DevOps tools

DevOps tool is an application developed by Amazon corporations that helps to automate the software development process. The main purpose to use the DevOps tool is to establish communication and collaboration between product management, operation profession

DevOps tools:

In this section, we are going to list a few major DevOps tools:

• Version control tools.
• Container management tool
• Application performance monitoring tool
• Deployment and server monitoring tool
• Configuration management tool
• CI/ deployment automation tool 
• Test automation tools
• Artifact management tool.

Become a DevOps Certified professional by learning this HKR DevOps Training! 

DevOps automation/testing  tools:

1. Docker:

Docker tool is a high-end DevOps application used in building, run-distributed, and shipment of any services on multiple systems. This also helps in the assembly of the apps quickly from the different components and is best suited for container management

 Key features of Docker:

1. This tool helps to configure the software systems in a more comfortable and faster way.
2.  Docker tools also increase productivity.
3.  It also provides the containers that will be used to run the application in an isolated environment.
4. Docker tool also routes the incoming request to publish the ports on available nodes to the container. This feature also enables the connections even if there is no task running on the container node.
5.  It allows a developer to save the secrets into the swarms. 

2. Jenkins:

Jenkins tool is developed for monitoring the repeated task execution. Jenkins is a type of software that allows users to perform continuous integration. Jenkins tools can be installed on a server-side central build.

Key features:

1.  Jenkins helps to increase scalable automation.
2.  This can easily configure and set up the system through a web interface.
3.  This tool can distribute multiple tasks across different machines and increase concurrency.
4.  Jenkins tool also offers continuous integration and continuous delivery.
5.  It consists of more than 400 plugins used to build and test any project virtually.

3.SeleniumHQ:

Selenium is one of the popular software testing frameworks used for web applications. This also provides an easy interface to develop automated tests.

Key features:

1.  This is a free open-source tool.
2.  It also offers a multiplatform for various testing platforms such as Android and IOS.
3.  This is very easy to build a keyword-driven web framework mainly for Web drivers.
4.  This tool creates a robust based regression automation process and test scripts.

Prepare for DevOps Interview? Here Are Top DevOps Interview Questions and Answers

4. Git:

Git is an open-source software distributed version system that is freely available for all users. This tool is designed to handle major as well as minor projects with better efficiency and speed. This is developed to coordinate different tasks among programmers.6. It just required a little maintenance and consisted of various GUI tools.

 Key features:

1.  This is a free open-source tool.
2.  It allows multiple distributed developments.
3.  This tool supports the pull request type.
4.  It also supports the faster release cycle.
5.  GIT is a very scalable tool.
6.  This is a very secure tool to use. 

5. CHEF:

A chef tool is useful for achieving speed, consistency, and scalability. This is a cloud-based system and open-source software technology. Chef uses Ruby encoding to develop essential blocks like recipes and cookbooks. The Chef tool is mainly used in the automation of infrastructure, reduces manual activity and repetitive tasks for software infrastructure management.

 Key Features:

1.  Chef tool maintains high availability.
2.  It also manages multiple cloud environments.
3.  This also uses the ruby programming language to create a domain specification
4.  The chef tool does not make any assumptions related to the current node status. This also uses various mechanisms to know the current status of the machine.

6. Ansible:

Ansible is one of the leading DevOps software tools. This is an open-source IT engine that helps in the automation of application deployment, intra service software orchestration, and cloud provisioning. The main purpose of using this tool is to perform scale automation and speed up productivity. The Ansible tool is very easy to deploy the software products without using any agents or custom security activity on the client-side and also pushing the data modules to the clients.

Key Features:

1.  This is very easy to deploy open source applications.
2.  This tool also helps in avoiding the complexity of the software development process.
3.  Ansible eliminates repetitive kinds of tasks.
4.  It also manages complex software deployments and speeds up the software development process 

7. Nagios:

Nagios is one of the more useful tools available in DevOps. This tool also determines the errors and rectifies them by using networking, server, log monitoring, and server system.

