These DevOps tools aim at minimizing the dependency between the Developer and the Operations team to deploy software. It does so, by automating the software development pipeline which includes development, software testing, deployment, etc.
Are you curious about what these Devops tools are? Today, in this blog, we will cover the top DevOps tools that make a tech team’s life easier.
If you want to skip the reading, you can check out this video by Intellipaat on the Top 20 DevOps Tools in 2023.
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DevOps tools lead to more collaborative teams, development pipelines that are faster, more robust applications and services, and more satisfied customers. We will be covering the following DevOps tools in this blog:
Here are the Top DevOps tools to learn :
- Git
- Docker
- Selenium
- Jenkins
- Ansible
- Puppet
- Nagios
- Chef
- SVN
- Rational Clearcase
- Maven
- Apache Ant
- Kubernetes
- SignalFx
- Prometheus
- Splunk Cloud
- Raygun
- Catchpoint
- Splunk On-Call
- Gremlin
Quick and high-quality application delivery models have become the new standard of expectations. This triggered the rapid adoption of DevOps practices, which in turn, necessitated a high demand for DevOps tools.
Here are some of the top DevOps tools:
Git
Git is an open-source, distributed, and the most popular software versioning system. Git has several sets of commands used to perform various operations. It works on a client-server model, which basically means that there is a central server that holds the main repository of code. Code can be downloaded from the main repository simultaneously by various clients or developers. Git is developed by Linus Torvalds. Git facilitates teams that are located at geographically different places to collaborate on the same project. Popular companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix extensively use Git in their CI/CD pipelines.
Check out the GIT Cheat Sheet provided by Intellipaat.
Docker
Docker is a containerization technology. Containers consist of all the applications with all of their dependencies. These containers can be deployed on any machine without caring about underlying host details. Containers can be a .net application or a website along with its dependencies like .net or lamp stack in case of a website application. These containers are used to automate the deployment process of applications in production and non-production environment.
Check out the Docker Cheat Sheet provided by Intellipaat.
Selenium
Selenium is an open-source, automated testing framework. Selenium is used majorly to automate the testing of web applications. We can define test in selenium which we want to test against our application. Selenium can repeatedly apply those tests to our application without manual intervention and generate reports. These reports can be used by testing individuals to see if the application is behaving correctly or not.
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source automation server written in java. Jenkins provides automation of the continuous delivery part. Jenkins is used in creating continuous delivery pipelines. To give you an example, here is a scenario wherein a Jenkins server will take our application container from the development environment and make it accessible to the testing environment, QA environment, or any other non-production environment in the beginning. Jenkins server is in the middle of the whole CI/CD pipeline. It automates this whole process which means whenever a developer commits a change in a code that code will automatically be visible to the testing server or QA team. They then can provide instantaneous feedback on these changes. Jenkins is used by Microsoft, Redhat, Rackspace, to name a few.
Ansible
Ansible is an open-source software application that is used for automated tool provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. Ansible is the backbone of controlling an automated cluster environment consisting of many machines. Ansible works on the client-server model. The client acts as a master, which is the center point in our cluster and provides centralized control of all client machines (slaves) that are connected to it. We can give any command to any client machine or deploy any application to more than one machine from a single master machine. Ansible only requires SSH for communication so it does not need any software dependency to run. Ansible works on Unix.
Bookmark this Ansible Cheat Sheet by Intellipaat. It will help you when studying Ansible.
Puppet
Puppet is an open-source software configuration management, automated provisioning tool. It is an alternative to Ansible and provides better control over client machines. Puppet comes up with GUI which makes it easier to use than Ansible. Puppet is cross-platform, it runs on both Unix and Microsoft Windows. Puppet uses a manifest file and applies those specifications across all machines. Unlike Ansible, Puppet is an agent-based tool. The Puppet master runs on a master machine and the Puppet agent runs on all client machines. Puppet is used by Microsoft, Google, Accenture, etc.
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Nagios
Nagios is used for continuous monitoring of infrastructure. Nagios provides server monitoring, application monitoring, and network monitoring. With Nagios, we can monitor a whole data center from a single server. We can see whether switches are working correctly, servers are not having too much load, or if any part of the application is down. It provides a nice GUI interface to check various details like how much memory is used, what is the fan speed, routing tables of switches, or the state of the SQL server. Nagios has a modular design. It supports NRPE plugins which can be used to add monitoring parameters on existing Nagios. There are various plugins available on the internet which can be used freely to add features to Nagios. Nagios is the most popular tool in continuous monitoring.
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Chef
Chef is a configuration management tool. Chef is used to manage configurations like creating or removing a user, adding an SSH key to a user present on multiple nodes, installing or removing a service, etc. We can manage up to 10,000 nodes by using chef. These changes are pushed by cookbooks or recipes. Chef has three components viz. Chef server, workstation, and nodes. The Chef server is a central point where all details of our Chef infrastructure reside. Chef workstation holds recipes or cookbooks which pushes particular configurations to our chef infrastructure. Nodes are simple machines that are configured using chef. Chef has API support from AWS, Azure, Rackspace, which makes it easy to use with infrastructure-as-code methodology.
SVN
SVN or Subversion is an open-source, centralized software versioning & revision control system. SVN is an alternative to GIT. SVN is a centralized system which means every time if a team member or client wants to make changes in the code he has to inform the central server or repo about these changes. To use an SVN repo, the client needs to connect to the central server. It can check out the code to download the repo from the server. The client then moves on to make changes in this code and commit this change by informing the central repo. From the central repo, these changes will be visible to other team members or clients.
Some Industry level project ideas for DevOps through DevOps Projects Blog.
