Over the years, the tools, practices, and culture associated with DevOps have drastically improved – in order to make this very lucrative niche of professionals to be guided and supported by the right mindset and of course technology.
The idea behind the different DevOps tools is to allow both developers and operations teams to find better ways to work together – and build more resilient CI/CD pipelines, improving the speed and efficiency of testing frameworks, ship code faster, and share responsibility for production environments. Simply since the DevOps operations and role maintain such a broad range of tasks and skills in software development and IT operations, there is a large chunk of tools being built and used. Today we’ll cover all aspects related to DevOps software & tools you must use and how to get started – Let’s dive right in.
What is DevOps?
At its very core, DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. Its main goal is to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery while maintaining high software quality.
Fundamentally, DevOps enables formerly siloed roles—development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security—to coordinate and collaborate to produce better, more resilient, and reliable products – in simpler words, it helps reduce manual efforts.
DevOps has a great and promising future. The practical applications of DevOps are increasing day by day and the demand for skilled professionals is on the rise.
How to choose the best DevOps tool?
DevOps software is a rapidly growing niche, and in some cases, it can be hard to tell which tools you really need and which ones you don’t. The best DevOps tools for your business will depend on your specific requirements, but there are a few core principles that you should keep in mind while evaluating your next DevOps tool.
Automation
Speed and accuracy of tasks are both vital for the success of DevOps, and both can be leveraged by the use of different and helpful automation tools. There’s really no way to introduce rapid, flexible, high-quality DevOps that hinges on manual processes, and that’s why you need automation tools in place – to empower your current and new DevOps tools.
Automation also makes it flawless to audit, secure, and improve your entire DevOps processes. The best automation solutions can really help you scale your entire DevOps operations, by allowing an easy way to ease your workflows and continuously tweak your processes without adding almost any manual work.
Get reed of the siloes
In a large or growing organization, more problems arise as teams are more siloed and are not sharing any of their most in-use DevOps tools.
Siloed teams are bad for your business but luckily this can be resolved through culture—communicate regularly, have common objectives, and share successes between teams. DevOps tools are the biggest part of the solution.
When thinking about tools your business needs for development or operations, consider their usefulness across the entire DevOps cycle, not just for a single functional team, that way you’ll be eliminating the siloed teams that are often caused by miscommunication and poorly adopted company culture.
The cloud is everywhere now – Use it wisely
DevOps and cloud computing are like Peanut Butter and Jelly, like Macaroni and Cheese, like Batman and Robin, well you get the picture.
While DevOps on-premise is possible, the cloud increases scalability and agility and is widely adopted across the largest companies.
The actual maintenance and upgrades often required for on-premise infrastructure can slow down your DevOps team and require more IT support. On the very other hands, a cloud-based platform will most likely continually update its technology so that its capable of working with new tools and solutions.
Making use of the cloud also allows for fast self-serve provisioning of cloud resources by developers, taking away the waiting time for support ticket resolution. Development teams can easily innovate and test code, and when resources are no longer needed they can be eliminated or closed.
The top 6 tools
While looking to scale your operations and achieve your business goals, you should be looking at various DevOps tools to help you in your endeavor. Here are our 6 best DevOps tools you should be using:
Ansible
Ansible is the leader in automating setups, updates, restarts, and other maintenance in terms of application and infrastructure aspects. This incredible and easy-to-deploy DevOps tool eliminates a lot of human-caused errors and saves time spent on manual configuration systems and CI/CD pipelines. Ansible’s configuration management connects to hundreds of other tools in your CI/CD pipeline, paving the road to faster development by you and your teams and way more resilient applications and services.
Jenkins
Jenkins main focus is the CI/CD pipeline and building out robust deployment automation. Jenkins is an open-source automation tool and can be used for reliable CI/CD pipelines, app deployments, and configuration management. Jenkins is a must-have tool for any DevOps team out there.
Docker
Docker tool is mainly being used to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Through Docker DevOps, developers can pack all parts of an application like libraries and other dependencies easily and ship it out as a single package. when used with DevOps, Docker ease the process of creating application topology embodying various interconnected components.
Puppet
Puppet is an open-source software configuration management and deployment tool. It’s most commonly used on Linux and Windows to pull the strings on multiple application servers at once. Like other DevOps tools, Puppet does more than automate system administration.
Puppet discovers information about a system by using a utility called Facter.
Git
Git is crucial for alignment between all development, R&D, and IT teams, leading to more visibility and clarity into development pipelines and better communication among the various engineering teams.
Git is an open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from the smallest to very large projects with maximum speed and efficiency.
Vagrant
Not as popular as the others on this list, Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With a simple and smooth workflow and significant focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity, and most importantly makes the entire working environment much more pleasant.
TSC team expert tip for choosing your next DevOps tools Before evaluating any DevOps tool, you must understand the collaboration and shared tools strategy for the Dev, QA, R&D, and infrastructure automation teams. After you are aligned with the current tools in use and the usage of each tool, you should predict and analyze the implementation of the new tool.
Conclusion
Choosing the best tools for DevOps is often considered to be a complex task, simply because this arsenal of tools is new and unfamiliar to most development teams out there. However, if you follow the steps in this article, and adopt some of the listed DevOps tools we mentioned, your path to success should be much clearer.
Considering the major changes both startups and enterprise-level companies are experiencing it’s important to be prepared to constantly evaluate the different sets of DevOps tools in terms of what works and what requires improvement. Try creating a clear process and even assign some of your team members to this task where they can evaluate the different benefits of new and existing DevOps tools, so you and your team will improve with time. The need to constantly monitor DevOps operations will continue over many years, so it’s critical to build into your plans and tool choices today.