Top 10 Best DevOps Tools You Must Know

“DevOps Branches are good for diversity. Adapt DevOps to your context or you might not survive.” – Patrick Debois

DevOps has gained momentum world over, encompassing all major industry segments – healthcare, finance, banking, insurance, eCommerce, manufacturing to name a few. Organizations, big and small, are leveraging the potential of DevOps Consulting in facilitating their business success in terms of increased productivity and profitability.

As the technical world expands, the tools and technologies supporting DevOps have also seen an upward trend. There are many tools that are simplifying the job that DevOps aims for. Before we have a look at the best DevOps tools, let us have a brief overview of what DevOps is all about.

Good Read: What Is DevOps? Simplified In 200 Words

DevOps – An Overview

DevOps is all about a merged culture of collaboration and communication between the development teams and operational teams. It includes a group of practices that look at automation and integration of development procedures between the two teams to garner optimal success and efficacy.
DevOps is an approach, a culture, a philosophy, a set of procedures and principles – all set to have a sharp influence on project development and delivery. Ranging from startup organizations to huge enterprises, it is altering the way business is built and executed. It encourages a continual atmosphere wherein changes, releases, and updates are more frequent.

Major Features Of DevOps

• Includes tools, mindset, procedures, and culture
• Is a work culture that thins the gap between teams to lessen development time
• Is a logical continuance of the agile journey and the future of software development life cycle
• Eliminates manual activities and lessens the occurrence of errors to increase accuracy and agility
• Goes by Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery model principles for process automation
• Helps teams to be more competent in catering to customer requirements, build more confidence and attain organizational goals swiftly
• Helps regulate the software development life cycle with each role involved in each phase

Top 10 DevOps Tools To Look For:

• Jenkins
• Selenium
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Puppet
• Chef
• Ansible
• GitHub
• Consul
• Gradle

Jenkins

Jenkins is a leading DevOps tool that builds great things at any scale. It is an open-source automation server that offers multiple plug-ins to build, deploy, and automate projects. It monitors the implementation of frequent tasks and assists in the integration of project-based changes seamlessly, by searching for issues.

Key Features

• Needs less maintenance and leverages the automation scale
• Offers multiple plug-ins to build and test any type of project
• Java-based support, easy to operate on most OS – Windows, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.
• Supports CI and CD
• Improves concurrency by distributing tasks across different devices
• Extensible and easy configuration/installation

Organizations Using It

Pentaho, Capgemini, AngularJS, LinkedIn, Openstack, NASA, Netflix, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! etc.

Selenium

Selenium is a popular DevOps tool that is used as an automated software testing framework for web applications. DevOps resources need a testing tool that is fast, effective, and accurate and that is what Selenium offers. It gives full-scale test automation along with all aspects of the project.

Key Features

• Competence to test on multiple platforms like iOS and Android
• Open source in nature and free to use
• Creates regression automation testing sets
• Makes use of multiple languages like Java, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Perl, C#, etc.
• Automates web applications for testing purposes
• Automates web-based admin tasks

Organizations Using It

Google, Salesforce, IBM, Cognizant, JPMorgan, Barclays, Atlassian, etc.

Docker

Docker is a preferred software platform that is ideal for building, testing, and deploying applications instantly. It acts as an ideal PaaS technology that leverages OS-level virtualization for delivering software in containers. As a lightweight tool, it uses containers to package apps with necessary requisites prior to shipping it as a unified package. There is no need for setting up and configuring the environment every time it is deployed or tested. Docker is apt at automating the entire procedure from development to deployment.

Key Features

• Utilization of containers with any programming language
• Possibility of shipping the container at any location – QA, team, cloud
• High-end scalability with zero downtime
• Supports distributed development
• Ability to isolate apps in separate containers
• Eliminates the need for virtual machines
• Works well with other DevOps monitoring technologies like Jenkins

Organizations Using It

Uber, eBay, PayPal, The New York Times, ThoughtWorks, JPMorgan Chase, Business Insider, GE, Groupon, Shopify, etc.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a leading container orchestration platform, headed by Google. As a competent DevOps tool, Kubernetes assists in deploying containerized applications to a cluster of devices and automates distributing the containers across. Here, containers are grouped into logical entities. It is considered beneficial for larger projects. As a cluster management tool, it offers a lot of benefits as against others.

