DevOps Automation Tools
DevOps is one technology trend that has really changed the way IT firms operate.
DevOps model appeared as a boon to those firms facing challenges with regard to faster deployment and in-time product release. More than as a technology, DevOps brought-in a new culture in functioning by bridging gaps between development and operations teams, which are key to any IT organization.
As the firms started realizing DevOps potential, the immediate challenge they had is with the implementation.
Though they have multiple strategies, there still existed gaps in a full-fledged DevOps implementation.
And, DevOps tools appeared as a solution! However, no single tool can be a one-stop solution to a full-fledged DevOps adoption and so, there is a wide variety of DevOps tools for every specific DevOps requirement.
DevOps tools facilitate ways for effective sharing and exchange of resources, information and technical know-how of the tasks between the development, operations and security teams for effective product output.
How DevOps Tools Benefit Your Business?
DevOps Tools make it easier by bringing in a new flow across SDLC and addresses key aspects of your DevOps environment by automating the process chain using Build, Test, Deploy and Release features.
Right DevOps Tools in place can help you with:
- Accelerated Development
- Enhanced Operational Efficiency
- Quicker Release
- Continuous Delivery
- Frequent Deployment
- Faster Recovery Time
- Increased Collaboration
- Faster Rate of Innovation
- Seamless Flow Across Value-Chain
Here, we will look into different types of DevOps tools that are playing a vital role in DevOps implementation. By functionality, DevOps tools can be basically divided into two different categories: Tools by Functionality and Tools by Requirement.
DevOps Tools by Functionality
Days are gone where the manual operations were a priority. Now, it’s time for automation! To stay in line with the trend, there are also a good number of DevOps automation tools that can help you in an effective software process. Here a few:
Popular DevOps Automation Tools | ||
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Tool | Tool Name | Description |
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Puppet | Available as a free open source and paid versions, we leverage this go-to automation tool that automates critical manual tasks and simplifies them by abstracting critical configuration details across different OS and technology platforms. |
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Docker | Beneficial for Dev environments, we utilize Docker for quicker deployment to create their own images or modify the existing ones as per the needs. A Docker-Puppet integration helps build robust images using more than seven million lines of Puppet code. |
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Jenkins | Automating regular tasks, we use Jenkins which enables CI/CD for any combination of coding language and source code repositories using a pipeline system. Allowing the usual scripting process, Jenkins ensures a robust procedure of integrating the entire DevOps chain. |
Infrastructure as Code | ||
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Terraform | An infrastructure provisioning tool that maintains the state of infrastructure using ‘state files’. Through this tool, we facilitate public and private cloud infrastructure provisioning. |
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Ansible | We use this agent-less configuration management and orchestration tool, where configuration modules defined as ‘Playbooks’. Written in YAML format, Playbooks are relatively easy to write compared to other related tools. It supports cloud provisioning. |
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Chef | We leverage this ruby-based configuration management tool that uses ‘Cookbooks’, where infrastructure is coded in Domain-Specific Language with limited programming. |
DevOps Continuous Integration/Deployment Tools | ||
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Jenkins | A Java-based CI tool, we use this for faster app delivery; as it requires association with a version control system such as GitHub; Pipeline-as-code functionality makes the CI/CD pipelines a complete code. |
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Vagrant | A tool for configuring virtual machines for a developer environment; it contains plugins that support cloud provisioning, cloud management tools and Docker. |
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Docker | This works on the concept of process-level virtualization, Docker creates isolated environments for container apps |
Configuration/Secret Management | ||
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Consul | We use this open-source, widely available tool, mainly for service discovery requirements; right fit to store and retrieve configurations in real-time. |
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Etcd | We use this open-source key-value store, used in Kubernetes, to store the cluster operations and management state. |
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Vault | We use this open source tool to store and retrieve confidential data that provides options to store secret keys through encryption. |
DevOps Monitoring Tools | ||
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Prometheus & Alert Manager | Prometheus is a lightweight, open source monitoring system built for modern application monitoring; supports Linux servers and container monitoring. The Alert Manager takes care of the mechanism for monitoring metrics. |
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New Relic | This is a SaaS-based app that supports monitoring of Php, Ruby, Java, NodeJS, among other applications; gives insights about real-time performance of running apps. |
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Sensu | Another open source monitoring tool developed for cloud environments; easily deployable through chef and puppet. |
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Datadog | Another SaaS-based application and server monitoring solution that helps monitor Docker containers and other related applications. |
DevOps Tools by Requirement
DevOps tools which can be basically categorized into three types depending on specific requirements, which include: Measurement Tools and Tools for Continuous Delivery.
