support to native artifact support
• Consume package from public
• Central managed approval for package usage
• High availability

Apart from the services and the features that we have listed here the number of services getting added to list is growing and will continue to grow! By leveraging these features we can reduce the number of external systems and minimise the failure points.