Key Features

• Facilitates deployment to multiple devices via automatic distribution
• Helps big time in taking care of complicated projects across huge team clusters
• An ideal container orchestration tool developed for public release
• Empowers resources to use Microservices, Serverless computing, etc.
• Benefits development speed and ensures reliability
• Easy deployment, scaling, and management of containerized apps

Organizations Using It

Google, Shopify, Robinhood, Slack, Nubank, StackShare, Babylon, booking.com, AppDirect, Amadeus, Bose, Capital One, IBM, The New York Times, etc.

Puppet

Puppet is a known name in the world of DevOps as a user-dependent tool contributing to the source code. It is leveraged in huge infrastructure and has good documentation and community support. It is based on Ruby and uses a customized domain scripting language. It can work on any platform that has support for Ruby. It offers a lot of traditional infrastructure support and hence is chosen by those who need to adhere to the original lookout. It is ideal for those whose teams have good DevOps skill support.

Key Features

• Well-built support system via Puppet Labs
• Highly mature interfaces
• Executes on all major OS
• Simplistic installation and initial setup
• Robust reporting competencies
• Works in client-server mode

Organizations Using It

PayPal, Uber, MIT, Salesforce, Red Hat, Google, Siemens, Stanford, Harvard Law School, Twitch, Booking.com, etc.

Chef

Chef is popular configuration management & DevOps tool for automating and defining infrastructure as a code. It makes use of Ruby to write the configuration parameters. It undergoes automation of app deployment, infrastructure configuration, and those managed across the network. It is a chosen option when there is the availability of skilled resources in Ruby and Git and there is a keen interest in searching for a streamlined environment.

Key Features

• Open source and supports multiple platforms
• Easily integrable with other cloud-based platforms
• Has an active and innovative community to support
• Flexible and resourceful owing to its code-driven methodology
• Possesses version control capabilities
• A rich collection of configuration controls and modules

Organizations Using It

Airbnb, Mozilla Firefox, Walt Disney, Expedia, HP, Rackspace, Facebook, Accenture, Fiverr, GitLab, Digital Ocean, etc.

Ansible

Ansible is a leading open source automation tool that is considered perfect for the creation and standardization of automation practices like applications, network configuration, development environments, and cloud-based deployments. As an ideal IT orchestration and configuration management tool, Ansible makes the most of your resources without loading it more. This, thereby, lowers the cost of maintaining the existing structure and increases the scalability speed.

Key Features

• Has good support towards push configuration
• Depends upon master-slave architecture
• Utilizes simplistic syntax and is open source by nature
• Eliminates human mistakes and saves on time and costs
• Connects to multiple other integral tools offering swifter development
• Offers more robust apps and services

Organizations Using It

Atlassian, Cisco, DLT, Juniper, Splunk, Siemens, Twitter, Verizon, Verisign, Capital One, NASA, Solidify, etc.

GitHub

GitHub is a very well-known DevOps tool, a development platform that is meant for easy collaboration. It is considered an ideal choice for hosting and reviewing code along with building software across multiple developers. Developers can share their projects and collaborate in shared repositories. Instant iterations to the code can be made and even rollbacks can be handled very swiftly. It offers high-end visibility into development pipelines and effective collaboration between associated groups.

Key Features

• Free, open-source, strong version control system
• Can easily integrate into the DevOps workflow
• Chosen widely by open source contributors and remote teams
• A distributed source code management (SCM) tool
• Maintains different versions of the source code seamlessly
• Handles small to big projects with efficiency and speed
• Tracks file systems, code changes during software development and informs all accordingly

Organizations Using It

Netflix, Guardian, Twitter, Yelp, Microsoft, Shopify, Artsy, IBM, Alibaba, Go Daddy, Gilt, Adobe, etc.

