The Best DevOps Tools and Technologies

Although DevOps is a practice, not a tool, tools are needed to implement it. Creating visibility and trust between all the teams involved in delivering software and technology is challenging. With the right tools, integrations and automation across functional teams can be seamless, open, and scalable.

In this article, we look at the top tools used in DevOps pipelines.

How to select the right DevOps tools?

DevOps cannot be ordered just by anyone. Software, only one vendor will provide some functionality required to support DevOps practices or pipelines. Knowing what tools to choose when you've decided upon a product or tool can be helpful. These objectives vary depending on the organization's structure, operation, and environment. Several important factors should be considered when selecting the appropriate tool for a particular project.

Step 1: Establish a collaboration

DevOps opposes waterfall methods of planning out all the work and dependencies for a release. Agile Development reduces risk and improves visibility as software is built and tested in smaller chunks, and customer feedback is iterated upon. Due to this, many teams plan and release in sprints of around two to four weeks.

It's important to consider feedback from the previous sprint's retrospective when your team shares their ideas and plans at the start of every new sprint. This will help you improve your team and services on a continuous basis. You can create a plan using various tools to organize your learning and ideas. The first step is to identify your target personas and map customer research data, feature requests, and bug reports to them. Then, user stories are created by grouping common themes and using sticky notes. By mapping user stories to specific personas, you can ensure that customer value is emphasized. Finally, tasks are organized and prioritized using a tool that tracks project burndown and daily sprint progress.

Step 2: Create a request-tracking system

The DevOps process should not be bypassed when implementing changes. Whenever the software needs to be changed or added, DevOps should capture the request. By automating the process, the system can accept change requests from both the business and the DevOps team - for example, making software changes to improve database access.

Step 3: Implementing Agile Kanban project management

The primary advantage of Kanban is that it promotes teamwork by encouraging teams to improve the system's flow. Kanban helps teams continuously deliver the work they have completed as they adopt it. Kanban can aid in the gradual release of new product features or fixing defects by dividing them into smaller, manageable chunks. Kanban's continuous delivery and deployment feature makes it an ideal tool for DevOps.

Moreover, Kanban provides a visual representation of your entire value stream and ensures smooth flow. This allows you to combine the workflows of different functions and activities from development to integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring. You will be able to work more collaboratively with your team of developers and operators. All Dev and Ops activities can be integrated into a single team and workflow over time. As a result of Kanban, the entire process can be seen - and the transformation into a DevOps culture is easier.

Step 4: Usage of tools to Log Metrics

In both automated and manual processes, one should always use tools that help understand the productivity of the DevOps processes. It is possible to determine whether it favors one's interests from this. The first step is to determine the metrics that are most relevant to the DevOps process, such as speed to effective action versus errors. The next step involves utilizing an automated process to address and resolve issues without the need for human intervention. For example, you are trying to automatically scale software on a digital cloud platform.

Step 5: Start implementing

Automated testing has many parts, but it is only one of them. It involves the implementation of code and data and the resulting solution to ensure its high quality. With DevOps, continuous testing is essential.

Step 6: Performing acceptance tests

Testing acceptance is necessary to ensure the infrastructure is accepted after each part is deployed. Apps, data, and test suites should also be subjected to acceptance tests as part of the testing process. To ensure that the selected criteria align with the tests, a considerable amount of time is required to test and retest DevOps. A new instruction is fed into an application as it develops, so testing should be done again as it evolves.

Testing automation

By automating your testing and development cycles, you can save time and money over time. Moreover, in a DevOps environment, awareness is essential.

To ensure successful development builds, Operations require insight into the testing process and its thoroughness. Automated tests offer an advantage over manual testing as they are executed consistently and with equal rigor each time. Moreover, they generate trend graphs and reports that highlight any potential risks.

It is impossible to mitigate risks that you cannot anticipate when it comes to software. Make your operations team part of the process. To enable everyone to contribute to the project, choose a tool that supports wallboards. Tools that make it easy for Operations to participate in blitz testing and exploratory testing are more effective.

Step 7: Provide continuous feedback

Regularly discussing an employee's strengths and weaknesses is crucial for providing ongoing feedback and coaching. The primary objective is to recognize gaps and inefficiencies in the app, and constant feedback helps achieve this. Feedback loops significantly enhance automated conversation between tests. Manual or automatic mechanisms should be equipped with the right tools to identify any issues. A collaborative approach should be taken to solve problems and achieve impeccable results.

Release dashboards

The most challenging part of shipping software is getting all the changes, tests, and deployment information into one place. Before a release, no one wants to spend time in a long meeting discussing its status. This is where release dashboards come in.

It's a good idea to seek out tools that seamlessly connect your code repository with your deployment tool. A centralized platform that displays all of your branches, builds, pull requests, and deployment alerts are highly beneficial.

The DevOps tools

The DevOps tool categories include the following:

Version control: a set of apps that track any changes made in a set of files in due course of time. It tracks software both manually and automatically. Compared to early version control systems, modern Version control uses distributed storage using either one primary server (subversion) or a web of distributed servers (git or mercurial). Version control systems, such as type, brand, and database, track dependencies in a version.

Building and deployment: a set of tools that automate the building and deployment of software throughout the DevOps process, including continuous development and continuous integration.

