Consider These Top 7 DevOps Tools to Redefine Your DevOps Strategy

The concept of DevOps involves the amalgamation of software development and operations to ensure Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). To put it in layman’s terms, it is when the development and operations team work collaboratively rather than working in silos, throughout the SDLC, starting from ideation to production.

Initially, the two teams were two different entities responsible for handling different dimensions in the software development life cycle. But this was causing delayed development, low throughput, and several other issues. The introduction of DevOps led to increased production time, lesser development failures, reduced cost, and improved communication.

In order to harness the full potential of DevOps, an organization must focus on five major processes- CI/CD, Communication, Configuration Management, Monitoring and Alerting, and Security.

Top DevOps Tools to Look for in 2022

There are many DevOps tools that aim to improve collaboration and the overall software development process. We have listed some of the best ones that you can look to implement in your DevOps strategy.

Note: These are personal preferences and should not be looked at as fixed standard tools. Choices can vary.

1. Jenkins (CI tool)

Jenkins is an integration DevOps tool. It is an open-source, Java-based CI server that automates the complete build cycle of a software project and is supported by multiple OSes such as Windows, macOS, and other UNIX operating systems. The pipeline feature is the USP of this tool that can be leveraged by developers to automatically commit code into the repository, run test cases, and fetch reports after testing. It helps the team members to increase their throughput as most of the tasks and tools involved in an SDLC can be automated with the help of the Jenkins tool.

CI and CD are the two core practices of DevOps methodology. And this is what makes Jenkins an important tool as it is compatible with most CI/CD integration tools and services. It provides instant feedback and thus would warn you if a particular sprint is leading to a broken build.

Jenkins tool is easy to install and configure, and can also be deployed on cloud-based platforms.

Also Read: 5 Essentials for QA to fit Perfectly into DevOps

2. Puppet (CM tool)

Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool that uses declarative programming to automate inspecting, delivering, and managing the server throughout the SDLC with platform independence. The tool automates infrastructure management to deliver software securely and quickly and is compatible with most platforms.

Puppet is written in Ruby and has its own domain-specific language. It has two layers- configuration and abstraction. The former describes how the hosts and services should look whereas the latter tells the administrator to implement the configuration on different platforms.

The primary perk associated with Puppet is that it eliminates the need for system administrators to use manual scripting for configuration changes. It minimizes the cost and effort put into changing minor code in hundreds of systems while maintaining a clear and auditable change control mechanism.

3. Chef (CM tool)

Chef is very similar to Puppet and is the most popular CM tool after Puppet. It is also Ruby-based. This configuration management tool is used to automate and simplify deployment, repair, update, and management of application infrastructures. Chef provides DevOps engineers with a seamless orchestration engine to allow them to ensure continuous delivery of code releases. It uses a master agent model and possesses infrastructure as code (IAC) capabilities for automating the infrastructure configuration.

Chef comprises three components- Chef server, workstation, and nodes. The chef server is a central command center where the entire details of the infrastructure are present. The chef workstation includes recipes or cookbooks, that pushes the configuration to infrastructure. Nodes are devices that are configured using Chef.

4. Ansible (CM tool)

Ansible is an open-source, Python-based configuration management tool and arguably one of the most simple yet effective ones, which is also used for deployment, automation, and orchestration. Compared to its feature-packed peers like Puppet and Chef, Ansible has a softer outlook and doesn’t overutilize the device’s resources in the background. While it uses infrastructure as a code architecture, the tool makes use of SSH connection for its push nodes and thus is agentless. Its playbooks are written in YAML with minimal commands which makes the tool easy to learn and use.

The tool is mainly used to push new changes within the existing system and also to configure newly deployed machines. IT organizations prefer this tool over any other for two reasons- first, it minimizes the infrastructure costs, and second, it increases the replication speed of scalability.

5. Kubernetes (Container Platforms)

Kubernetes is amongst the most popular and widely used open-source container orchestration platforms. It enables developers to run containerized applications across Kubernetes clusters. It automates the deployment, management, security, scaling, networking, and availability of containerized applications in order to achieve production speed and efficiency.

Deployment automation is the major benefit of Kubernetes in DevOps. By automating container creation on nodes across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid IT environments, Kubernetes can be used to spin up the development environment on-demand based on business needs. This is quite helpful in auto-scaling, rolling updates, and canary deployments.

By orchestrating container creation and deployment, Kubernetes becomes a useful tool for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

Related: Kubernetes Approach for Enterprise Application Development

6. Docker (Container Platforms)

Docker is an open-source tool and is at the center of containerization. The tool automates application deployment and allows secure packaging, deploying, and running of applications regardless of the running environment. Each application container comprises the source code, supporting files, run time, system configuration files, etc. responsible for application execution.

The containers can be accessed using the Docker engine which, in turn, can execute applications in a remote environment. It has helped organizations cut down the infrastructure costs.

Docker is compatible with cloud services like AWS, GCP, and Azure Cloud. Besides, it also runs on Windows and Linux operating systems.

7. Slack (Communication and Collaboration)

Slack is still one of the most used tools by teams for effective collaboration and communication during a project. From the DevOps perspective, organizations all over the world use this tool to eliminate barriers and provide team members with a clear insight into the workflow. What developers love about Slack is that it allows them to collaborate using toolchains in the same environment they are communicating with other service and maintenance teams.

Slack offers strong search capabilities with neatly-designed search modifiers to make document tracking, management, and file-sharing an easy process. It flaunts powerful collaboration and communication abilities via direct chats, shared channels, video and audio conferencing. Additionally, it offers features like workflow builder, notification, note-taking, etc.

Conclusion

You may find many other tools as well such as GitHub, Splunk, Maven, Selenium, etc. We listed out these 7 DevOps tools as they are getting more adopted by organizations across the globe. Many of them are open-source and budget-friendly. Understand your needs, analyze the tools, test them in your environment and see what works best.

Remember, achieving success with your DevOps strategy is not just about selecting the right tools. What’s equally important is the correct use of processes you need to automate, optimize and accelerate application rollouts.