What is DevOps?

There is no single definition or right answer to the question, “What is DevOps”? DevOps is not a tool, technology, or framework; it is more a philosophy and a concept. It is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), which helps to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous integration and delivery with high software quality. If you are a beginner, then check out this introduction post or take this online course – Docker for an absolute beginner.

DevOps Benefits

Improved collaboration and communication Faster software or product delivery Continuous cost reduction Improved process Faster resolution of issues

In the DevOps world, there is no single magical tool that fits all the needs. It is about choosing the right tool that fits an organization’s needs. Let’s find out about them.

Continuous Integration

#1. Travis CI

Travis CI is a Cloud-hosted, distributed continuous integration platform used to build and test projects hosted at GitHub and Bitbucket. It is configured by adding a YAML file. It can be tested for free for open-source projects and on a fee basis for a private projects.

#2. Jenkins

Jenkins is one of the most popular open-source DevOps tools to support continuous integration and delivery through DevOps. It allows continuous integration and continuous delivery of projects, regardless of the platform users are working on, with the help of various build and deployment pipelines. Jenkins can be integrated with several testing and deployment tools.

#3. Bamboo

Bamboo is one of the popular products developed by Atlassian to support seamless continuous integration. Most of the functionality is prebuilt, which means we do not need to download different plugins like Jenkins. It also supports seamless integration with other Atlassian products like JIRA and Bitbucket.

#4. TeamCity

TeamCity is a server-based continuous integration and builds a management tool developed by JetBrains.It has a simple and easy-to-use User interface (UI) and provides build progress, drill-down build information, and history information for all the configurations and projects.

#5. CircleCI

CircleCI is available in the form of cloud-based as well as on-premise solutions for continuous integration. It is easy and fast to start and supports lightweight, easily readable YAML configurations. There are more CI tools you can explore here.

Planning & Collaboration

#1. JIRA

JIRA is one of the popular project management tools developed by Atlassian used for issue, bug, and project tracking. It allows the user to track the project and issue status. It can easily be integrated with other Atlassian products like Bitbucket in addition to other DevOps tools like Jenkins.

#2. Zoom

Zoom is a web conferencing and instant screen-sharing platform. You can get your team to join through audio or video. Doesn’t matter how big your team is; the zoom is capable of up to 1000 recipients in an online meeting.

#3. Slack

Slack is a freemium Cloud-based collaboration tool that allows team communication and collaboration in one place. This tool can also be used to share documents and other information among the team members. This can also be easily integrated with other tools like GIT, Jenkins, JIRA, etc.

#4. Clarizen

Clarizen is a collaborative and project management software that helps in issue tracking, task management, and project portfolio management. It is easy to customize and has a user-friendly interactive User interface.

5. Asana

Asana is a mobile and web-based application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work in an effective and efficient manner. It is used to track team day-to-day tasks and support messaging and communication across the organization.

Source Code Management

#1. SVN

SVN is a Centralized version and source control tool developed by Apache. It helps developers maintain different versions of source code and maintain a full history of all the changes.

#2. Git

Git is a distributed version control system aimed at speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows. Other than source code management, it can also be used to keep track of changes in any set of files.

#3. Bitbucket

Bitbucket is a web-based hosting platform developed by Atlassian. Bitbucket also offers an effective code review system and keeps track of every change in the code. It can easily be integrated with other DevOps tools like Jenkins, and Bamboo.

#4. GitHub

GitHub is a code hosting platform designed for version control and collaboration. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git in addition to its features. It offers access control and collaboration features like bug tracking, feature creation & Request, task management, etc., for the project.

Build Automation

#1. Ant

Apache Ant is an open-source java-based build and deploys tool. It supports the XML file format. It has several built-in tasks allowing us to compile, assemble, test, and run Java applications.

#2. Maven

Maven is a build automation tool majorly used for java projects. It contains an XML file that describes the software project being built, its dependencies on other external components and modules, the build sequence, directories, and other required plug-ins.

#3. Grunt

Grunt is a javascript command-line tool that helps to build applications and helps developers to automate repetitive tasks like compilation, unit testing, code linting, validation, etc. It is a good alternative for tools like Make or Ant.

#4. Gradle

Gradle is an open-source build automation system that builds upon the concepts of Apache Maven and Apache Ant. It supports Groovy proper programming language instead of the XML configuration file. It offers support for incremental builds by automatically determining which parts of the build are up to date.

Configuration Management

#1. Puppet

Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool used to configure, deploy and manage numerous servers. This tool supports the concept of infrastructure as code and is written in Ruby DSL. It also supports dynamic scale-up and down of machines on a need basis.

#2. Chef

Chef is an open-source configuration management tool developed by Opscode using Ruby to manage infrastructure on virtual or physical machines. It helps in managing complex infrastructure on the fly on virtual, physical, and cloud machines as well.