Functional and non-functional testing: tools that provide automated testing in DevOps's functional and non-functional aspects. A set of testing tools should provide an integrated unit, check performance updates, and ensure the app's security. The sole motive of these testing is to check the whole automation system.

**Provisioning: **Configuration management is part of provisioning. That's using a tool like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible to configure your server. "Provisioning" often implies it's the first time you do it. Configuration management usually happens repeatedly. The tools that help create provisions podium required for deployment of the software and monitor the functions along with logging any changes that might occur to the configuration of the data or software. It helps in getting the system back in a state of equilibrium.

The Top-rated DevOps tool list

Jenkins

Jenkins is a leader in DevOps tools for monitoring and implementation for repeated jobs. By merging changes and accessing outputs, DevOps teams can quickly identify problems.

Key Features:

• Self-contained Java-based program ready to run out of the box with Windows, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like operating systems
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery
• A web interface facilitates setup and configuration
• Hundreds of plugins in the Update Center

Website: https://www.jenkins.io/

Price: Free

Ansible

DevOps professionals recommend Ansible as the preferred tool for orchestrating, automating, configuring, and managing IT infrastructures. In DevOps, Ansible enables scalability and response to demand.

Key Features:

• 750+ built-in modules for automating, configuring, deploying, and orchestrating the IT infrastructure
• Agentless system for easier management and storage

Website: https://www.ansible.com/ 

Price: Contact sales

Docker

Container-based distributed applications can be created, shipped, and operated with the Docker technology stack. Users will be able to build programs from components on this platform, develop applications, and exchange container images with enterprises.

Key Features:

• Fast deployment, trial run, and rollback capabilities enable a consistent and isolated environment at a cost-effective price.
• Provide consistent performance across multiple environments, including AWS, Azure, Google, and others.
• Organize, manage, and configure image caches privately and publicly with a public registry for sharing and collaboration

Website: https://www.docker.com/ 

Price: Free — $5/license/month

Kubernetes

Kubernetes automates application deployment, scaling, and management using open-source code. Compute cluster nodes are scheduled on them, and they are actively managed so that their state is in accordance with the intentions of their users.

Key Features:

• Run anywhere: on-premise, hybrid, or public cloud
• Automated rollouts, rollbacks, and scaling
• Service Discovery and load balancing
• Storage orchestration
• Helm charts to deploy multiple projects with the same customized applications
• Largest community among container orchestration tools

Website: https://kubernetes.io/ 

Price: Contact sales

Git

Git is an open-source, free, and highly efficient version control system for handling small and very large projects.

Key Features:

• Allow team members to collaborate and manage code repositories together
• Intuitive integration with Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and IntelliJ

Website: https://git-scm.com/ 

Price: Free 

Monit

This tool acts as a watchdog to ensure that a specific process runs smoothly on the software. It is user-friendly and can be easily set up and configured for use in a multiservice architecture.

Key Features:

• Small open-source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems
• Conducts automatic maintenance and repair
• Executes meaningful causal actions in error situations

Website: https://mmonit.com/monit/

Price: Free

Vagrant:

Vagrant can aid in facilitating a DevOps culture within your organization, while also improving the development and operational processes of Puppet for both developers and professionals.

Key Features:

• No complicated setup process; download and install within minutes on Mac OS X, Windows, or widespread distribution of Linux
• Create a single file for projects describing the type of machine you want, the software you want to install, and how you want to access the device, and then store the file with your project code
• With a single command "Vagrant up," Vagrant creates your complete development environment so that all members of the DevOps team have the same development environment

Website: https://www.vagrantup.com/

Price: Free

Chef

With Chef, developers can express infrastructure, security policies, and application lifecycles as code, modernizing how applications are developed, packaged, and delivered to any platform.

Key Features:

• With little human interaction, deploy simple or complex system changes to a large number of servers
• Easily automate legacy desktop applications that are hard to automate. 

Website: https://www.chef.io/ 

Price: Contact sales 

Prometheus

Prometheus is a widely-used tool in the DevOps community, often used alongside the Grafana framework. As an open-source service monitoring system, it offers a flexible query language that allows for efficient analysis of time series data, generating useful alerts, tables, and graphs. With support for over ten languages and the ability to execute custom libraries, it is a user-friendly and versatile option.

Key Features:

• A flexible query language for slicing and dicing collected time series data to generate graphs, tables, and alerts
• Scales through functional sharing and federation of memory and local disk storage
• Supports more than ten languages and includes easy-to-implement custom libraries
• Signals based on Prometheus's flexible query language
• Alert manager handles notifications and silencing

Website: https://prometheus.io/

Price: Free

Final thoughts

DevOps tools and technologies are vast and constantly evolving, with new tools and techniques always emerging. However, based on our analysis and research, we can confidently recommend several top tools and technologies to help organizations streamline their development, testing, deployment, and operations processes.

These tools include popular automation tools like Jenkins and Travis CI, containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, collaboration platforms like GitHub and GitLab, configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef, and monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana.

While the tools and technologies an organization uses may vary depending on their unique needs and requirements, implementing these best-in-class DevOps tools can help businesses achieve greater agility, efficiency, and productivity in their software development and delivery efforts. 

In today's fast-paced, technology-driven world, organizations can stay ahead of the curve by utilizing the right DevOps tools and practices.