Key features:

1.  It offers complete desktop monitoring and server operating systems.
2.  The network analyzer helps to search for the bottlenecks and optimizes any bandwidth utilization.
3.  Nagios also helps to monitor various components such as applications, operating systems, network protocol, and applications.
4.  This tool also helps to monitor the Java Management Extensions.

8. Gradle:

Gradle is a build automation tool for multiple programming languages. It controls the development process of compilation and packaging to testing, deployment, and publishing. 

Key features:

1. Deep and rich API for managing projects, declarative build by convention.
2. Language for dependency-based programming.
3. The structure you build.
4. Multi-projects build and ease of migration.

DevOps monitoring tools :

In this section, we are going to explain a few DevOps monitoring tools;

1. Sensu:

Sensu is an open-source infrastructure monitoring and application solution software that mainly monitors the servers, services, application health, sends alerts, and notifications with third-party integrations.

Key features :

1. Monitoring for mission-critical systems.
2. Integrated, secure, and scalable.
3. Monitoring workflows, no workarounds.
4. Health checks, custom metrics, and logs.
5. Alerts and incident management.
6. Endpoint management and auto-remediation.

2. Pager duty:

Pager duty is a monitoring tool that automatically groups related alerts into a single incident to minimize the noise while centralizing the relevant contexts. 

Key features:

1. Equitably distribute on-call responsibility and streamline incident response with Round Robin schedule.
2. Visualize and manage all of your services in one place with a dynamic service graph.
3. Automates cross-functional team responses for any situation.
4. Video conference in the operation command console.
5. Offers easy steps to suppress alert noise.
6. Streamline critical communications with stakeholder engagement.

3. Tasktop integration hub:

A desktop integration hub is a monitoring tool that enables us to execute third-party APIs as a part of flow when specific events occur. 

Example: Service now.

Key features:

1.  Bi-directional ticketing, and other integration.
2.  Out-of-the-box integration library.
3.  Built-in aggregation and normalizations.
4.  Powerful and flexible APIs.

4. Librato:

Librato is a monitoring tool acquired by Solarwinds. inc, that offers a full-stack performance monitoring of infrastructure and applications on clouds such as AWS, and heroku.

Key features:

1. Provides custom metrics.
2. Infrastructure monitoring.
3. Trace powered APM.
4. Turn key integration and fully populated dashboards.

5. Datical deployment monitoring console:

Datical Deployment Monitoring Console is the platform that allows you to automatically monitor the status of every database deployment across the facility. To curb the plausibility of any human error and keeping a record of all SQL queries execution are some notable tasks that you can streamline with the help of the Datical Deployment Monitoring Console. It also offers the simplification of database auditing as well as deployment monitoring.

Key features:

1. Simulate the impact of database changes before they are deployed.
2. Automatically enforce DBA rules across all proposed database changes.
3. Creates database continuous integration by unifying applications and database changes.
4. Automatically monitor the status of every database deployment across the enterprise.

6.Prometheus :

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring platform primarily used for data gathering and analysis based on time-series data. It allows users to set up monitoring capabilities by utilizing the integrated toolset. It is one of the best monitoring platforms to use with containerized DevOps platforms like Kubernetes

Key features:

1. A multi-dimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key/value pairs.
2. PromQL is a flexible query language to leverage this dimensionally.
3. No reliance on distributed storage, single ever nodes are autonomous.
4. Time series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP.

7. Kibana:

Kibana is a DevOps monitoring tool, and it can be widely used as a data visualization dashboard in the Elastic search software. It is available in the form of time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases. 

Key feature:

1. Data exploration and visualization.
2. Kibana lens and time series visual builder.
3. Preconfigured operations dashboard and web server modules. 
4. Share and collaborate, embedded dashboard, and dashboard only mode.
5. Machine learning and forecasting on-time series.

8. Splunk:

Splunk is a tool used to make any machine data usable, valuable, and accessible to everyone. This also delivers operational intelligence and secured system development.

Key features :

1.  This tool has a next-generation analytical and monitoring solution.
2.  It delivers a unified, single view for different IT services.
3.  Also extends the Splunk platform with purpose-built solutions.
4. Offers data-driven analytical features with actionable insights.

