30 DevOps Tools You Could Be Using

As a DevOps consultancy, we spend a lot of time thinking about, and evaluating DevOps tools.

There are a number of different tools that form part of our DevOps workbench, and we base our evaluation on years of experience in IT, working with complex, heterogeneous technology stacks.

We’ve found that DevOps tooling has become a key part of our tech and operations. We take a lot of time to select and improve our DevOps toolset. The vast majority of tools that we use are open source. By sharing the tools that we use and like, we hope to start a discussion within the DevOps community about what further improvements can be made.

We hope that you enjoy browsing through the list below.

1. Puppet

What is it? Puppet is designed to provide a standard way of delivering and operating software, no matter where it runs. Puppet has been around since 2005 and has a large and mature ecosystem, which has evolved to become one of the best in breed Infrastructure Automation tools that can scale. It is backed up and supported by a highly active Open Source community.

2. Vagrant

What is it? Vagrant — another tool from Hashicorp — provides easy to configure, easily reproducible and portable work environments that are built on top of industry standard technology. Vagrant helps enforce a single consistent workflow to maximise the flexibility of you and your team.

3. ELK Stack

What is ELK? The ELK stack actually refers to three technologies — Elasticsearch, Logstashand Kibana. Elasticsearch is a NoSQL database that is based on the Lucene search engine, Logstash is a log pipeline tool that accepts inputs from different sources and exports the data to various targets, and Kibana is a visualisation layer for Elasticsearch. And they work very well together.

4. Consul.io

What is Consul.io? Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure. It can be used to present nodes and services in a flexible interface, allowing clients to have an up-to-date view of the infrastructure they’re part of.

5. Jenkins

What is Jenkins? Everyone loves Jenkins! Jenkins is an open source CI tool, written in Java. CI is the practice of running tests on a non-developer machine, automatically, every time someone pushes code into a source repo. Jenkins is considered a prerequisite for Continuous Integration.

6. Docker

What is it? There was a time last year, when it seemed that all anyone wanted to talk about was Docker. Docker provides a portable application environment which enables you to package an application in a unit for application development.

7. Ansible

What is it? Ansible is a free platform for configuring and managing servers. It combines multi-node software deployment, task execution and configuration management.

8. Salkstack

What is it? Saltstack, much like Ansible, is a configuration management tool and remote execution engine. It is primarily designed to allow the management of infrastructure in a predictable and repeatable way. Saltstack was designed to manage large infrastructures with thousands of servers — the kind seen at LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Google.

9. Kubernetes

What is it? Kubernetes is an open-source container cluster manager by Google. It aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling and operations of container clusters across hosts.

10. Collectd

What is it? Collectd is a daemon that collects statistics on system performance, and provides mechanisms to store the values in different ways.

Why should I use collectd? Collectd helps you collect and visualise data about your servers, and thus make informed decisions. It’s useful for working with tools like Graphite, which can render the data that collectd collects.

11. Git

What is Git? Git is the most widely used version control system in the world today.

An incredibly large number of products use Git for version control: from hobbyist projects to large enterprises, from commercial products to open source. Git is designed with speed, flexibility and security in mind, and is an example of a distributed version control system.

12. Rudder

What is Rudder? Rudder is (yet another!) open source audit and configuration management tool that’s designed to help automate system config across large IT infrastructures.

13. Gradle

What is it? Gradle is an open source build automation tool that builds upon the concepts of Apache Ant and Apache Maven and introduces a Groovy-based DSL instead of the XML form used by Maven.

14. Chef

What is Chef? Chef is a config management tool designed to automate machine setup on physical servers, VMs and in the cloud. Many companies use Chef software to manage and control their infrastructure — including Facebook, Etsy and Indiegogo. Chef is designed to define Infrastructure as Code.

15. Cobbler

What is it? Cobbler is a Linux provisioning server that facilitates a network-based system installation of multiple OSes from a central point using services such as DHCP, TFTP and DNS.

Cobbler can be configured for PXE, reinstallations and virtualised guests using Xen, KVM and Xenware. Cobbler also comes with a lightweight configuration management system, as well as support for integrating with Puppet.

16. SimianArmy

What is it? SimianArmy is a suite of tools designed by Netflix to support cloud operations. ChaosMonkey is part of SimianArmy, and is described as a ‘resiliency tool that helps applications tolerate random instance failures.’

What does it do? The SimianArmy suite of tools are designed to help engineers test the reliability, resiliency and recoverability of their cloud services running on AWS.

17. AWS

What is it? AWS is a secure cloud services platform, which offers compute, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

18. CoreOS

What is it? CoreOS is a Linux distribution that is designed specifically to solve the problem of making large, scalable deployments on varied infrastructure easy to manage. It maintains a lightweight host system, and uses containers to provide isolation.

19. Grafana

What is Grafana? Grafana is a neat open source dashboard tool. Grafana is useful for because it displays various metrics from Graphite through a web browser.

20. Chocolatey

What is Chocolatey? Chocolatey is apt-get for Windows. Once installed, you can install Windows applications quickly and easily using the command line. You could install Git, 72Zip, Ruby, or even Microsoft Office! The catalogue is now incredibly complete — you really can install a wide array of apps using Chocolatey.

21. Zookeeper

What is it? Zookeeper is a centralised service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronisation, and providing group services. All of these services are used in one form or another by distributed applications.

22. GitHub

What is GitHub? GitHub is a web based repository service. It provides distributed revision control and source control management functionality.

At the heart of GitHub is Git, the version control system designed and developed by Linus Torvalds. Git, like any other version control system, is designed to system, manage and store revisions of products.

GitHub is a centralised repository system for Git, which adds a Web-based graphical user interface and several collaboration features, such as wiki and basic task management tools.

One of GitHub’s coolest features is “forking” — copying a repo from one user’s account to another. This allows you to take a project that you don’t have write access to, and modify it under your own account. If you make changes, you can send a notification called a “pull request” to the original owner. The user can then merge your changes with the original repo.

23. Drone

What is it? Drone is a continuous integration platform, based on Docker and built in Go. Drone works with Docker to run tests, and also works with Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket.

24. Pagerduty

What is it? Pagerduty is an alarm aggregation and monitoring system that is used predominantly by support and sysadmin teams.

25. Dokku

What is it? Dokku is a mini-Heroku, running on Docker.

26. OpenStack

What is it? OpenStack is free and open source software for cloud computing, which is mostly deployed as Infrastructure as a Service.

27. Sublime-Text

What is it? Sublime-Text is a cross-platform source code editor with a Python API. It supports many different programming languages and markup languages, and has extensive code highlighting functionality.

28. Nagios

What is it? Nagios is an open source tool for monitoring systems, networks and infrastructure. Nagios provides alerting and monitoring services for servers, switches, applications and services.

29. Spinnaker

What is it? Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud CD platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

30. Flynn

What is it? Flynn is one of the most popular open source Docker PaaS solutions. Flynn aims to provide a single platform that Ops can provide to developers to power production, testing and development, freeing developers to focus.

To read the full article discussing the pros and cons of using these individual tools, click here.

If you’re interested in learning more about DevOps or specific DevOps tools, why not take a look at our Training pages.

We offer regular Introduction to DevOps courses, and have a number of upcoming Jenkins training courses.