Nowadays, many companies on the market are using the DevOps method to effectively manage CI/CD pipelines. The application provides an environment in which both developers and IT professionals can collaborate to improve the performance and productivity of the system, which leads to the development of high-quality applications. It enhances collaboration between team members from the design phase up to the maintenance of the delivered product. But before the introduction of DevOps, these teams worked in silos without minimal communication that lowered the productivity and throughput.
With DevOps, these teams get to use various tools that simplify their working and managing the various phases of the software development. Such tools help in enhancing productivity, reducing costs, etc. However, the benefits depend on how well you have implemented the DevOps approach and what DevOps tools you are using within your organization.
In this article, we will be discussing DevOps, its benefits, its challenges, and various DevOps tools that have benefitted the CI/CD process.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a software development methodology that has extended the most common features of the traditional agile methodology positively. DevOps emphasizes team communication that helps in enhancing and improving the frequency of the product releases while maintaining the quality of the product. There is no doubt how many companies have benefited by implementing the DevOps approach within their system. One of the main features of DevOps is that you can automate various repeated tasks and processes that will help in saving a lot of time and efforts of the team members, allowing them to focus strictly on the development for quick delivery and making quick updates to the software.
Before you implement the DevOps to your system, you must understand its usage, how it can be beneficial to your business, and what strategy to implement for introducing DevOps to your business. It is important to understand the nature of your business and the client’s demands towards software development. DevOps approach works differently for different businesses and the results may vary depending on how you implemented it. So make sure you work on an appropriate strategy for efficient working of the system and getting the most out of the DevOps approach.
Benefits of Using DevOps
If you implement the DevOps approach perfectly then you will get to leverage the below-mentioned benefits of DevOps within your organization.
- It ensures that your releases are done faster, allows you to adapt to the changing market needs efficiently, and you will get better results than expected.
- With DevOps, you will be able to improve and enhance product quality by getting consistent feedback from clients.
- DevOps has a positive impact on the CI/CD process by ensuring quality updates and changes in the infrastructure, providing an excellent experience for the end-users.
- It has provided a platform for collaboration within the teams for enhancing higher productivity. It allows all the team members to be on the same page from designing to the deployment of the software.
- It allows you to use various security tools for securing the complete software development process.
- Using DevOps, you will be able to scale and maintain your applications seamlessly using various DevOps tools.
Challenges of Using DevOps
Apart from having various benefits, you may face the below mentioned challenges while using and implementing the DevOps approach within your organization.
- Challenges during the transition – once you start the development of any software or application using the legacy systems and later you are willing to rebuild that particular application for microservice architecture or willing to move your older application to the cloud platform, then you might face some challenges while working with the DevOps approach.
- Inadequate talent– for implementing DevOps, you require a skilled team that has hands-on experience on various platforms and languages. Today, DevOps engineers are in great demand but difficult to find people who are suitable for the role as it requires high knowledge and sound technical knowledge.
- Choice of toolset– while implementing DevOps, it is important that you use the right tools that are compatible with every platform making it possible to migrate your application later on different platforms. As you will come across a wide range of tools available for DevOps, you need to make sure that the chosen tool will be able to met your business requirement.
Various DevOps Tools
1. Jenkins
Jenkins is a Continuous Integration server written in Java. It is one of the commonly used DevOps automation tools that has proved to be beneficial for the Development teams. It allows the team to automate various stages of the delivery pipeline. It offers more than 1000 plugins so that it can be efficiently integrated with other DevOps tools. It allows the developers to troubleshoot and fix errors along with automating the testing.
Features of Jenkins
- Open-source tool offering more than 1000 plugins.
- Developers will be able to script several jobs within a single workflow.
- It helps in providing easy and seamless updates for its built-in GUI.
- It offers great support for managing the CI/CD process.
- It helps in achieving concurrency as it distributes several tasks across multiple systems.
2. Docker
Docker comes as a complete technology suite for DevOps. It is a lightweight tool with its focus on container technology that is capable of packing the application along with their required dependencies within a container and then deploy these bundled applications on the target environment independently. It helps the users in grouping various applications from many components so that they can work in collaboration.
Features of Docker
- You will be able to select your choice of preferred languages.
- You can add as many nodes using Docker as per business requirements.
- Docker comes with the major support for many cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
- With Docker, it is easy to improve and enhance the delivery workflow.
3. Splunk
One of the major concerns of the DevOps team is to ensure complete security. This tool helps the developer for creating a defensible infrastructure and implement it efficiently from the very start of the delivery process. Apart from this, it emphasizes on the team members to collaborate closely and work together on the incidents, so they start working on the raised alerts simultaneously. You can use this tool for searching, analyzing, and visualizing the logs that are being generated by the machine from various sources.
Features of Splunk
- This tool is capable of analyzing, and visualizing the logs generated from various sources.
- You will get collective data to be available in multiple file formats.
- It allows you to create knowledgeable objects for efficient operation.
- It helps in measuring the business metrics with the help of log insights.
4. Nagios
It is one of the amazing monitoring tools that will help the developers for keeping a check on the various applications, servers, and business infrastructure. This tool can be efficiently used for large-scale businesses that run high-end network operations in the backend. It offers an alerting system that can be leveraged to create alerts about failures or any faults within the system. You will be able to create a performance chart that will help in monitoring the trends for alerting the users.
Features of Nagios
- You can use it to monitor and troubleshoot the performance-related issues of the server.
- It ensures easy up-gradation of your older infrastructure before it starts impacting other functionalities within the system.
- It enables an easy and automatic fix to problems upon detection.
5. Ansible
It is a management tool that helps in the efficient management of the IT configuration. Unlike its competitors available in the market, Ansible comes with a softer outlook and uses the system’s resources efficiently without impacting the performance of other applications or processes running in the background.
Features of Ansible
- This tool is available as an open-source, secure, and lightweight configuration tool.
- You can automate the deployment process with the help of Ansible.
- It allows you to push the latest configuration changes in the existing system.
- It is based on the master-slave architecture ensuring that no daemon process is running in the background.
6. Vagrant
Vagrant will allow the developers to manage and work with multiple virtual machines with the help of a single workflow. Using this system, team members can test and run software together without having to get into the configuration. The tool ensures that the same environment is available across all development machines.
Features of Vagrant
- You can integrate this tool along with various commonly used configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and many more.
- You can use this tool on operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux.
- The development team will be able to leverage an ideal development environment.
Conclusion
DevOps has been widely adopted due to its unlimited benefits for small-scale and large-scale businesses. But the results may vary from company to company as it depends on how you have implemented DevOps. Different companies have different requirements thus they follow different approaches toward DevOps. There are several DevOps tools you can use for making your system more efficient by making it more organized. In this post, we have listed various tools that will improve the productivity and performance of your business.