12 Awesome tools to make DevOps effective
The DevOps movement drives IT department into improving collaboration between developers, sysadmins, and testers. It also improves deployment rates, defect detection, and feature delivery.
“Doing DevOps” is more about changing processes and simplifying workflows between departments than it is about employing new tools. Thus, there will never be an all-encompassing DevOps tool. But you can always benefit using right set of tools.
The DevOps tools can be categorized in five groups depending on its purpose in the particular stage of DevOps life cycle
1. Jenkins
Jenkins is developed in Java. You can also deploy it in servlet containers. Jenkins’ focus is on two major jobs: building/testing software projects continuously and monitoring externally run jobs. Jenkins requires little maintenance and has built-in GUI tool for easy updates. Jenkins provides customized solution as there are over 400 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
2. TeamCity
TeamCity (TC) is a major all-in-one, extensible, continuous integration server. Written in Java, the platform is made available through the JetBrains. The platform is supported in other frameworks and languages by 100 ready to use plugins. TeamCity installation is really simple and has different installation packages for different OS.
3. Travis
Travis CI is probably one of the easiest CI servers to get started with. Travis CI is an open-source hosted, distributed continuous integration service used to build and test projects hosted at GitHub. Travis CI can be configured to run the tests on a range of different machines, using the different software installed.
4. Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs is arguably the most well-established of Configuration Management platforms. It tends to be favored by organizations whose DevOps push was driven by ops people who like the simplicity of its declarative programming language and gentler learning curve. The Web UI works well for management but does not allow flexibility in configuration of modules. The reporting tools are well developed, providing deep details on how agents are behaving and what changes have been made.
5. Chef
Chef is a systems and cloud infrastructure framework that automates the building, deploying, and management of infrastructure via short, repeatable scripts called “recipes.” Chef tends to offer a greater degree of flexibility than Puppet for those who have the skills to program infrastructure via this Ruby-driven platform. As a result, Chef tends to be well-loved by organizations whose DevOps programs are more heavily championed by the developers.
6. Ansible
Ansible built on Python, combines multi-node software deployment, ad-hoc task execution, and configuration management. Ansible is more suited for a larger or more homogeneous infrastructure. It uses an agent less architecture. Ansible can be run from the command line without the use of configuration files for simple tasks, such as making sure a service is running, or to trigger updates and reboots.
7. SonarQube
SonarQube is the central place to manage code quality. It offers visual reporting on and across projects and enabling to replay the past code to analyze metrics evolution. It is written in Java but is able to analyze code in about 20 different programming languages.
8. HP Fortify
HP Fortify Static Code Analyzer (SCA) helps verify that your software is trustworthy, reduce costs, increase productivity and implement secure coding best practices. It scans source code, identifies root causes of software security vulnerabilities and correlates and prioritizes results. Thus providing line–of–code guidance for closing gaps in your security.
9. Docker
DevOps teams use Docker -containerization tool as an open platform that makes it easier for developers and sysadmins to push code from development to production without using different, clashing environments during the entire application life cycle. Docker brings portability to applications via its containerization technology, wherein applications run in self-contained units that can be moved across platforms. It offers standardization to keep the operations folks happy and the flexibility to use just about any language or tool chain to keep the development team satisfied.
10. Vagrant
Vagrant is an open source product described as Virtual Machine (VM) manager. It is a wonderful tool that allows you to script and package the VM config and the provisioning setup with multiple VMs each with their own configurations managed with puppet and/or chef.
11. Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides virtualization using scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Amazon EC2 decreases capital expenditure by eliminating the investment in hardware upfront cost. Businesses can use virtual servers, configure security and networking and manage storage.
12. VMWare
VMWare provides virtualization through a gamut of products. It’s product vSphere virtualizes your server resources and provide critical capacity and performance management capabilities. VMWare’s NSX virtualization and Virtual SAN provides network virtualization and software-defined storage respectively.
At Maruti Techlabs, we have successfully incorporated TeamCity as continuous integration tool and Sonarqube as inspection tool in the respective steps of DevOps. We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as virtualization tool for cloud computing and launching virtual servers.
