In my own experience, I’ve learned that there are many best DevOps tools that can make the process of making software much better. These tools are very important for creating a DevOps culture in a company or team. From my own experience, the fact that software development and operations teams work together is one of the most transformative parts of the DevOps approach.
What I think is most important about the DevOps strategy is how it streamlines and automates different parts of software development. In this group are jobs like writing code, running tests, finding and fixing problems, overseeing releases, and more. This automation not only cuts down on the time it takes to get software products to market, but it also makes them better overall.
Increasing production time, improving communication, reducing costs and decreasing deployment errors are the main motivations for DevOps. To take full advantage of DevOps, an organization must address five key processes: Communication, CI/CD, Configuration Management, Security, and Monitoring and Alerting. Below, we have mentioned the best DevOps tools.
Best DevOps Tools
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open source continuous integration server that automates the entire software project creation cycle. The strength of this tool is the pipeline functionality that can be used by developers to automatically submit code to the repository, run test cases, and retrieve reports after testing. Continuous integration and continuous deployment are two key practices of DevOps methodology that make Jenkins an indispensable DevOps tool.
Jenkins is compatible with most CI/CD integration tools and services, thanks to the more than 1,500 available plugins that provide integration points for deploying custom functionality during software development. This highly customizable tool provides immediate feedback and alerts when a particular sprint leads to or affects a faulty build. Most of the tasks and tools involved in the SDLC can be automated with Jenkins, enabling team members to increase their performance.
Maven
Maven is one of the most important DevOps tools for building projects. Unlike the ANT build system, Apache Maven is more than just an automated build framework. It is also designed to handle reporting, documentation, deployment, release, and dependency processes. Maven is written in the Java language and can build and manage projects in Java, C#, Ruby, Scala and other languages using Project Object Model (POM) plugins. It has a rich repository of plugins to enhance the build process and broad compatibility with IDEs such as Eclipse, JBuilder, MyEclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA and others.
Maven offers a number of benefits to its users. It simplifies the creation and monitoring process through automation and provides a unified creation process that enables consistency and efficiency. This tool also provides comprehensive project information through high-quality documentation, a valuable resource for developing best practices hence the name Maven, which translates in Yiddish as knowledge repository. Finally, Maven offers a greatly simplified feature migration process.
Git
Git is one of the most popular and widely used DevOps tools in the software industry. It is a distributed source code management (SCM) tool valued by remote teams and open source contributors. With Git, it is possible to keep track of the progress of development work. You can save different versions of source code and revert to an earlier version when needed. It is also great for experimentation, as you can create separate branches and merge new features only when they are ready for use.
By default, Git is a command-line tool, but you can also download the GUI client, which allows you to manage your source code through an easy-to-use GUI. Many source code editors, such as Visual Studio Code, also have a built-in Git editor tool. To integrate Git into the DevOps workflow, it is necessary to host source code in repositories where team members can publish their work. Currently, the most popular online services for hosting Git repositories are Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket.
Nagios
Nagios is used for continuous infrastructure monitoring. It provides server, application, and network monitoring. With Nagios, we can monitor an entire data center from a single server. We can see if switches are working properly, if servers are not overloaded, or if some part of the application is down. Nagios offers an attractive graphical interface that can be used to check various details, such as memory usage, fan speed, switch routing tables, or SQL server health.
Nagios has a modular design. It supports NRPE plugins that can be used to add monitoring parameters to existing Nagios. There are numerous plugins available on the Internet that can be used freely to add additional functionality to Nagios. Nagios is the most popular tool for continuous monitoring.
Jira
Jira is a popular issue tracking and project management platform. It is a product of Atlassian, a renowned IT company that develops several popular software tools, including Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello, Statuspage and others. You can use Jira as a SaaS or on-premise solution. Since Jira was originally a bug tracking tool, most developers still consider it a tool. The intuitive interface allows you to view the development status of projects, create branches and pull requests, view commits, manage dependencies and releases, view progress, and more.
Project management functions were added to Jira at a later date and complement the bug tracking functions. Because Jira focuses on agile software development (i.e., methods that focus on iterative development), it has Scrum and Kanban boards (two competing implementations of Agile), roadmaps, advanced reporting tools, and more. Jira also has an advanced automation engine that allows you to create automation rules using a convenient drag-and-drop interface. Not only can you automate Jira tasks, but you can also connect to tools such as Bitbucket, GitHub or Microsoft Teams and include them in your automation workflows.
Ansible
Ansible is an open source CM DevOps tool also used for deployment, automation and orchestration. While using infrastructure as the code architecture, Ansible uses an SSH connection for push nodes, making it agentless. Of the three tools, Ansible is considered easy to learn and use because its playbooks are written in YAML with minimal commands and can be read by humans.
This tool is mainly used to import new changes into the existing system and to configure new machines in provisioning. Reducing infrastructure costs and increasing the speed of scalability replication are just two of the reasons that have made this tool a favorite among IT companies.
Puppet
Puppet is an open source tool for software configuration management and automated deployment. It is an alternative to Ansible and provides better control over client computers. Puppet has a graphical user interface that makes it simpler than Ansible. It is cross-platform and runs on both Unix and Microsoft Windows. Puppet uses a manifest file and applies that specification to all machines. Unlike Ansible, Puppet is an agent-based tool. The Puppet master runs on a master machine and the Puppet agent runs on all client machines. Puppet is used by Microsoft, Google, and Accenture, among others.
Docker
The Docker engine is designed to automate the development, deployment and management of containerized applications on individual nodes. Docker is open source and compatible with cloud services such as AWS, GCP and Azure Cloud. Docker also runs on Windows and Linux operating systems. Container platforms are application solutions that allow developers to create, test and deploy applications in resource-independent environments.
Each container contains a complete runtime environment with the respective application, its libraries, source code, configurations and all dependencies. Container platforms provide orchestration, automation, security, governance and other capabilities. DevOps relies heavily on containerization and microservices for efficient application development and deployment; Docker and Kubernetes are the most commonly used container technologies.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that takes container management to the next level. It was founded by a couple of engineers at Google who wanted to find a solution for managing containers at scale. Kubernetes works well with Docker or one of its alternatives and helps group containers into logical units. If you only have a few containers, you may not need a container orchestration platform. However, it is the next logical step when you reach a certain level of complexity and need to scale resources. With Kubernetes, you can automate the process of managing hundreds or thousands of containers.
With Kubernetes, you no longer need to tie containerized applications to a single machine. Instead, you can deploy them across a cluster of machines, with Kubernetes automating the deployment and scheduling of containers across the cluster. A Kubernetes cluster consists of a master node and multiple worker nodes. The master node applies predefined rules and distributes containers to the worker nodes. Kubernetes monitors everything to avoid inconveniences, such as noticing when a worker node fails and redistributing containers.
