Software development, implementation, and deployment are complicated yet critical processes for product and service-oriented organizations. However, With the digital boom, Software-as-a-service became a concept that held together what has now become the biggest industry this world has seen – the worldwide IT industry.
Providing software as a service has a few well-documented steps, such as software development and software testing services. With the advent of this digital service sector, newer problems in operations also arose, the most common of which is the tussle between development teams, which are responsible for building the software, and operations teams, which are responsible for its deployment.
Development teams suggested changes in the core software, whereas operations teams pointed out that the web server environment is the issue. Caught in this conflict, the organizations started losing business, and as a result, clients lost out on regularly updated software releases. They introduce the concept of involving both development and operational engineers throughout the lifecycle of the service to rid the service sector of this bottleneck. This practice, called DevOps, is built on a principle of communication between the agencies for mutual benefit and offers two major features – continuous value addition and automation.
DevOps Features
DevOps has brought significant change in the structure of daily operations at software firms. Let’s take a look at some of the key features of the combination of development and operations as a single entity below:
Values
The DevOps principle operates based on offering a full focus on the overall service provided to the customer, rather than just the presentation of “working software”. It urges a collaborative environment among different teams and departments to facilitate efficient outputs.
Methods
The methods previously used independently for operational and developmental purposes do not necessarily require a change. Although, newer methodologies are evolving that take a symbiotic relationship into account and design methods that can perform both jobs simultaneously. We can look forward to increasing the efficiency of the methods used as new methods continue to be conceived and tested.
Practices
Continuous integration, coupled with continuous deployment, is the practice followed for the management of integrated jobs and regulating and monitoring automated functions.
Tools
A whole host of tools catering to the DevOps world has sprung up as the concept gained steam. There are tools dedicated to handling releases, configuration management, orchestration, monitoring, virtualization, etc. Developers have developed these tools with the exclusive purpose of bringing in the values, methods, and practices that facilitate DevOps.
Know all about the DevOps by watching a Video by Rackspace
Looking Ahead
DevOps has started on a high, but it is certainly still a work in progress. New technologies are being developed every day to work towards a more collaborative approach to service provisions. Software testing services need to be automated to ensure that the processes that software testers develop are tested and not just independently but in connection with their parent and sub-processes in quality settings.
DevOps is still a term unclear to many in the business sector, but implementing this principle and clearly defining roles can ensure that deadlocks in internal production processes do not arise. And the final products are available with far more efficiency in terms of quality and time consumption.
Top Must Have DevOps Tools for Professionals
1. Nagios and Icinga
Infrastructure monitoring has several solutions ranging from Zabbix to Nagios and similar open source tools. Nagios is a traditional monitoring solution that provides effective results since it has a large community where contributors develop plugins for the tool. It doesn’t have all the expected abilities, and thus, you need to work around the issues occurring to the plugins. The best thing is it is not a hard part, and Nagios gives its best performance.
Icinga was initially made as a fork of Nagios. The makers of Icinga aimed to take Nagios to the next level with a premium collection of the latest features and user experience.
2. ELK – Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana
The ELK stack is a log analytics solution in the IT industry. The tool gathers logs from all apps, services, tools, networks, servers, and others in an environment into a centralized location used for conducting further processing and analysis.
We may use ELK to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot problems, monitor services, and resolve operational issues. Other than such analytical use, we can also deploy this tool for security and auditing purposes.
3. Jenkins
Jenkins is already popular, isn’t it? Though there is nothing fancy about Jenkins, it’s simple to start to use and includes the ideal ecosystem of plugins and add-ons. We can optimize Jenkins for customization. We configure this tool to develop code, build Docker containers, run maximum tests, and push to production.
4. Docker
Docker is transforming the ecosystem of the IT world. Experts use this tool in production for most services. Developers have designed it to ease configuration management, control issues, and scale by letting containers move from one place to another place.
5. Consul.io
Consul is an open source tool designed for service discovery and configuration in flexible apps developed through microservices. It leverages the latest technology and works as a type of broker to help you sign and register names. Also, It allows you to access service names and not the specific machines. It is an efficient tool, and you can do more with a Consul.
6. Ansible
Ansible is a simple configuration management tool we mostly use for a deployment configuration. We can use it to push changes and reconfigure the latest deployed machines. Moreover, the ecosystem offered by Ansible is ideal for working as it offers custom application development.
7. Buddy
Buddy is a smart CD/CI tool for developers in which they leverage delivery pipelines to develop, test, and deploy software. The pipelines are made with more than 100 instant actions that you can arrange in any way you want. It supports all popular languages, task managers, and frameworks. Developers can integrate Buddy with AWS, DigitalOcean, Google, Shopify, Azure, WordPress, etc.
8. Vagrant
Vagrant DevOps tool lets developers build and manage VM environments in a single workflow. It offers a simple workflow and lowers the development environment setup time. Also, it increases production parity. Developers can integrate Vagrant with existing configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible. It also offers an ideal development ecosystem to DevOps professionals.
9. PagerDuty
PagerDuty tool helps enterprises to enhance their brand image. The tool supports a continuous delivery strategy, and as a result, it lets DevOps professionals deliver high-performing and most efficient app solutions.
PagerDuty offers real-time alerts. It easily detects and resolves incidents in the development to the production phase. It also supports platform extensibility and enables scheduling and automated escalations.
10. Ganglia
Ganglia is one of the best DevOps tools, and developers can use it for high-performing computing systems such as grids and clusters. Additionally, the tool offers several cluster and grid monitoring capabilities. It is a completely free and open-source tool. Experts have designed this tool to handle clusters with 2,000 nodes.
11. Splunk
DevOps service providers use the Splunk tool to make machine data accessible, valuable, and usable to everyone. Splunk tool offers operational intelligence to DevOps teams. Additionally, It makes companies more productive, secure, and competitive. It is a next-gen monitoring and analytics solution that delivers a unified view of different IT services.
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