What are different DevOps tools?
In journey of implementing DevOps culture in your work environment, it is quite an important step what kind of DevOps tools that you and your team pick. It is important to understand technical needs of your project may be it requires a petabyte-scale, data analytics infrastructure or specific architecture and processes drivers during development and operation phases. A great care must be done while selecting, benchmarking and constantly improving tool selection.
If you are a company that is building a solution on top of an open-source stack (ELK), teams have to get involved in the open source community, contributing to multiple projects while customizing tools to fit needs. DevOps tools can be classified in various categories based upon their specific features/usage during software development lifecycle management. The ones which are quite widely used in IT industry are enumerated as given below :
a. Build and Continuous Integration tools
Jenkins
First released in 2011, Jenkins is the leading open source automation server, which provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any projec. According to its own marketing, “can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any project”. E.g. Pipeline plugin means customers can implement their project’s entire build/test/deploy pipeline in a Jenkinsfile and store it alongside the code. It helps in continuous delivery and speeding deployment.There are other tools as well like Solano Labs and Gradle.
b.Infrastructure Performance and Monitoring tools
Nagios
There are many infrastructure monitoring solutions e.g. Zabbix,Nagios and many others open-source tools but Nagios is a stand out monitoring solution that is highly effective owing to its large community of contributors who create plugins for the tool. Nagios may not include all the abilities that are desired around the automatic discovery of new instances and services, so working these issues around with the community’s plugins help a great deal.
c.Version control tools
Github
If you have an excellent repository of source code then it will accelerate DevOps projects. Github is one with its effective search navigation and collaborative structure that provides a space for software developers to host their code online for free. It functions as a social site, where questions can be asked and code exchanges made. Github has a handy list of DevOps tools with one-line descriptions to help developers choose a relevant software. Each suggestion is colour-coded to indicate which language it is written in, saving search time.
d. Enterprise Container Platform
Docker
Docker, launched in 2013, is a popular enterprise platform provider, operating on Windows or Linux and compatible with any programming language. The toolkit will separate software, wrapping it in a file-system which facilitates automated deployments. It makes easier to host applications inside portable environments. Docker automates operating-system-level virtualization – and it’s integration-friendly, cooperating with IBM Cloud, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Azure and more. It is a powerful tool that promises to assist in transition to DevOps. It helps implementing the velocity, variation and visualization of systems thinking and amplifying feedback loops. It has a built-in container orchestration which uses clustering.It provides convenient integration with third-party systems with open APIs, plugins and drivers.
e.Software Configuration management tools
Software configuration management(SCM) is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software. When something goes wrong then SCM can help determine what was changed and by whom. SCM practices include revision control and the establishment of baselines.
The SCM tools in recent times have become virtual appliances that can be instantiated as virtual machines.The tools can model and manage cloud-based virtual resources, including virtual appliances, storage units, and software bundles. Now developers are able to dynamically instantiate virtual servers and related resources.
Chef
Chef is a configuration automation tool which is quite popular in DevOps communities.As the environments managed grow, manual configuration and deployment practices can result in growing operational expenses at an alarming rate. With Chef, the infrastructure is defined as code, ensuring that configuration policy is flexible, versionable, testable and human readable. Servers managed by Chef are continuously evaluated against their desired state, ensuring that configuration drift is automatically corrected, and configuration changes are universally applied.
Ansible
Ansible is on of the simplest solution for configuration management available. It's designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure and highly reliable, with an extremely low learning curve for administrators, developers and IT managers.
Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions your infrastructure which are both human-readable and machine-parsable - ensuring everyone on team will be able to understand the meaning of each configuration task.It frees people of configuration management related tasks botheration and free their time for more strategic works. Ansible requires a password or SSH key in order to start managing systems. It can start managing them without installing any agent software, avoiding the problem of "managing the management" common in many automation systems.
f.Incident, change and problem management tools
Jira
Jira is was primarily an issue tracking software which helps DevOps team organized when it comes to dealing with issues. These days Atlassian has come up with plethora of Jira products meant for DevOps teams:
If you are a company that is building a solution on top of an open-source stack (ELK), teams have to get involved in the open source community, contributing to multiple projects while customizing tools to fit needs. DevOps tools can be classified in various categories based upon their specific features/usage during software development lifecycle management. The ones which are quite widely used in IT industry are enumerated as given below :
a. Build and Continuous Integration tools
Jenkins
First released in 2011, Jenkins is the leading open source automation server, which provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any projec. According to its own marketing, “can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any project”. E.g. Pipeline plugin means customers can implement their project’s entire build/test/deploy pipeline in a Jenkinsfile and store it alongside the code. It helps in continuous delivery and speeding deployment.There are other tools as well like Solano Labs and Gradle.
b.Infrastructure Performance and Monitoring tools
Nagios
There are many infrastructure monitoring solutions e.g. Zabbix,Nagios and many others open-source tools but Nagios is a stand out monitoring solution that is highly effective owing to its large community of contributors who create plugins for the tool. Nagios may not include all the abilities that are desired around the automatic discovery of new instances and services, so working these issues around with the community’s plugins help a great deal.
Github
If you have an excellent repository of source code then it will accelerate DevOps projects. Github is one with its effective search navigation and collaborative structure that provides a space for software developers to host their code online for free. It functions as a social site, where questions can be asked and code exchanges made. Github has a handy list of DevOps tools with one-line descriptions to help developers choose a relevant software. Each suggestion is colour-coded to indicate which language it is written in, saving search time.
d. Enterprise Container Platform
Docker
Docker, launched in 2013, is a popular enterprise platform provider, operating on Windows or Linux and compatible with any programming language. The toolkit will separate software, wrapping it in a file-system which facilitates automated deployments. It makes easier to host applications inside portable environments. Docker automates operating-system-level virtualization – and it’s integration-friendly, cooperating with IBM Cloud, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Azure and more. It is a powerful tool that promises to assist in transition to DevOps. It helps implementing the velocity, variation and visualization of systems thinking and amplifying feedback loops. It has a built-in container orchestration which uses clustering.It provides convenient integration with third-party systems with open APIs, plugins and drivers.
e.Software Configuration management tools
Software configuration management(SCM) is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software. When something goes wrong then SCM can help determine what was changed and by whom. SCM practices include revision control and the establishment of baselines.
The SCM tools in recent times have become virtual appliances that can be instantiated as virtual machines.The tools can model and manage cloud-based virtual resources, including virtual appliances, storage units, and software bundles. Now developers are able to dynamically instantiate virtual servers and related resources.
Chef
Chef is a configuration automation tool which is quite popular in DevOps communities.As the environments managed grow, manual configuration and deployment practices can result in growing operational expenses at an alarming rate. With Chef, the infrastructure is defined as code, ensuring that configuration policy is flexible, versionable, testable and human readable. Servers managed by Chef are continuously evaluated against their desired state, ensuring that configuration drift is automatically corrected, and configuration changes are universally applied.
Ansible
Ansible is on of the simplest solution for configuration management available. It's designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure and highly reliable, with an extremely low learning curve for administrators, developers and IT managers.
Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions your infrastructure which are both human-readable and machine-parsable - ensuring everyone on team will be able to understand the meaning of each configuration task.It frees people of configuration management related tasks botheration and free their time for more strategic works. Ansible requires a password or SSH key in order to start managing systems. It can start managing them without installing any agent software, avoiding the problem of "managing the management" common in many automation systems.
f.Incident, change and problem management tools
Jira
Jira is was primarily an issue tracking software which helps DevOps team organized when it comes to dealing with issues. These days Atlassian has come up with plethora of Jira products meant for DevOps teams:
- Jira Software for Project and issue tracking
- Jira Service desk for IT service desk and customer service
- JiraOps for Modern incident management
- JiraCore for essential business management
About Dharmendra P