DevOps operations tools:

1. Puppet:

Puppet is one of the popular tools and is widely used in the market. This tool allows the delivery and release date of the technology that changes frequently and quickly. The puppet tool consists of features like versioning, automated testing, and continuous product delivery.

Key features :

1. Offers real-time context reporting.
2. Modeling and managing the entire environment.
3. Defined and continuity infrastructure.
4. Supports desired state detections and bug-free errors.
5. This tool inspects and reports on libraries that are running through the infrastructure.
6. This eliminates any manual work during the time of the software delivery process.
7. This tool helps the software developer to deliver great software products quickly.

2. Ansible :

Ansible is one of the leading DevOps software tools. This is an open-source IT engine that helps in the automation of application deployment, intra service software orchestration, and cloud provisioning. The main purpose of using this tool is to perform scale automation and speed up productivity.

Features:

1. It is very easy to deploy open-source applications.
2. This tool also helps in avoiding the complexity of the software development process.
3.  Ansible eliminates repetitive kinds of tasks.
4.  It also manages complex software deployments and speeds up the software development process.

3. Vagrant:

A vagrant is an infrastructure tool that is used to build an entire development environment and consistent workflow to test the infrastructure scripts.

Key features :

1.  Open-source virtual machine management tool.
2.  Creates a consistent virtual machine environment and tests the VM workflow scripts.
3.  Quickly create the standard environment to test the VM environment.
4.  This tool also helps to monitor the Java Management Extensions.
5.  Easily integrates with other automation tools.
6. We can use Vagrant to support sharing between the researchers and their audience.

4. CHEF:

A chef tool is useful for achieving speed, consistency, and scalability. This is a cloud-based system and open-source software technology. The Chef tool is mainly used in the automation of infrastructure, reducing manual activity and repetitive tasks for software infrastructure management.

Key features :

1. Chef tool maintains high availability.
2. It also manages multiple cloud environments.
3.  This also uses the ruby programming language to create a domain specification
4.  The chef tool does not make any assumptions related to the current node status. This also uses various mechanisms to know the current status of the machine.
5.  Centralized store of your infrastructure’s configuration.
6.  The knife is used to upload configuration changes to the chef server.
7.  A chef workstation is simply a computer with a local chef repository configured chef.
8.  Systems managed by the chef are called nodes.

5. SaltStack:

Saltstack is a lightweight DevOps tool. This tool also shows various tasks like real-time error queries, logs, and workstation activities. SALT STACK is also a software-defined data center.

Key features :

1. It eliminates the messy configuration and data changes.
2.  This also traces the detail of all web request types.
3.  This tool also allows us to fix any type of bugs and find errors before production.
4.  SALT STACK also offers secured access and configures the cache images.
5.  It also secures multi-tenancy with role-based access control management.
6.  Flexible image management tool with a private registry to manage and store various images.
7.  The configuration file can be simple YAML templates or scripts in python and PyDSL.
8.  It can communicate with the clients via SSH or using locally installed agents.
9.  The web interface allows you to view running tasks, the status of subordinate nodes and allows you to execute commands on clients.
10.  Scales extremely well.

DevOps deployment tools:

1. Capistrano

Capistrano is an open-source tool that supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks on multiple server environments. It is mainly used for deploying web applications and is written totally in the Ruby language.

Key features :

1. Reliably deploys the web application for several machines concurrently as a sequence.
2. Setups and automates the audits to any number of machines (whether it is checking logins, enumerating uptimes, or updating security patches).
3. Automates the most common tasks in software teams.
4. Scripts arbitrary workflows over SSH.
5. Utilized to drive infrastructure tools like Ansible, Chef, etc.

 2. JuJu:

JUJU is a deployment tool that helps organizations simplify the scaling, configuration, and operation of their complex software.

