List of Best DevOps Tools To Learn and Master

There is a wide variety of paid and open-source DevOps tools you can use to embrace DevOps maturity. Here’s the list of some popular DevOps tools:

Docker has garnered popularity in the DevOps ecosystem as the most commonly used DevOps tool by the DevOps teams. It is a Linux-based open-source tool that supports containerization. It means that your software is packaged and shipped along with its dependencies as a single unit. This eliminates the tedious task of managing dependencies separately. Docker is portable, secure, compatible with any language, and integrates seamlessly with other tools, such as Ansible, Jenkins, and Bamboo.

According to Forrester, Docker dominated the enterprise container platform category in quarter four of 2018.

Ansible is most famous for its software automation benefit. It is used for automating software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. This open-source DevOps tool can easily handle complex deployments without any need for a dedicated systems administrator. Moreover, Ansible is agentless and uses a simple syntax written in the YAML language.

“Ansible has become the DevOps darling for software automation,” quotes CIO.

Git has established itself as the most popular DevOps tool in the IT world. It is being used by tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. This open-source DevOps tool enables DevOps engineers to easily track their development work progress and coordinate work among themselves. With Git, one can revert to previously saved versions of their work, create branches separately, and implement new features when ready. However, organizations are required to host a repository for the work, such as GitHub.

Puppet is popular for its thousands of modules. This open-source DevOps tool enables DevOps teams to manage and automate software inspection, delivery, and operation. It can seamlessly integrate with many other tools. However, the free version Puppet tool is only profitable for smaller projects. If you are working on large-scale projects, choosing Puppet Enterprise would be a wise choice. Puppet Enterprise can enable your organization to have numerous teams and thousands of resources.

Chef has a solid track record as the most powerful configuration management tool. This open-source DevOps tool allows you to modify infrastructure into a code and manage data, attributes, and roles, among others, with ease. Same as Puppet, Chef also supports multiple platforms and seamlessly integrates with cloud-based platforms. Irrespective of your infrastructure vastness, Chef can automate infrastructure configuration and application deployment. It can also manage configurations across the network.

Jenkins has enticed DevOps engineers with its ability to detect errors in code, quickly and efficiently. This free, open-source DevOps tool automates your delivery pipeline and allows you to test and report code changes in near real-time. Jenkins can integrate with almost every DevOps tool available in the market, as it has a vast plugin ecosystem with over a thousand plugins. This DevOps tool is compatible with Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Nagios is one of the most sought-after monitoring tools in the DevOps arena. This free, open-source DevOps tool helps identify and rectify issues in networks and infrastructure. With Nagios, DevOps teams can monitor applications, services, and network protocols, among many others. It enables you to keep a record of events like outages and failures. Presently, Nagios Core and Nagios XI are the two editions available in the market. The latest edition, Nagios XI, offers greater functionality with many new features. Anyhow, both editions have Forum support.

Splunk has grabbed a position in the list of most popular DevOps tools for its ability to allow every member in the team to effortlessly access and use machine data and logs. With Splunk, DevOps engineers can quickly analyze and visualize machine data and gain insights to improve productivity and efficiency. Developers have the facility to develop custom Splunk apps and integrate Splunk data into other apps.

Bamboo is a widespread continuous integration and deployment tool. It integrates automated builds, tests, and releases into a single workflow. Though it is almost similar to Jenkins, Bamboo is not an open-source DevOps tool. This tool enables developers to automatically develop, integrate, test the source code and prepare an application for deployment. The unique features of Bamboo include easy to use graphical user interface, auto-completion, integration with various tools, and prebuilt functionalities. Developed by Atlassian in 2007, Bamboo allows DevOps teams to use CI/ CD methodologies.

The combination of three open-source DevOps tools, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, is ELK Stack. While Elastic search is a search and analytics engine, Kibana is the visualization layer. Meanwhile, Logstash gathers data from various sources, which are stored by Elastic search. ELK Stack is famous as the most robust yet simple DevOps tool. It is used for centralized logging. The Stack features multiple plugins and an active support community.

Released in 2015, this container orchestration platform helps you manage a vast number of containers with ease. Once you deploy containerized applications to a set of computers, Kubernetes automates their distribution and scheduling. However, Kubernetes is just an orchestration platform, meaning it’s not a whole solution by itself. It must be used together with other tools like Docker that lets you develop, distribute, and run containers.

Selenium is known for automating tests for web applications. This open-source DevOps tool is used by many Fortune 500companies, including Google and IBM. The unique features of Selenium are that the test scripts can be written in many languages, including Python and Java. It is compatible with operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux, and works with any browser. To achieve continuous testing, Selenium should be integrated with Docker and Jenkins.

Vagrant is among the most popular open-source DevOps tools. With this tool, you can develop and manage virtual machine environments in a single workflow. Thus, all the team members, whether a developer, an operator or a designer, will have the same simple workflow. Vagrant replicates the production environment so that DevOps engineers can identify and fix bugs early in the production process. This popular tool easily integrates with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, among others.

Maven is an open-source DevOps tool, which is primarily used for Java projects. The primary function of this tool is automating the build process and resolution of dependencies. Maven helps in the compilation of source code, running tests, including unit tests and functional tests, integrating the results into JAR's, WAR's, and RPMs, and uploading the packages to remote repo's, Nexus, or Artifactory. The tool is developed based on the concept of a project object model. Maven depends on XML and has predefined instructions for performing regular tasks.

Last but not least, Gradle is one of the most commonly used DevOps tools out there. This open-source automation tool enables writing code in several languages, including Java, C++, and Python. Though Gradle builds on Apache Ant and Maven, it uses a Groovy-based domain-specific language for describing builds. Since its release in 2009, this tool has been gaining popularity steadily for multi-project builds. Owing to its incremental builds, build cache, and daemon, Gradle is efficient than Maven.

DevOps orchestration is a crucial step for any organization that has embarked DevOps journey and is in the process of, or completed, implementing automation. It coordinates all the tasks automated by DevOps practices to offer improved optimization and oversight.

Initiating DevOps orchestrating can offer a host of business benefits, including:

• Faster software delivery

• Swift release of new features and fixtures

• Minimized deployment time

• Reduced service delivery cost

• Increase product reliability

Moreover, DevOps orchestration enables analysts, managers, and QA to select as per their interests and quickly implement a complete environment provisioned at the proper build and configuration levels. However, orchestration in DevOps is not a walk-on-cake. 

Organizations require orchestration tools that are entirely on par with their business goals to make the most of their automation efforts and DevOps implementation. Additionally, DevOps orchestration is a comprehensive organizational shift, vertically and horizontally.

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