As the pressure to deliver high-quality products quickly mounts, embracing new-age DevOps tools that make building software a lot easier and efficient has become a requisite for survival and success.
Since DevOps facilitates stronger and more frequent collaboration between the development and operations teams, detecting and rectifying faults will be much easier – and will happen at a much earlier point in the development lifecycle.
Tools that drive value
Selecting the right tools is extremely critical to ensure the success of your DevOps implementation. You must ensure the tools you choose will operate seamlessly across your DevOps organization and comply with the necessary security and governance requirements.
That said, here’s a list of various types of tools needed for successful DevOps implementation:
Collaboration: Collaboration is the foundation on which any DevOps strategy is built. Therefore, it is important to choose tools that can help you develop and review code as a team and stay updated with all the challenges that come your way. The right tools can not only pave the way for frequent and efficient collaboration, but they can also help in distributing responsibilities, supporting numerous reviews, resolving conflicts, and improving the quality of code.
- Jira, a project management tool, can enable you to efficiently plan and manage tasks across the software development life cycle. Using Jira, team members can effectively plan and distribute tasks, prioritize and discuss the team’s work, and build and release great software together.
- Trello, Atlassian’s collaboration and work management tool, is an easy-to-use, Kanban-inspired tool that helps teams get organized and work efficiently. By organizing projects into boards, Trello allows your teams to stay abreast of all that’s happening across the project – the tasks that are actively being worked on, who is working on them, and so much more.
- Slack, a workplace communication tool, allows software development teams to collaborate easily – either through group chats or direct messages. Using Slack, users can read and respond to messages, view RSS feeds, set reminders, get notifications, and always keep up with what’s happening. Its intuitive and responsive UI makes it a highly sought tool, even for non-technical users.
Source control management: As software development teams begin to work on code from different departments and locations, using tools that help in effectively tracking and managing changes to their code becomes increasingly important. Source control management tools are an excellent way for teams to get insight into the history of code development and resolve conflicts while merging contributions from multiple sources.
- GitHub, a version control tool, allows teams to keep track of collaborative as well as personal projects. Since each file has a history, your teams can explore the changes that are being made to data, scripts, notes, graphs, and more, as the project develops. It streamlines the version control process, making it far easier for teams to store and backup files, host and review code, manage projects, and build good quality software.
- Bitbucket, a web-based version control repository hosting service, offers several benefits to a collaborative software team workflow. It enables team members to effortlessly resolve conflicts as code gets edited while leaving an audit trail that provides a history of all the changes. If a bug is detected, teams can easily undo or rollback changes to the last stable version and maintain an offsite source code backup at all times.
- Nexus is a robust repository manager that provides a single source of truth for components, binaries, and builds across QA, staging, and operations. It can be easily integrated with existing provisioning systems and offers encrypted SSL communications that helps keep code safe. Using Nexus, teams can share binaries, snapshots, releases, and staged artifacts and quickly test, promote, or discard them as needed.
Continuous Integration: For companies looking to accelerate time-to-market, DevOps concepts like CI make the process of integration a simple, easily repeatable, everyday task. To achieve success with CI, teams need to adopt tools that help in building, testing and deploying software efficiently and reliably.
- Jenkins, an open-source automation server, provides teams with hundreds of plugins to build, deploy, and automate any project. It can either be used as a simple CI server or converted into a CD hub – depending on the need. Using Jenkins, teams can continuously monitor development cycles, check for vulnerabilities, and improve server health and application performance. Because it helps in quick identification of issues, it allows teams to more easily integrate project changes and deliver working software – quickly.
- Bamboo, a CI/CD server developed by Atlassian, allows teams to create multi-stage build plans, set up triggers to start builds, and assign users to critical deployments. Using Bamboo, your teams can also run automated tests while integrated with a host of other tools to boost the CI pipeline.
Deployment: For teams running DevOps projects, ensuring every change that passes through the development pipeline is also deployed in time is critical. The right deployment tools can help in bringing products quickly to the market while shortening the feedback loop.
- Codefactori, Addteq’s hosted and managed cloud environment, is centered around popular Atlassian tools. Using Codefactori, teams can get critical insights and techniques on how to optimize the release process. They can also efficiently manage cost, scale seamlessly, and enjoy enterprise-grade security and 24×7 monitoring.
- Stackstorm offers teams a way to connect all their apps, services, and workflows in a single pace so that they can improve their deployment accuracy. Using a robust automation engine, it allows for easy automation of DevOps processes. It integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure and enables continuous deployment of code.
Configuration: In the DevOps world, configuration management plays a vital role in automating otherwise tedious tasks, allowing teams to boost agility. Configuration management tools help in designing, automating, monitoring, and managing daily tasks so that system-wide changes can be implemented quickly and easily.
- Chef, a widely used configuration tool, enables teams to define and run infrastructure as code on one centralized server. Once configurations are specified, they are automatically replicated across thousands of nodes – making it easy to implement changes immediately.
- Puppet enables automation of infrastructure and application workflows across teams, deployments, and applications so that DevOps teams can drive value faster. By automating mundane everyday tasks, it helps eliminate manual errors and scale teams with infrastructure-as-code.
Adopting the right DevOps tools is crucial to deliver products that perfectly align with customer demands. Is your geared for DevOps success?