Rational ClearCase
Rational ClearCase manages changes across the software lifecycle. ClearCase is used in Software configuration management of source code. ClearCase is used in both hardware and software development. The center of ClearCase is a secure data repository. It has data that is shared by all users including accounting data and historical data on development processes themselves. It shows details like which user implemented which version, when, and why. There are 3 products of ClearCase—Rational ClearCase is for medium to large teams, Rational ClearCase LT is useful for small to medium teams, and Rational ClearCase multisite is used by geographically distributed teams.
Check the Intellipaat DevOps interview questions to learn more about the DevOps tools.
Maven
Maven is a build automation tool. It automates the software build process & dependencies resolution. A Maven project is configured using a project object model or POM.XML file which describes the build process and the software project, its dependencies on external modules and components, build order, directories. Maven can dynamically download these external modules & Maven plugins during the build process itself. Maven can build and manage projects on Java, C#, Scala, Ruby, and other languages. Maven is majorly used by Apache Foundation to automate the build of some of its large projects like Apache Hadoop.
Apache Ant
Apache Ant is a software tool used for the automation of the software build process. Apache Ant is inspired by Unix make utility. Apache Ant uses an XML file build.xml in place of makefile which is used by make utility for build processes. It automates repetitive tasks in the build process and generates documentation. Ant builds are based on three blocks viz. tasks, targets, and extension points. Ant supports many third-party extensions like Eclipse IDE and NetBeans IDE.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration tool. It is developed by Google. It is used in continuous deployment and auto-scaling of container clusters. It increases fault tolerance, load balancing in a container cluster. Kubernetes maintains the desired state of a cluster; this desired state is described in the YAML file. YAML file contains the state of pods or slave nodes and replication unit for a cluster. Kubernetes uses this YAML file to maintain the desired state of the cluster. For example, in case, a pod is serving more requests than another pod, then it can automatically distribute the load to other pods. In case one machine fails, then it can configure another pod to replace it thus ensuring fault tolerance, load balancing, and high availability in a cluster. Kubernetes is used in high-performance data centers like that of Google, Facebook, and Amazon Web Services.
Learn about key differences between Kubernetes and Docker in this comparison blog on Kubernetes vs Docker.
SignalFx
SignalFx, which recently got acquired by Splunk, is a complete observability tool. It can collect traces, metrics, and events from applications and infrastructure to help inform users of not only the system’s health but why it is behaving a certain way. This helps teams to fix issues faster as well as connect application and infrastructure monitoring with the requirements of the business. SignalFx is great to use for debugging and post-incident reviews through high cardinality analytics, service mapping, and detailed visualizations and dashboards.
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Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source, time-series database and monitoring tool that is mostly used by DevOps and IT teams. It generates alerts based on time-series data. One can generate precise alerts and visualizations to get business insights and engineering outcomes. Developers and IT practitioners can easily customize the tool for their own use cases. Following are some of its features:
- Functional sharding and federation helps with scaling
- Easy service instrumentation with numerous client libraries
- PromQL enables powerful reporting capabilities
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud are log management, infrastructure monitoring, and application monitoring tools. It can collect data from services and devices as well as other monitoring tools such as DevOps monitoring tools. Splunk serves as the single source of truth for the health and performance of a system. Its powerful log search, filtration functionality, and informative visualizations and dashboards lead to quicker incident resolution. Splunk provides observability and provides the tools required to take action whether there is an on-premises architecture or in a cloud environment. Splunk when paired with VictorOps creates complete observability, data-driven incident management, and on-call incident response.
Learn more about the top DevOps tools in this Intellipaat DevOps tutorial.
Raygun
Raygun generates real insights into the way users experience a service. It has the ability to provide detailed reports on everything like full-scale app crashes, downtime, performance metrics like load speeds, network latency, etc. Its real-user monitoring can identify and expose both client-side and server-side problems for users as well as help product teams give priority to engineering roadmaps to align with real problems. The APM tool works well with Raygun’s error management workflow. It automatically links errors back to the source code. This brings Development and Operations together through a single source of truth for the entire team—performance problems and the cause of errors.
Catchpoint
The Catchpoint monitoring tool combines synthetic monitoring, real-user monitoring, network monitoring, and endpoint monitoring for the detection of errors and incidents anywhere in an architecture. The ability to run synthetic metrics through the system is a unique advantage as compared to others. For smaller teams who don’t have large amounts of real metrics, it can help you find service reliability or performance problems as you scale before customers notice it. Catchpoint helps identify issues whether it’s caused by a user’s browser or device or an application or infrastructure problem.
Check out the blog on Ansible vs Kubernetes vs Docker to get more insights on different technologies!
Splunk On-Call
With Splunk On-Call, one can alert engineers and on-call responders about problems and incidents in real-time as well as provide contextual alert information and remediation instructions. In one single pane of glass, DevOps and IT practitioners can collaborate to drastically reduce the time taken to acknowledge and resolve incidents. With reports like MTTA/MTTR, Post-Incident Review, Incident Frequency, teams can drive swift problem resolution, manage alert noise, reduce burnout, etc.
Gremlin
Gremlin lets you design experiments according to your liking to conduct or simply re-enact issues experienced in the past and run them through your applications and services to see how they handle them. DevOps periodic table serves as a helpful tool for DevOps practitioners to better understand and organize the vast array of tools
Conclusion
In conclusion, the world of DevOps in 2023 is marked by innovation and rapid change. Mastering the right tools has become not just an advantage but a necessity for professionals in this field. The 20 DevOps tools we’ve explored in this blog are helpful in achieving simplified development, efficient integration, and effective operations. Whether you’re an experienced professional or a newcomer, staying updated with these tools will be instrumental for your success in this ever-evolving tech environment. As we step into 2023, the world of DevOps is more alive than ever. To stay ahead, mastering the right tools is crucial.
Now that you have looked into the work of tools, know about what the roles of a DevOps Engineer are.