Almost every IT company has included the DevOps process within their system. It is an approach that will manage the CI/CD process more comfortably and efficiently. It has created a platform where both IT operations and the development team can work together as a team throughout the complete software development cycle from the development to the deployment phase. Before the DevOps process, these two teams worked as different entities handling the various tasks and somehow led to increased development time, low throughput, etc.
DevOps has changed every organization’s work by increasing production time, reducing cost, and fewer failures. There is no doubt how the DevOps approach can be easily fit to any organization. In this article, we have mentioned DevOps, its benefits, its challenges, and various DevOps tools.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is an approach that allows the merger of the traditional software engineering process and improves the communication to enhance the frequency of production releases while maintaining the software quality consistently. It is claimed that many organizations have experienced its benefits, but there are very few practical examples. But with DevOps, any business tends to increase the release frequency and improves the test automation practices.
Not only this, DevOps encourages team collaboration on a large scale across various departments to boost employee welfare. If you implement continuous release practice, it will lead to rapid feedback from the end-users to improve the product. It may be possible that DevOps works differently for various organizations and does not fulfill their expected results. Before implementing the DevOps approach, you need to understand what practices they need to implement for DevOps.
Benefits of Using DevOps
Implementing DevOps approach will benefit your organization in the following ways:
- Implementing DevOps makes sure your releases are done faster, you will efficiently adapt to the changing market needs, and you will produce better results than expected.
- With DevOps, the releases are done faster, which improves the product quality by providing you consistent feedback.
- DevOps has improved the CI/CD process by ensuring the application updates quality and changes in the infrastructure, improving the experience for the end-users.
- It has improved the way of collaborating within the teams to ensure higher productivity. In this manner, all the team members will be on the same page while developing and deploying the product in production.
- You can implement various security tools to secure the complete process.
- DevOps applications are scalable and easy to maintain as it uses the cloud technology and the microservices architecture.
Challenges of Using DevOps
Below are the various challenges you may face using DevOps:
- Challenges during the transition- if you are currently working with the legacy systems and want to rebuild your applications for microservices architecture or move them on the cloud, it may not be possible by adopting the DevOps approach.
- Inadequate talent- it is challenging to find the perfect and skilled DevOps team with hands-on experience. Today, DevOps engineers are in great demand and have an excellent pay scale. But there are not enough qualified employees for the job.
- Choice of toolset- today, there are various tools available for the DevOps approach, making it easier to switch to this technology. But with such variety, confusion arises which tool to implement that will suit well for the business. You may change to different tools later, but moving all the applications to another tool can be difficult and a waste of time.
Best DevOps Tools
1. Jenkins
Jenkins is a CI server written in Java. It is one of the DevOps automation tools useful for the development teams. It helps in automating the various delivery pipeline stages. It comes with a wide range of 1000 plus plugins, making it easy to integrate with other DevOps tools. It enables the developers to find and fix bugs and automate the testing.
Features of Jenkins
- It is an open-source DevOps tool provided with more than 1000 plugins.
- It allows you to script various jobs within a single workflow.
- This tool requires a little maintenance and provides easy updates for its built-in GUI.
- It is a Java-based tool that can run on any platform.
- It supports the CI/CD process.
- It enhances concurrency by distributing tasks across multiple systems.
2. Docker
Docker works as a technology suite for DevOps. It is a light-weight tool based on container technology to package the application along with required dependencies within a container and deploy them on the target environment. It enables the users to assemble applications from various components and work in collaboration.
Features of Docker
- You can use Docker technology with any of the preferred languages.
- You can scale Docker upto 1000 nodes and more as per business requirements.
- You can easily integrate Docker with other tools like Jenkins, Bamboo.
- Docker comes with the support of major cloud providers- AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
- It helps in improving the delivery workflow.
3. Splunk
DevOps team majorly focuses on security. This tool helps the developers to create a defensible infrastructure from the start of the delivery process. It allows the team members to collaborate efficiently and work on the incidents together, so they get the alerts simultaneously. This tool helps in searching, analyzing, and visualizing the machine-generated logs from various sources.
