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Nanduri
Nanduri

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Most Popular DevOps Tools

DevOps philosophy permeates the modern world of software development. The DevOps culture is a practical implementation of the Agile methodology and nowadays it is the most efficient approach in software development. Thus said, every business owner wants to implement DevOps for the seamless software development lifecycle. There are a few main DevOps principles and multiple tools to accomplish them.

DevOps as a methodology provides the automatization of routine software development processes. It can be realized by many tools and technologies. There are some main principles of DevOps implementation. For better understanding, let’s talk about these principles and tools for the implementation of every principle.
DevOps methodology presents the whole environment as code. This is called Infrastructure as Code or IaC. Such an approach is accomplished by manifests. These are files written in descriptive language, that allow changing the environment for deployment by changing a few lines in the manifest. DevOps engineers create the manifests and developers can change them for every test or any other infrastructure operation. Before the DevOps methodology, there were a lot of additional actions and mandatory presence of Quality Assurance engineers. There is an opinion that IaC is based only on CI/CD – Continuous Integration and Delivery but there are many more components.

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Thus, IaC enables the other following principles:

Configuration Management
Version Control Management
Code Review
Continuous Integration
Continuous Delivery
Monitoring and Logging
Analitycs
Messaging
Let’s define each of them in detail.

1. Configuration Management: This point is based on making a stable, reliable and mobile environment for code deployment. With the right approach, Configuration Management allows transferring projects between teams very quickly. The environment is packed in a Docker container and can be deployed in any other place. This process is provisioned by Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt and other instruments.

2. Version Control Management: The most popular instrument for version control is Git. This is a distributed version control system, an open-source tool that allows you to store all the changes in your software and go to the previous version if needed. This is an invaluable tool for development and DevOps because you can control every change in the development process. The most popular Git instruments are Github and Gitlab.

3. Code Review: Github, Gitlab is useful for this point too. Code review is the process of checking the code, new functionality and comparing it with previous versions.

4. Continuous Integration (CI): CI is perceived as the basic DevOps principle. Continuous Integration allows to test code automatically and add new features to the main code as fast as possible. Practically, DevOps engineer configures the system in the way that the developer writes code and it’s tested automatically and after successful testing can be used in the main software. In general, such an approach allows making releases very fast. If an application needs some updates or adding new features, CI allows to provide it without wasting time like in the Waterfall model, for example. The most popular instruments for CI are Gitlab CI, CircleCI and Jenkins.

5. Continuous Delivery (CD): CD means you can deliver your software to end-users as fast, as possible. Before the DevOps methodology introduction, new versions of the software were delivered very slowly and rarely. Every small change needed a lot of time for implementation. CI/CD pipeline automates this process and allows to deliver new features quickly. the same tools are used for CD implementation as for CI.

6. Monitoring and Logging: This is an important point in the DevOps lifecycle. You should monitor the infrastructure performance and remove bottlenecks for uninterrupted work and updates. It’s quite difficult to do it manually, so there are some tools for logging and monitoring in the DevOps – Amazon Cloud Watch, Carbon, Prometheus, Grafana, Icinga, Google StackDriver, Kibana, ElasticSearch, Logstash, and others.

7. Analytics: At this step, DevOps engineers need to analyze the information collected from previous steps. The main way is to understand patterns and eliminate errors. This step uses the next tools – Splunk and SumoLogic.

8. Messaging: This point is accomplished by RabbitMQ and Amazon SQS. Messaging allows to store all the changes and deliver the information between system components.

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