Organizations widely adopt DevOps to streamline their development and operations processes, fostering collaboration and agility. However, selecting the appropriate tools is crucial to managing the DevOps lifecycle effectively. There are many DevOps tools, and picking the right one can be overwhelming.
Nevertheless, by carefully evaluating factors such as price, lifecycle stage compatibility, and automation capabilities of each tool, you can pick a tool that suits your specific needs.
In this article, we will discuss the best DevOps tools, their key features, and which tool to use in each phase.
DevOps lifecycle tools are platforms that help deliver, deploy, and manage software applications throughout the system development cycle. In comparison, DevOps technologies refer to a broader ecosystem involving various DevOps processes, applications, tools, and methodologies.
DevOps tools and technologies facilitate collaboration between DevOps teams, automate manual processes, and improve overall deployment frequency to meet customer demands.
Four core principles of DevOps enable teams to continuously innovate yet maintain high-quality standards of code cleanliness and delivery. The principles are given as follows:
The first principle of DevOps is to encourage collaboration and communication among development, operational, and other teams. Both teams work together to evaluate crucial information and optimize processes as per users’ feedback. This promotes a culture of trust and positivity within the organization.
Automation is another DevOps principle that involves automating various manual DevOps tasks, such as software testing and building, to boost the overall reliability of DevOps processes.
Learn more about the importance of DevOps Automation.
Continuous Integration (CI) is the frequent changing of small codes by the development teams in a shared repository. Continuous Deployment (CD), on the other hand, picks up the work from where CI leaves and refers to the delivery and deployment of code changes to production or testing environments. Organizations that implement a robust CI/CD pipeline can bring in more frequent changes and updates, ensuring high-quality software and security.
Explore the topic:Â The Role of Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment in DevOps.
The fourth and last principle of DevOps is monitoring and feedback, which is critical to identify issues in systems for quick resolution. Some of the best DevOps tools, like Prometheus and Grafana, are a great help in this regard as they regularly analyze and provide you insights on the health of a system.
A DevOps toolchain is a collection of the best DevOps tools, often bought from different vendors, that are integrated together to work as one unit. A DevOps toolchain aims to smoothly design, build, test, manage, and operate various software and systems. Generally, there are 2 types of DevOps toolchains: All-in-One DevOps Toolchain and Open or Customizable DevOps Toolchain.
All-in-One DevOps Toolchain
All-in-One DevOps Toolchain is a comprehensive solution provided by a single vendor having different tools that work together and cover a complete software development life cycle. It doesn’t allow any third-party integration and is suitable for new DevOps teams that are just starting their journey.
Open or Customizable DevOps Toolchain
An Open or Customizable DevOps Toolchain allows organizations to integrate DevOps tools from different vendors to create a unit for their linking. This approach offers excellent flexibility and is suitable for DevOps teams that already have a set of preferred tools.
Despite the type of toolchain your organization is using, the DevOps process stays the same. The following are 7 key phases of a DevOps lifecycle process:
In the discovery phase, DevOps teams collaborate to determine the scope of a project and identify user needs. During this phase, you also set goals and define success. The key activities involve brainstorming sessions and creating user stories to lay the basic foundation for the development process.
The next phase is all about planning. In this, DevOps teams collaborate with key stakeholders to define project requirements clearly and gather information on what features to deliver to customers.
The build phase is about creating codes and packing them into executable binaries or packages. In addition, unit tests are run to check the efficiency of a code, identify any loopholes, and pack the applications.
Now, the newly created or updated application is tested by running integration and acceptance tests. The goal is to make sure that the final product meets the highest quality standards.
Once an application is deployed, it’s continuously monitored and maintained in the production environment. This may involve things like monitoring application performance and tracking user behavior and response.
The operation phase is all about keeping a check on the newly deployed software or application to see if it’s operating optimally. Key activities can include managing infrastructure resources, handling configuration management, applying security patches, and responding to incidents or outages promptly.
In this, you’ve to collect feedback from various stakeholders like users, business partners, and other team members to improve application features.
Learn more about DevOps Lifecycle and its phases.
Navigating the DevOps lifecycle involves more than the above-listed stages. It also requires embracing the foundational principles encapsulated in the “7Cs”: Culture, Collaboration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery/Deployment, Continuous Testing, Continuous Monitoring, and Continuous Feedback.
For each stage of the DevOps lifecycle, there are different tools that are considered the best. Here are some of them:
Let’s explore how these principles guide the selection of optimal DevOps tools for each stage of the lifecycle.
There are two DevOps tools you can use to automate the continuous development process, like GitHub and Jira.
GitHub, or you can Git, is an incredible tool in software development that caters to various things, from version control to collaborative coding and efficient project management. It has an intuitive interface that keeps your public and private codes always available while preventing security breaches. The unique feature of GitHub is that it provides you with a Changes History feature so you can see when and why specific code changes were made. See our GitHub!
Jira is another one of the best DevOps tools for the planning phase. Built in 2002 as part of Atlassian tools, it not only aids in planning but also monitors a project’s progress and creates dependencies. The due dates for every task can be simply changed by the drag-and-drop feature.
There’s a backlog feature that allows project managers to add story points highlighting the complexity of a particular task. Jira is typically a custom or open DevOps toolchain as it easily integrates with native and third parties.
The ideal DevOps tools for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are Jenkins and SonarQube.
Jenkins is a flexible and highly customizable open-source DevOps tool that automates various DevOps phases, including building, testing, and deployment, to allow for smooth CI/CD in software development.
