How to Choose the Right DevOps Tool in 2019?
DevOps is a popular job role among technocrats. It is a culture that can be adopted by any business organization. DevOps help in collaboration between developer and operation teams so that they can work together with ease. There are some tools that are used by DevOps professionals to manage their responsibilities.
Today in this post we would discuss the features of some of the popular and most used DevOps tools that are chosen by the DevOps professionals.
Choosing the Right DevOps Tool
There are many tools that support automation and collaboration between teams. Here we have tried to list the right combination of tools that can be used by DevOps professionals. Many tools can be used in all the development phases of the project, but there are some tools that play an important role in some of the specific phases. So, let’s study the DevOps tools as per their roles in the development lifecycle:
- Plan
Mainly Used Tools: Hipchat, Confluence, Jira Software
For agile methodology, the recommended tools are those that allow the development team to plan an iteration. Through iteration and user’s feedback, you can easily optimize your product by interacting with the user. So, try to choose the tools that provide sprint planning features.
You should collect the user’s feedback continuously and then organize it into actionable inputs so that you can then prioritize those actions for the development teams. Try to choose the tools that encourage “asynchronous brainstorming” like those through which everyone can share their idea, goals, and strategies.
2. Build
Mainly Used Tools: Docker
Chef and Puppet tools are mainly beneficial for the operation teams, while developers use tools like Docker to manage the development environments. More work can be done through virtual coding and disposing of replicas.
Through Docker, the infrastructure can be treated as a code and all the discrepancies of the wrong classpath or broken Maven installation can be easily handled. Re-provisioning is quite faster and reliable then repairing. Moreover, the development environment spinning can also be done easily whenever required. The whole development team can work in an identically-provisioned environment.
Pull requests can improve peer reviews and throughput as in this case you will not have to wait for change approval from each department. Through the pull requests, you can inform your teammates about any of the changes that have occurred, and they can review and discuss the modifications if required.
3) Continuous Integration
Mainly Used Tools: Bamboo, Hipchat, Bitbucket, Capture
In the case of continuous integration, the code is stored in a central and shared repository several times a day so that it can be tested each time. Through this, the problems can be identified and resolved quickly, and flawless solutions could be provided to the users as early as possible. All the workflows are managed by branch-and-merge tools through which continuous integration will not have to run through all branches.
All the tools should be able to be applied to test all the development branches and real-time alerts in the chat-tool of all the teams. In DevOps, the automation testing is quite imperative for maintaining the awareness and at the same time, the operation team needs to have visibility to know what is being tested.
4) Deploy
Mainly Used Tools: Jira, AWS, Bamboo, Hipchat, Puppet
While shipping any product or software the developers store all tests, changes and deployment information at one place. Moreover, in the meeting before the release of the product, the dashboards which are used by the development teams are known as release dashboards. Here the DevOps tool must be able to automate all the tasks of release like request pooling, build and branch management, deployment warning and many others.
However automatic deployment is not possible and if it’s being done then, in that case, the deployment is performed firstly at the lowest level and then the complete path is replicated for the production environment. From here the deployment environments are compared and a list of standardization is generated.
Provisioning tools like Chef and Puppet reduce the standardization pain and provide step by step visibility into each environment and control the process.
5) Operate
Mainly Used Tools: Nagios, Hipchat, Bigpanda, New Relic, Splunk, Pingdom, Pager Duty
Server monitoring and performance monitoring are usually automated. Sometimes you may have to monitor your application 24/7. Tools like Splunk, Nagios and New Relic can handle both types of monitoring automatically.
To maintain real-time communication chat-tools are being used that have dedicated rooms. You need to look for a proper chat tool that is extensible and has integration property. For any project and product, incidents must be timely reported and handled, so you should check whether the tool is able to track any change. All incidents, problems, changes and software projects must be identified and fixed timely through the same platform.
6) Continuous Feedback
You can collect customer’s feedback through various means like NPS data, bug reports, support tickets and even tweets. In DevOps environment, the user’s comments can be accessed, as they help in planning and guiding everything right from planning the release to testing sessions. Your chat tools must be properly integrated with your favourite survey platform. Here social media sites like Facebook, Twitter must also be integrated in real-time with your platforms, so that proper reports can be formed, and historical data can also be used as and when required. The use of DevOps tools makes the complete development and deployment process faster.
Wrapping It Up!
In small companies usually, a team is responsible for the full development process, whereas in large size organizations each development step is handled by a separate department. DevOps is about handling and managing the complete development process to make it faster in an automated manner. So, the DevOps tools must be chosen smartly to collaborate on the development and operation environment properly.
