DevOps technology is a combination of development and operations. It is based on the practical implementation of Agile methodology and is one of the most methodical and systematic approaches in the software industry. DevOps has led to Continuous Delivery, Integration, and Deployment and has reduced boundaries between the development teams and the operations team. Complex and heavy applications need elaborate and well-structured tech stacks that command substantial and large-scale labor for development and configuration.
DevOps offers a wide range of tools and technologies to build, test, and deploy applications within a span of a few minutes and a single click. They can be customized as per the client requirements and can be eliminated when not in use hence making the process seamless and cost-efficient for both the development team and the operations team. There are various DevOps tools have been advanced to make collaboration and development easier.
Here are the Top 10 DevOps tools which you should try in 2020:
1. Git
Git is the best DevOps tool for easy collaboration in shared repositories. It is an open-source, version control system that allows code management, swift code changes, and iterations along with development. The best part about Git is that it is suitable for large-scale applications as well and permits non-sequential development. Developers can work on different branches and push their changes and updates to the master branch for reviewing and merging. It maintains a copy of the previous code and in case something goes wrong, it can be reverted to the previous state of the project. It keeps a track of every commit which is simply retractable with the help of good commit messages.
2. Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration and automation server which is written in the Java programming language. It is used to automate the complete build cycle of a software application or project. Jenkins is preferred since building, automating, and deploying across various platforms is much easier and it integrates all the DevOps stages due to its enormous plugin ecosystem with more than a thousand plugins. Not only does it have a command-line interface but also a web-based graphical user interface and REST API for communication. It works with any programming language and supports multiple operating systems like Windows, Linux, etc. The Pipeline feature in Jenkins makes it possible for developers to automatically commit code into repositories and run test cases along with generating reports.
3. Ansible
Ansible is another open-source configuration planning, coordinating, and management tool. It is based on the master-slave architecture and supports push configuration. Ansible is essentially used for pushing new code changes in the existing project along with configuring newly deployed machines. It allows us to automate updates and setups thereby resulting in the faster configuration of CI/CD pipelines. Ansible is completely agentless and uses the YAML syntax. It is highly preferred since it lowers infrastructure costs and increases the replication speed while scaling. Ansible just needs SSH access to run commands on the servers that it manages in comparison to the alternative tools that need the installation of an agent on all the servers for communication.
4. Docker
There has been tremendous growth in the use and implementation of containerized platforms and micro-services architecture. Docker is a lightweight tool that uses the concept of containerization. It packages up an application along with various dependencies and requirements before shipping the complete container as a single package. Docker is widely used as it accelerates the development of ready-to-run containerized applications that are secure. It works well with other DevOps monitoring tools and works with any language. Every application container accommodates the source code, running time, system configuration files, etc. which is responsible for the execution of the application.
5. Maven
Maven is also considered one of the best DevOps tools that are being actively used for building projects. It has been designed in such a way that it can easily manage reporting, documentation, distribution, releases, etc. Maven is solely written in Java programming language can is capable to handle projects of Scala, Ruby, C#, or Java.
Maven offers a rich repository (for plugins) that can enhance the process with endless capabilities using IDEs such as Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, etc.
6. Puppet
Puppet is an open-source, cross-platform configuration management platform based on master-slave architecture. It allows Infrastructure as a Code management along with faster and more reliable software delivery. Puppet is used for automating the process of delivering, examining, and operating the application throughout the complete software life cycle with platform independence. It helps to release better software in less duration of time and aids the best DevOps practices like CI/CD, versioning, and automated testing. It assists in quick error recovery and agility and is hence quite popular among developers. It limits customization but in turn, offers more reliability as it uses declarative language.
7. Kubernetes
Kubernetes is another powerful automated tool that helps developers to run contained applications across its cluster (referring to a group of nodes). On the other hand, developers harness Kubernetes to automate such processes as container config, scaling, networking, etc. to meet the requirements by offering fast processing and fewer bugs. Below are some of the major highlights of Kubernetes:
- You can run it anywhere (hybrid or public)
- Storage orchestration
- Service discovery and load balancing
8. Grafana
Grafana is open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application that is open source. It is used by thousands of companies to monitor Prometheus & Graphite metrics, power plants, logs, beehives, applications, and custom data sources. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when attached to supported data sources that give valuable insights. It is expandable through a plug-in system and the end-users can create advanced monitoring dashboards using the interactive query builders it provides.
9. Splunk
Splunk is a high-end machine data, infrastructure monitoring, log analyzing, and application monitoring tool. Splunk is preferred as it provides dashboard provisioning for better representation and visualization, analysis, and management. It communicates with the various log files and stores them in the form of events. Splunk can be used on-premises or on SaaS as well. It is shipped with a lot of defaults and features preconfigured so that the user does not waste time and effort digging through the documentation to set things up. It can get insights from various types of data and generate knowledge objects for operational intelligence.
10. Chef
The chef is another open-source configuration management and automation tool built in Ruby and Erlang. It manages the data, cookbooks, attributes, environments, and roles and converts infrastructure to code. It is easy to integrate with cloud-based platforms such as SoftLayer, Amazon EC2, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and also supports multiple platforms like Linux, FreeBSD, CentOS, and Red Hat. As opposed to the puppet, it uses imperative language which offers a greater level of customization and gives freedom to program every feature of the node. It is an amazing tool for more traditional legacy applications rather than stateless applications.