Consul

Consul is a leading DevOps tool, a service mesh solution that is utilized to discover and configure services in any kind of infrastructure. It offers a comprehensively featured control plane with different features related to service discovery, configuration, and segmentation. It is considered perfect for modernized infrastructure as it is quite useful to the DevOps community.

Key Features

• Offers a robust API
• With HTTP or DNS, apps can search for relevant services
• Leverages the hierarchical key or value
• Service discovery, health checking,
• Multi datacentre and secure service communication
• Friendly to both – DevOps teams and developers

Organizations Using It

Trivago, Slack, Robinhood, N26, Tokopedia, Durstexpress, Digital Ocean, etc.

Gradle

As a versatile building tool, Gradle is perfect when it comes to assisting teams in building, automating, and delivering software faster and in an effective manner. It is written in Java, Kotlin, and Groovy. Gradle comes up with many options for configuration and hence is considered fast and accurate. Google has designated it as the official build tool for Android Studio.

Key Features

• Enriched API and matured ecosystem of plug-ins and integrations
• Option to choose the language of your own choice
• Faster as compared to its peers because of its daemon and build cache
• Reliability and versatility
• Uses a Groovy-based DSL to explain build scripts
• Saves a large amount of time because of incremental builds

Organizations Using It

Accenture, Netflix, Lyft, N26, Alibaba Travels, Craftbase, etc.

Good Read: DevOps Failure. Why DevOps Fails? Here Are Some Key Reasons To Consider

Other Top DevOps Tools In The Popularity Run

• Slack

Slack is a good DevOps tool that is used globally for effective collaboration across projects. It facilities developers to communicate with toolchains the same way they do with other team members.

• Sentry

Considered a good tool for error finding, Sentry has good support for languages like JS, Ruby, etc. It possesses a certain inbuilt SDK that can be used for supporting other frameworks. It offers a variety of solutions and sends notifications as needed.

• AWS CodeDeploy

As an Amazon product, AWS CodeDeploy is a completely managed deployment service in which the latest application version is deployed to any EC2 instance. It supports many compute services like AWS Lambda, EC2, Fargate, etc.

• Bamboo

An efficient CI/CD DevOps tool, Bamboo empowers delivery pipeline automation, from designing till implementation. It also integrates seamlessly with other products such as Jira. It has an instinctive UI with flexible features.

• Bitbucket

Bitbucket helps in project code management throughout the software development lifecycle. It is cost-effective and offers a private repository. It offers seamless integration with Jira and Trello.

• Datadog

Datadog offers an in-depth view into the tool performance of your DevOps cycle. It helps track real-time information flow with different visualization components. It also helps share dashboards/graphs/logs within team members.

• New Relic

New Relic APM is a good DevOps tool that offers complete visibility into a good client experience. It helps DevOps teams to less their time into application monitoring and management.

• SonarQube

SonarQube is developed by SonarSource as an open-source DevOps tool that helps in the regular inspection of code quality. It also offers automated evaluations with detailed code analysis for finding out errors and security flaws in different languages.

• Splunk

Splunk Phantom is a software platform that supports security orchestration, automation, and response system. It offers a facility to analyze machine-generated logs from different sources like sensors, devices, websites, etc.

• TeamCity

TeamCity is an effective build management and CI/CD server by JetBrains. It is written in Java and is competent to build and deploy different kinds of projects. It permits up to 100 various job configurations.

DevOps Is Here to Revolutionize Technology, Let Us Leverage Its Potential

It is the time of DevOps now. Industries are benefiting in abundance, thanks to the above-mentioned DevOps tools, DevOps consulting and its USPs, and many other tools that are hitting the market. It is tough to decide on which one to choose. It all depends upon the organizational needs, cost estimates, technical expertise, and infrastructure. Overall, these tools are instrumental in unleashing the potential of DevOps to the globe. Waiting for many more to come and show their wonders. The higher the competition, the better is the organizational success ratio!