Top tools every DevOps Engineer should have in his/her caddy
Although DevOps is a methodology rather than a tool, it requires tools to be executed. It is difficult to remove communication barriers while increasing visibility and trust across all the teams that develop software and technology. With the right technology, the required automation and connections across functional teams are made simple, open, and scalable.
Here we will look in to best CI/CD automation, orchestration, and other DevOps pipeline tools
Selecting the Best DevOps Tools
There is no single vendor that really can supply all of the features required to support a DevOps strategy or pipeline. However, there are numerous critical factors to think about when choosing tools and technologies for your organization’s needs and unique DevOps objectives. These objectives often differ depending on the structure, activities, and environment of the business.
There are a few factors to consider while selecting the correct tools for any specific project or company.
What application and technical infrastructure does your software platform use ?
Tools should integrate with your current development environment IDEs and project management platform
Make sure the tool is simple for your team to learn and use, and have capability to scale.
Make sure to consider the cost of use and licensing, Although some tools may be free in terms of license, but sometimes the resources required to implement and maintain them are expensive.
Containerization & Orchestration Tools
Container orchestration tackles the problem by automating container scheduling, deployment, scalability, load balancing, availability, and networking. Container orchestration is the automation and management of the container and service lifecycle.
It involves maintaining and arranging a large number of containers and a microservices architecture.
Docker
DevOps teams may use the Docker technology stack to build, ship, and manage container-based distributed applications. By letting users to construct programs from components, this platform enables organizations to develop applications, trade container images, and communicate with users.
Docker’s primary goal is to automate application deployment by allowing several containers to operate on the same system. Docker always assures that if an application works well in development, it will also function well in staging and production. Basically it enables you to separate applications from infrastructures so that software is delivered quickly.
Features
Application Isolation
Easily Scalable
Reduced Infrastructure and Maintenance Costs
Easy and Faster Configuration
Swarm , which is a scheduling and clustering tool for Docker containers
cost-effective due to its rapid deployment
An open-source platform use to automates the administration, scalability, and deployment of containerized applications use to distribution of workloads onto compute cluster nodes. It can aid in the automated deployment, scaling, and administration of containerized workloads and services.
Kubernetes API facilitates communication between users, cluster components, and third-party components.
Features
Automates manual processes
Interacts with groups of containers
Self-monitoring
Horizontal scaling
Storage orchestration
Automates rollouts and rollbacks
Container load balancing
Openshift
OpenShift Container is a Platform as a Service is provided by Redhat, it aids in the automation of applications on secure and scalable resources. It provides enterprise-grade platforms for creating, deploying, and controlling containerized applications.
It is constructed using the Kubernetes engine and Redhat enterprise Linux. Openshift offers a variety of UI and CLI functions for managing clusters. Redhat offers two further iterations of Openshift,
Features
scale to thousands of instances across hundreds of nodes in seconds.
Flexibility to run a self-managed or fully managed service on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.
Open source standards
Automated container, app builds, deployments, scaling, health management
Advanced security and compliance
Some honorable mention
Nomad
Docker swarm
Docker Compose
Mini kube
Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD) Tools
Businesses are moving toward DevOps approaches and Agile cultures in order to speed up delivery and guarantee product quality. A continuous and automated delivery cycle is the foundation of DevOps, enabling quick and dependable delivery.
The capacity of a good CI/CD technology to interface with continuous testing software is a crucial requirement. Teams may have to have to make difficult decisions to choose the best CI/CD technologies due to the abundance of solutions on the market.
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source program that enables continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) by automating phases of software development, including testing, building, and deployment, it leverages pipelines to create a continuous integration or continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment for almost any combination of languages and source code repositories, as well as to automate other normal development tasks.
Features
User-friendly and simple interface
Simple to install and update
Open-source availability
Large community base
Variety of plugins available
Circleci
CircleCI promotes quick software development and publication. The user’s workflow may be automated using CircleCI, from code development through testing and deployment. It offers simple installation and maintenance without any difficulties. As a cloud-based solution, Circle CI features a free plan even for business accounts, thus no dedicated server or server maintenance is necessary.
Circle CI also places a strong emphasis on thoroughly testing each change to the code before it is released, including techniques like unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests.
Features
Easy to setup
Customizable
Easy to learn and use
Simple and lightweight YAML configuration
No dedicated server is required to operate
Git Lab
GitLab is an open source code repository and platform for collaborative software development. It allows you to automate your code’s builds, integration, and verification. With each change or push, GitLab allows you to initiate builds, run tests, and deploy code. Jobs can be created on a virtual machine, a Docker container, or on a different server.
Features
Easy to learn and use
Highly scalable
Branching tools are used to view, develop, and manage code.
Economical, secure and are very flexible in costs
Code and Productivity Analytics
Jira integration
Some honorable mention
Azure DevOps ( Microsoft Azure )
Teamcity ( Jetbrains )
Travis Ci
Configuration Management Tools
Configuration management connects functionality, design, and product requirements to guarantee the software performs consistently as part of system management and engineering.