Features of Splunk
- You can store, analyze, and visualize the logs generated from various sources.
- It can provide the collective data in multiple file formats.
- It helps in creating knowledgeable objects for seamless operation.
- You can measure the business metrics using log insights.
4. Nagios
This is also a monitoring tool that helps keep the tab on the various applications, servers, and business infrastructure. This tool works well for large-scale businesses with high-end networks operating in the backend. It helps the alerting system to alert the years about the failures or any faults in the system. It enables you to maintain a performance chart to monitor the trends to alert the users.
Features of Nagios
- It helps in monitoring and troubleshooting the performance issues of the server.
- It allows you to upgrade your infrastructure before the old system creates issues.
- It will fix the problems automatically upon detection.
5. Ansible
It is a useful and effective IT configuration management tool. Unlike its competitors in the market, Ansible has a softer outlook and does not consume most of your resources in the background. Using this tool, you can quickly push the new changes in the existing system and configure the latest deployed machines. It helps in reducing the infrastructure cost and enhances the replication speed of scalability.
Features of Ansible
- It is an open-source, secure, and light-weight configuration tool available in the market.
- It enables you to automate the deployment process.
- It helps in pushing the latest configuration changes in the existing system.
- It works on the master-slave architecture without any daemon process running in the background.
- It is agentless and uses YAML syntax.
6. Vagrant
Vagrant is a DevOps tool, allowing you to manage and work with virtual machines using a single workflow. It will enable the team members to share the software’s running environment and test them without getting into the configuration settings. This tool ensures that the project’s environment will be the same across all developer’s machines. It allows the team to focus on automation and increases production.
Features of Vagrant
- You can integrate this tool with configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and many more.
- It works on any platform like Windows, Mac, Linux.
- It ensures that the development team has an ideal development environment.
- You can create a single file describing the machine type and required software.
7. Git
It is one of the commonly used DevOps tools. It is a distributed source code management tool with open-source contributors. It allows you to create various versions of the same code with added features and save them for future reference. You are allowed to develop different code branches to add new features whenever you want at any phase of the software lifecycle. You will require to host repositories for proper integration of GIt within your DevOps process.
Features of Git
- It helps in tracking history
- It is available as free and open-source
- It supports non-linear development
- It enables you to create backups
- It makes the branching process easier
- It allows in distributed development
8. Puppet Enterprise
It is a DevOps tool that enables you to manage and configure the entire infrastructure as code without expanding the team size. It will enable you to automate the management of infrastructure to deliver the software faster. This tool works well for smaller projects. It offers features like- reports in real-time, control of nodes, etc.
Features of Puppet Enterprise
- It allows you to control multiple teams with thousands of resources.
- It allows you to handle the dependencies and failures within the system seamlessly.
- If you encounter any failed config, it will automatically skip the dependent config.
- It helps in modeling and managing the complete environment.
- It allows you to inspect and report on the running packages.
9. Scalyr
It is a DevOps platform that allows you to monitor a high-speed server along with managing the logs. It comes with a log aggregator module, allowing you to collect logs for applications, web processes, and systems.
Features of Scalyr
- You can use the Scalyr agent on any available server.
- You can import logs from Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudWatch, etc.
- It offers you a centralized log management and server monitoring process.
- You can even monitor new events in real-time.
- You can switch between graphs and logs with a single click.
10. New Relic APM
It is one of the DevOps tools, providing you visibility across customer experience and the infrastructure. It requires less time for monitoring applications. This DevOps tool is one of the best tools to organize, visualize and evaluate in-depth analytics.
Features of New Relic APM
- It helps in organizing, visualizing, and evaluating the in-depth analytics.
- You can get an insight into the dynamically changing system.
- You can use customized queries for getting metrics.
Conclusion
DevOps has been widely adopted within companies due to various advantages. But, you may not find the same results of implementing the DevOps approach for all companies. There may be a change in business requirements or might have used another approach. It matters how you understand the DevOps need within the organization. You can use DevOps tools to make the process simpler. You can use various tools that you may consider. We have mentioned the ten best DevOps tools with their features.