Howdy readers, welcome aboard! In this blog, we are going to discuss several DevOps tools that support automation and collaboration between teams.
Being a leading DevOps Consulting Service Provider, we are often asked about the best DevOps tools in the market. But the thing is, becoming a DevOps champion is a long and complicated process. Although various tools affect all aspects of the development cycle in one way or another, no individual tool we know of plays the primary part in all phases. One tool can’t do everything. There are different needs and suitable tools for those needs. So in this article, we are going to include important tools for some particular tasks for the next time you go tool shopping ;-)
When talking about DevOps tools, it is helpful to split it down by stages. We will be including planning, building, continuous integration, deployment, and operation in this blog.
1. Planning
Planning is the very first and most important step towards DevOps transformation. You should always go for the tools that allow your developers to design in iterations. This way, you can leverage user feedback to optimize your project. On this stage, we recommend tools with sprint planning features. Always try to find planning tools that encourage continuous brainstorming.
You should try- Jira Software, Hipchat, Confluence
2. Building
While operation teams primarily use Chef and Puppet, to plan individual development environments developers, use tools like Docker. Disposable replicas of production, coding against virtual help you to spin up variations of your development ecosystem. When the whole development team works with the same kind tools “works on my machine” cases occur less. So, try to look for the tools that enable the identically-provisioned environment for your team.
You should try- Bamboo, Bitbucket, Chef, Docker, Puppet
3. Continuous Integration
Continuous integration can be described as a process of checking in code to a common container and testing it multiple times a day. Looks hectic, right? But this way you can identify bugs early and fix them before they are too hard to find so that you can provide users with the latest update as early as possible.
Since branch-and-merge workflows are being so favoured in the DevOps communities, tools that can handle running CI in a multi-branch environment are the ultimate saviours to sustain testing without compromising the speed of Dev.
You should try- Bamboo, Hipchat
4. Deployment
Do you know what is the most stressful thing about pushing a release to deployment? Maintaining all the changes, versions, testing, and deployment information about the forthcoming release in one place. Nobody likes those long meetings finding where is what. What is the solution? Release Dashboard.
Find the tools providing a single dashboard integrated with your deployment tools and code repository.
You should try- Jira Software
5. Operations
When doing the monitoring (server and application performance both), you need a tool that listens and registers data 24/7. Yes, there are many tools available to do that and some famous names are Nagios, Splunk, and New Relic. You will need to look for some cross-team communication tools to notify teams about all the incidents and their resolution.
You should try- BigPanda, Hipchat, HostedGraphite, Nagios, New Relic, Pager Duty, Pingdom, Splunk, Statuspage, DataDog
Now that you already know about many great tools, you need to understand one thing - DevOps tools are not magic wands that will transform your software development process overnight. It’s more of a cultural transformation than a magic spell. However, tools do play a great sidekick for ‘The Mighty DevOps’. So go check out these tools and tell us how did they perform for you!