By offering adequate tools for setting baseline system settings and working in accordance with them from the start in order to get the smoothest, most reliable, and error-free outcomes, configuration management makes the lives of both administrators and users simpler. By utilizing one of the technologies suggested will ensure that your system runs more smoothly while synchronizing settings with their appropriate environments.
Ansible
Ansible is the preferred DevOps tool for IT infrastructure orchestration, automation, configuration, and management. The advantages of using Ansible in DevOps are the ability to adapt to and scale in response to demand. Ansible makes IT automation easier by collecting a wide range of IT resources and supporting multitier deployments.
Servers, storage, networking, and software are some examples of the systems that are managed by ansible. Ansible is an agentless and user-friendly configuration methodology.
Features
Simple-to-use platform
Easy to install and configure
Easy to deploy because it uses no agents or additional custom security infrastructure
Free and Open Source
Can manage various systems as well as cloud infrastructure such as Amazon EC2 and openstack
Chef
Chef automates the network-wide deployment, configuration, and management of the infrastructure. Known sometimes as a recipe or cookbook, a chef is an open-source cloud configuration that converts system administrative duties into reusable definitions. Chef supports a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Ubuntu, Centos, and Solaris, and it has a client-server architecture.
Additionally, it works with cloud computing systems like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenStack, IBM Bluemix, HPE Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace. Only catch is it requires steep learning curve and bit complicated to setup.
Features
With only a few staff, you can easily manage hundreds of servers
keeps a blueprint of the whole infrastructure’s plan
connects to all major cloud service providers
Designed for programmers.
Centralized management
Version controlling Tools
Version control systems are software tools that assist development teams manage changes to source code over time. Version control technologies help software teams operate quicker and smarter as development environments have increased.
VCS stores every modification to the code in a specific type of database. If a mistake is made, engineers may go back in time and compare previous versions of the code to help correct the problem while minimizing disturbance to other team members.
Git
Git is the world’s most contemporary free and open-source distributed version management system and commonly used distributed version control system. It is designed to handle tasks quickly and efficiently. We can monitor and collaborate with our team members at the same workspace thanks to the version control system.
Features
Free and open source
Distributed System
Highly reliable
Highly Secure
Some honorable mention
GitHub
Apache Subversion
Bitbucket Server
CVS
Infrastructure-As-A-Code Tools
IaC is a set of tools meant to make various systems as closely configured as possible. They are a solution to the problem of inconsistency. By deploying cloud computing using code rather than manually, you ensure that all systems are identical. DevOps Need laC tools for scalability , reliability , better testing and version controlling.
Terraform
The most well-known open-source tool for infrastructure automation is Terraform. It aids in deploying, maintaining, and configuring infrastructure as code. Terraform makes it simple to design and build IaC across many infrastructure providers using a single process. The necessary infrastructure is defined as code using a declarative approach.
You may swiftly create various environments with the same configuration and manage your desired infrastructure’s whole lifespan, eliminating human mistakes and improving automation in the infrastructure provisioning and management process.
Features
Manage Virtual Machine Images
Multi-Cloud Deployment
Integrate with Existing Workflows
Declarative
OpenSource
large community with enterprise support
Some honorable mention
AWS cloudformation
Azure resource management
Google Cloud Deployment Manager
puppet
Builds Management Tools
The process of automating all the steps necessary to compile and build application software is known as build management or build automation.
Build tools are tools that are used for build automation. The following are some of the build management tools.
Gradle
Gradle is a free and open-source build management system. It was developed in Java, Kotlin, and Groovy. Gradle is focused on performance and must be quicker than the Maven tool for large projects.
Gradle is a build automation tool known for its versatility in software development, the code is compiled, linked, and packaged during the construction process. With the assistance of build automation tools like gradel, the process becomes more uniform.
Features
Easy to use and maintain
Supports dependency management
Integration process is bit easier
Provides support for a multi-project framework
Some honorable mention
Ant
Maven
Lifecycle Management Tools
Creating own use case is one of the most effective ways for a company to determine which lifecycle Management solution or solutions will best fit its needs. To develop a use case, a firm must express its pain points or the difficulties that are causing the most crucial bottlenecks in the current process.
An organization must also be aware of its own size, history, financial position, employee experiences, etc. The organization may then prioritize the features of lifecycle Management solutions based on their significance in managing its use cases.
Jira
Jira was originally envisioned to be a bug and problem tracker. Today, however, Jira has developed into a potent work management solution for a variety of use cases, including agile software development and the management of requirements and test cases. Jira serves as the core center for the stages of coding, collaboration, and release. Jira is offered as both a SaaS and an on-premises solution.
Features
Tracking time spend on issues
WEB and mobile version both available
Tracks ongoing projects at any stage
Integrate effortlessly with Bitbucket, GitHub, and Microsoft Teams
Some honorable mention
Trello
Raygun
Bugzilla
Azure Devops
Github issues
It is essential to look into the present development process requirements, demands, strengths and weaknesses, and maturity before picking the proper DevOps tools. If tools are supplied by several vendors, compatibility must be considered. It is frequently advised to utilize an integrated suite to ensure a seamless procedure.