Key features :

1. Allows scripts to be bundled in order to easily deploy chunks of infrastructure at once 
2. Deploys to private or public clouds  
3. Provides reusable and repeatable workloads to configure open-source software 
4. Provides 24/7 monitoring and alerting to give you an available and secure tool.
5. Smart, flexible, and scalable open-source application.
6.  Create your own solution in the GUI (graphical user interface) or browse the store to get started. 
7. Managed JuJu infrastructure hosted by canonical.
8. With JuJu, the relationship between the linked charms is formed automatically.

3.GoCD : 

GoCD is an open-source software used to automate the continuous delivery of software across organizations and teams. It automates the complete build-test-release process from code check-in to deployment. It supports several version control tools such as Mercurial, Git, Perforce, Subversion, etc., and also supports other version control software by installing additional plugins. It is sponsored by ThoughtWorks and is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux operating systems.

Key features:

1. GoCD quickly configures dependencies with parallel and sequential executions for faster feedback and on-demand deployment.
2. Easy to extract a template from the current pipelines as each pipeline instance is anchored to a particular changeset.
3. Offers built-in test reporting 
4. Easy to install and manage 
5. Presents many REST APIs which make further automation easy
6. Provides reliable UI which makes it extremely easy to visualize the place where you are in the Pipeline.

4. Octopus Deploy:

Octopus Deploy is an automation deployment and releases management server. It is designed to simplify the deployment of ASP.NET applications, databases, and Windows Services.

Key features :

1. Reliable and repeatable deployments.
2. Supporting changes in development, QA, acceptance testing, and database deployments are quite easy through environments via lifecycle.
3. Offers seamless integration abilities with different platforms as well.
4. Offers a simple UI to observe multiple products, versions, and their environments for further management workflows.

5. IBM Urban Code Deploy

IBM Urban Code Deploy is used for orchestrating, automating, and deploying applications to on-premise, distributed, virtualized, or cloud environments. It is designed for continuous delivery in agile development for audit trails, approvals, and versioning.

Key features :

1. Supports application deployments to distributed data centers, cloud, and virtualized environments.
2. Plugin ecosystem removes scripting and builds DevOps toolchains for complex applications.
3. Able to track user activity.
4. Simple drag-drop systems for process designs.
5. Offers easy integration with IBM RQM to operate quality tests on deployed applications.

DevOps security tools:

1. GitLab:

Gitlab is an open-core service company that allows developers to access Git repositories. Here we would like to explain the term “Git”, where Git represents the source code version that keeps track of code modification, push or pull repositories from the remote resources.

Key features:

1. Gitlab helps developers to host their software projects for free.
2. Gitlab is a popular domain where you can manage the various Git repositories.
3. Gitlab provides features like hosting software projects for free/ private/public, issue-tracking, and maintaining the wiki pages. 
4. Gitlab is a user-friendly web user interface that increases the speed of working on this platform.
    

2. Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform:

Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform (WPP) offers broad threat protection but at the same time, it is not one of the best positioned as a point provider. The company from its very inception took the lessons that they’ve learned over the years to develop this platform to defend against real-world threats. It is definitely one of the applications that will enable a full spectrum of cybersecurity to web applications. WPP is not just a Web Application Firewall (WAF), but it is much more than that.

Key features :

1. Signal Sciences offers the very first Next-Gen Web Application Firewall with the acronym NGWAF.
2. WPP offers web application defense from the attacks based on the real-world experience
3. WPP can bring out the proper insight as to where and how your web applications or APIs are attacked and also suggestions on how to secure them from those attacks.

Become a Gitlab Certified professional by learning this HKR Gitlab Training! 

 

Final words:

In this DevOps tool, we have tried to list out very important tools based on different categories such as operations, testing/automation, security, and deployment. With the help of this DevOps tool post, you can expedite various DevOps tools which are in more demand on the market. We have been trying to adhere to several DevOps communities and online experts through our articles. Stay tuned for more articles related to DevOps. This is a must-read blog for those who are dreaming to pursue their career as DevOps specialists. 

Related articles : 

• DevOps Architecture
•  Agile vs DevOps
• DevOps Certification
• What Is DevOps
• DevOps Workflow
• DevOps Vs SRE