Programmers can use this tool to automatically make code changes, ensuring the most up-to-date code is deployed regularly. What sets this tool apart is its huge range of over 1800 plugins. They are spread across categories like user interface, administration, build, and source code management.
SonarQube is one of the best DevOps tools and primarily focuses on improving code quality. This tool quickly integrated with CI to check projects across different languages and provide immediate feedback while coding. It has a Sonar’s Clean as You Code concept that ensures that only the most secure and good quality codes make it to the production environment. You can even see ‘fail or pass’ results for your code based on quality profiles.
The best DevOps tools for continuous testing are Selenium and Bamboo.
Selenium WebDriver empowers users to create robust browser-based regression automation suites and tests that facilitate the scalability and distribution of scripts across multiple environments. It has Selenium IDE available as a Chrome and Firefox add-on, which simplifies interaction recording and playback within the browser through its intuitive record-and-playback feature.
Another one from the list of the best DevOps tools is Bamboo. It’s another software development and deployment tool provided by Atlassian that unites and automates builds, tests, and releases. It comes with a user-friendly interface and provides advanced monitoring features.
For instance, if a code build fails, you can use it to access logs and find the root cause of the failure. It can even integrate with Jira to streamline the software or application planning process.
The DevOps tools for continuous deployment are Ansible, Puppet, Kubernetes, and Docker.
Ansible is an amazing deployment automation and configuration management tool. It’s known for simplifying complex tasks by synchronizing IT infrastructure and application deployments, making it easy for DevOps professionals to complete their projects. The key features of Ansible are that it reduces manual errors, speeds up deployment time, and enables efficient resource utilization.
Like Ansible, Puppet is another of the best DevOps tools that automate application deployment and configuration management. This tool is especially commendable due to its versatility and helps simplify complex tasks by extracting configuration details from different operating systems. Whether you are dealing with 100 or 10,000 servers, this tool makes management and scaling easy.
Kubernetes is an open-source DevOps tool that plays a role in container orchestration. It constantly monitors the health of your applications and systems, allowing you to make changes to your configuration when necessary. It offers its own IP addresses and one DNS name and integrates with other third-party products like Docker. The UI is also quite user-friendly and easy to read.
Docker also functions like Kubernetes and is great for development settings to ensure all DevOps professionals are working on the same basis. It’s an all-in-one DevOps toolchain with a container runtime that smoothly works on Linux and Windows Server OSs. This tool’s unique offering is Docker Hub, which lets you explore different images from publishers and community members that you can use according to your project’s needs.
The DevOps tools for continuous monitoring are Prometheus and ELK Stack.
Prometheus is a fantastic DevOps tool that has open-source technology and quickly monitors the health of cloud-native environments. You can use it to monitor the health of cloud infrastructure like Azure and more. It also has an alerting system that notifies you when there’s an issue with your application.
Built on an open-source basis, ELK Stack is actually a combination of the three best DevOps tools: Kibana, Elasticsearch, and Logstash. These tools are renowned for their monitoring capabilities. It has excellent machine learning, security, and monitoring features that automate and ensure the protection of your application.
Check: Top 10 DevOps Monitoring Tools.
The popular DevOps deployment tools for continuous feedback are Jira Service Management and Parlol.
Parlol is one of the best DevOps tools for collecting feedback from business partners and end users. It aggregates feedback from different sources, like products or support, and records it into a single system. You can then see how your application is performing and what areas need improvement. This tool also supports other features like live chat, Slack, and ticketing integrations for smooth collaboration.
Kubernetes and Terraform are the tools that take care of the continuous operation of DevOps applications.
Terraform is one of the best DevOps tools that ensure smooth operations of your DevOps applications or software. Despite the vendor you are using, this tool maintains and deploys coding infrastructure in the cloud. It can work with multiple DigitalOcean and GoDaddy as well as covers many AWS assets.
When choosing the best DevOps tools, you must consider factors like integration capabilities, scalability, API support, and ease of use.
There’s a plethora of the best DevOps tools available in the market that you can use for different purposes like monitoring, container orchestration, testing, collecting feedback, and operating applications. If you need help with your DevOps operations, Hicron Software House has efficient and skilled developers. Our team has years of DevOps experience and make sure all your applications are running smoothly without any downtime.
Contact us today and take the efficiency of DevOps to the next level.
Hicron’s contributions have been vital in making our product ready for commercialization. Their commitment to excellence, innovative solutions, and flexible approach were key factors in our successful collaboration.
I wholeheartedly recommend Hicron to any organization seeking a strategic long-term partnership, reliable and skilled partner for their technological needs.
After carefully evaluating suppliers, we decided to try a new approach and start working with a near-shore software house. Cooperation with Hicron Software House was something different, and it turned out to be a great success that brought added value to our company.
With HICRON’s creative ideas and fresh perspective, we reached a new level of our core platform and achieved our business goals.
Many thanks for what you did so far; we are looking forward to more in future!
Hicron is a partner who has provided excellent software development services. Their talented software engineers have a strong focus on collaboration and quality. They have helped us in achieving our goals across our cloud platforms at a good pace, without compromising on the quality of our services. Our partnership is professional and solution-focused!
The IT system supporting the work of retail outlets is the foundation of our business. The ability to optimize and adapt it to the needs of all entities in the PSA Group is of strategic importance and we consider it a step into the future. This project is a huge challenge: not only for us in terms of organization, but also for our partners – including Hicron – in terms of adapting the system to the needs and business models of PSA. Cooperation with Hicron consultants, taking into account their competences in the field of programming and processes specific to the automotive sector, gave us many reasons to be satisfied.