#3. Ansible

Ansible is an open-source IT configuration management, software provisioning, Orchestration, and application deployment tool. It is a simple yet powerful tool to automate simple and complex multi-tier IT applications.

#4. Terraform

Terraform is an open-source tool for building, changing, deploying, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. It is used to manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions. It helps in define infrastructure in config/code and will enable a user to rebuild/change and track changes to infrastructure in an easy way.

#6. Vagrant

Vagrant is one of the popular tools for building and managing virtual machines (VM). It has an easy-to-use and configurable workflow that focuses on automation. It helps to reduce development environment setup time and increases production parity.

Continuous Security

#1. Prometheus 

Integrate Prometheus in the development lifecycle to find and fix open-source security vulnerabilities automatically. It supports JS, .Net, PHP, NPM, jQuery, Python, Java, etc., and can be integrated into coding, code management, CI/CI, container, and deployment. Snyk got the largest open-source vulnerabilities database.

#2. Invicti

Invicti automatically scans your application for security flaws and provides actionable classified reports so you can take action based on priority. A DevOps security scenario would be to examine the new commit and report the bug directly into the tracking system like Jira or GitHub and rescan once fixed by the developer. You see it integrate at every stage of SDLC.

Test Automation

#1. Selenium

Selenium is the most popular open-source testing tool. It supports test automation across various browsers and operating machines. It can easily be integrated with test management tools like ALM, and JIRA and also with other DevOps tools like Jenkins, Teamcity, Bamboo, etc.

#2. JUnit

JUnit is an open-source unit testing framework used by developers to write and run repeatable test cases. It supports different test annotations using which any developer can write a seamless unit test case. It can easily be integrated with other DevOps tools like Jenkins, GIT, etc.

#3. TestNG

TestNG is an Open source Testing framework that is designed and inspired by Junit and Nunit. It can easily be integrated with the selenium web driver to configure and run automation test scripts. It also generates different test reports like HTML or XSLT.

Monitoring

#1. Nagios

Nagios is an open-source and one of the most popular tools for continuous monitoring. Nagios help to monitor systems, applications, services, and business Processes in a DevOps culture. It alerts users when anything goes wrong with the infrastructure and alerts them as well when the issue has been resolved.

#2. Sensu

Sensu is an open-source monitoring tool written in Ruby that help in monitoring servers, services, application, and cloud infrastructure simply and effectively. It is easy to scale so that we can easily monitor thousands of servers.

#3. Sematext

Sematext is a full-stack monitoring solution that gives you in-depth visibility into your IT infrastructure. It provides front-end and back-end performance monitoring, log monitoring, API and website uptime and performance monitoring, user experience monitoring, and more. While it comes with out-of-the-box dashboards and alert rules for popular applications and infrastructure like common databases and NoSQL stores, cloud servers, networks, containers, etc., you can easily customize dashboards and alerts to fit your monitoring needs. Sematext features powerful alerting with anomaly detection, failed heartbeat detection, scheduling, and numerous integrations for delivering alert notifications.

#4. Datadog

Datadog is an agent-based server metric tool. It supports integration with different web servers, apps, and cloud servers. Its dashboard service provides various graphs about real-time monitoring across the infrastructure.

#5. Grafana

Grafana is an open-source analytics platform to monitor all the metrics from infrastructure, applications, and hardware devices. You can visualize the data, create and share a dashboard, set up alerts, and collaborate. You can pull data from more than 30 sources, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, AWS CloudWatch, etc.

#6. ELK

ELK is a collection of three open-source products —Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana which are all developed, managed, and maintained by the company Elastic. It allows users to take to data from any source in any format and then search, analyze, and visualize that data in real-time.

#7. New Relic

New Relic is a software analytics product for application performance monitoring (APM) that delivers real-time and trending data about web application performance and the level of satisfaction that end-users experience with it. It supports an end to end transaction tracing and displays them with a variety of color-coded charts, graphs, and reports.

Cloud Hosting

#1. AWS

#2. Azure

Azure is a cloud computing platform designed by Microsoft to build, deploy, test, and manage applications and services through a global network of its data centers. The services provided by Microsoft Azure are in the form of PaaS (Platform as a service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service).

#3. GCP

Google Cloud is a complete set of public cloud hosting and computing services offered by Google. It supports a wide range of services for computing, storage, and for application development that uses Google Hardware.

Containerization/Orchestration

#1. Docker

Docker is a tool to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. This container allows the developer to package an application with all the components and sub-components it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out in a single package. This work on the concept of the ship and running anywhere.

#2. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system originally designed by Google and is now it is maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is used for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. It works with other container tools as well, including Docker. Explore more container orchestration tools here.

Conclusion

I hope the above-listed tools help you with your DevOps journey. You may also explore some different phases of DevOps lifecycle.

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