1) DevOps Tools for Measurement:
Through a wide variety of DevOps tools, we analyze, measure and conduct auditing processes, which are key to any IT organization. Here are two of the DevOps tools offers with a proven record in successful measurement factor through which we have ensured information sharing and increased transparency across firms:
Tool | Tool Name | Description |
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Splunk | This is a powerful tool that has a significant role in monitoring and exploring machine-generated data. Its specialty lies in indexing data of any type which makes it unique among other DevOps tools besides its effective information-sharing mechanism. |
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Graphite | This tool is specialized in converting machine-generated data into graphical representations such as on-demand graphs. It renders chunks of available data into dashboards and graphs, which can further be deployed easily onto other applications or webpages. |
2) Tools for Continuous Testing:
Continuous Testing (CT) in DevOps is a software testing method that involves automatic testing of the software at every step of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The obejective of Continuous Testing is evaluating the quality of software at every stage of the Continuous Delivery process by testing early and often. Let’s take a look at some critical continuous testing tools:
Tool | Tool Name | Description |
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Selenium | Selenium is an open-source automated testing tool that supports multiple operating systems (Windows, MAC, Linux) and browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Headless browsers). It supports various languages for test script writing like Java, Python, Groovy, C#, Ruby, PHP, and Perl. Robot Framework is the most popular framework used with Selenium for Continuous Testing. |
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Testsigma | Testsigma is a cloud-based automation testing tool that supports the testing of Web applications, Mobile Web applications, Android and iOS apps, and APIs. It uses simple, natural English language to compose test and requires no complicated programming, reducing the learning curve for manual testers to quickly adopt automation skills. Testsigma allows multiple open source and third-party integrations and supports numerous test environments to match the dynamic testing requirements continuously. |
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IBM Rational Functional Tester | Rational Functional Tester (RFT) can perform functional testing, regression testing, data-driven testing, GUI testing, API testing, and performance testing. It supports a host of applications, including web-based, .Net, Java, Siebel, and PowerBuilder. |
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Tricentis Tosca | Tricentis Tosca is a continuous testing platform that can be combined with open-source testing tools and more than 150 technologies. It supports model-based test automation, which is a scriptless approach and will reduce the maintenance overhead. It performs functional testing, load testing, BI testing, and risk-based testing. |
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Watir | Watir is an open-source automation and continuous testing tool based on Ruby language. It supports cross-browser testing for browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Opera. Watir also supports data-driven testing and headless browser testing, and integrates with BDD tools and frameworks, including Cucumber, RSpect, or Test/Unit. |
2) Tools for Continuous Delivery:
Continuous delivery and continuous integration are two key aspects that are driving DevOps adoption across IT firms. Let’s take a closer look at a number of DevOps tools that are playing in specific service offering:
Tool | Tools Name | Description |
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Jenkins | One of the most popular DevOps tools, for supporting continuous delivery offering through DevOps. As a continuous integration server and a continuous delivery hub, Jenkins tool offers hundreds of plugins that can help in build, deploy and automate the project of any kind. Through Jenkins advancement, the new Blue Ocean sub-project came up with a better way of options to run, build and analyze project pipelines. |
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Git | This tool enables version control of software projects and is more familiar among Linux users. It has a special advantage when it comes to the sharing of master versions of application files to distributed teams. But, Git by itself doesn’t have a centralized repository. |
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GitHub | GitHub can be called as an extended feature to Git. Addressing the centralized repository gap in Git, GitHub appears as a solution for hosting Git repositories. Easing information sharing across teams through graphical representations, GitHub bridges key gaps between the teams making information exchange easier and effective. The public and private repositories are available in paid versions. |
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Gerrit | This is a web-based management solution for Git-run control system. Gerrit allows you to manage code review and code repositories at a place. |
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GoCD | Reliable and continuous integration form DevOps unique features, which means ensuring codes in short and reliable cycles. This continuous integration tool offers complete visibility throughout the workflow. With Go, one can easily compare builds and go beyond that with dozens of easily-deployable plugins. |
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Mercurial | This is also similar to Git in its version-control feature. With an instant graphing tool, Mercurial is unique because of its distributed nature. Like Git, this tool has no dependence on a central repository. |
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Chef | A configuration-management tool for efficient web-scale IT operations. It uses the concept of ‘recipes’ for configuring databases, load balancing and web servers. |
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Ansible | Another powerful tool that offers a continuous delivery feature. With effective server and configuration management, this tool eases IT automation ending repetitive tasks and enabling faster deployments. Cloud provisioning, application deployment are among other key features of Ansible. |
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Kubernetes | This tool is a solution for age-old concerns related to server management, especially in updating and migrating servers. Kubernetes, an open-source tool, ensures a mechanism to deploy, maintain and gauge containerized applications. Limiting hardware resource usage, this tool offers application predictability. |
Tools That Can Fill Gaps
We leverage the aforementioned ones which play a key role by functionality and a specific requirement for opting DevOps services.
Tool Name | Description |
Application Performance Management | This is key to DevOps adoption that actually stands out among other DevOps tools. This acts as a measuring point for applications and process improvement and plays a key role in DevOps progress. This speaks about DevOps progress in the end-user perspective. |
Monitoring | Monitoring is key to any organization as it grows. Busily engaged in automation and continuous delivery and integration, DevOps would definitely need integration of monitoring tools to assess the workflows, which could boost efficiency in deployment cycle, business process and overall software development. |
End-User Experience Monitoring | Tools that measure the DevOps progress in terms of end-user experience are an important part of the entire DevOps journey. |
Analytics | Analytics is one important aspect that every organization is looking at to stay perfect. Along with continuous integration and deployment tools, our DevOps services offer continuous analytics tools to measure application activity in comparison with the business requirements. Continuous monitoring, tracking, and analytics could be the need of the hour for a full-fledged DevOps implementation. |
DevSecOps | A new integration tool that addressed the security issues in DevOps. |
Which DevOps Tools Suit Your Requirement?
Worried about choosing from widely-available options of open source and commercial tools? This usually needs some testing and experimentation. Don’t worry! We are here to guide you. All you have to do is prepare the checklist of your key requirements and tell us.
Our DevOps experts including planners and engineers will help you choose the appropriate ones that meet your project requirements and also assist you in the successful implementation.
Overall, 2019 has been noted as the promising year for DevOps and its tool market with many more companies realizing DevOps potential. As the rate of deployment increases, same will result in the rise of demand for the best DevOps tools.
How Veritis Helps?
Are you worried about choosing from widely-available options of open source and commercial tools? We understand that this process needs some testing and experimentation.
We are here to guide you – All you have to do is prepare the checklist of your key requirements and discuss your specifications with us.
Our DevOps experts including planners and engineers will help you choose the appropriate ones that meet your project requirements and also assist you in successful implementation.
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