Best DevOps Automation Tools and Technologies
The processes at your company or business can hold significant importance on how your business will thrive. These days, technology can help you automate your business processes to bring speedy delivery of applications and services to your clients. Many companies today, no matter how big it is, start to depend on DevOps to make things faster and more efficient.
DevOps is a coined term from development and operation, making a buzz in the tech world today. Combination of your company’s philosophies, practices, and adoption of programmable software development, DevOps can help produce a better result. DevOps promotes better communication and collaboration within teams and organizations. Leveraging on DevOps allows your company or business to develop and improve products much faster than usual or traditional development methods.
These days, there is a massive availability of DevOps tools and technologies you can use to help you with your automation processes. To help you decide on which tools you can use for your DevOps requirement, here is a list of some of the best in the market that you can consider.
[ Also Read: 5 DevOps Services Trends to watch in 2020 ]
DevOps Tools And Technologies You Can Lean On
A smart data testing tool, QuerySurge, can provide data intelligence and data analytics. It comes with a robust API that has 60 plus calls and seamlessly integrates into the DevOps pipeline. It can also verify easily and quickly vast amounts of data and validate complicated transformation rules between sources and systems. It can perform all tests and run automatically without any human intervention.
QuerySurge can validate critical transformation rules between multiple sources and add up data validation coverage. When any data failure occurs in your system, it can also provide you with a detailed report that accurately shows what went wrong.
Buddy is a Continuous Integration, (CI)/Continuous Delivery (CD) focused tool that leverages automation pipelines that are flexible enough to build, test, and deploy software. It can be easily integrated with Google, Azure, AWS, and more. Actions are the building blocks of this tool as it is used to lower the threshold of DevOps. Actions done on Buddy are the steps executed in a pipeline that have an unspecified number of levels.
Buddy can also monitor the status and health of applications and services with pipelines that are triggered repeatedly. Most popular languages and frameworks also support it.
Another CI/CD automation tool, Jenkins, is an excellent choice to monitor the execution of repeated tasks. It is written in Java, open-sourced, and ready to run with any operating systems. It has several built-in plugins for continuous integration, an essential part of any DevOps requirement. It also allows you to automate different stages of your delivery pipeline. Jenkins also comes with around a thousand plugins that you can use to integrate your DevOps stages efficiently.
As the most advanced cross-platform configuration management tool, Puppet is commonly used to configure, deploy, and manage servers. This way makes deployment faster and secure.
Puppet can configure every host found in your infrastructure. It can also manage the servers by scaling up and down machines, check whether configurations are in place or revert a lost required configuration on the host.
If you lean on Puppet Enterprise, you can manage multiple teams and resources at the same time. This advanced tool is also capable of handling failures and disasters efficiently. Its set of modules can be quickly and easily integrated with other popular DevOps tools.
Bamboo is also another CI/CD tool that can automate your delivery pipelines. This DevOps tool has many pre-built functionalities that you do not need to configure manually, unlike Jenkins. Utilizing Bamboo can save you a lot of configuration time as it has already built-in features that can already perform out of the box tasks. With only around 100 plugins compared to a thousand from Jenkins, Bamboo does not need many plugins as it comes pretty packed.
A well-known DevOps technology suite, Docker allows most DevOps teams to build and run fast distributed applications efficiently. Docker relies on the concept of visualization while at the process level and makes isolated environments for container apps, which eliminates conflicts. This feature makes it portable and secure for applications.
Docker is the first in the DevOps landscape to offer this kind of feature, making it faster to facilitate deployment, making it possible for distributed development, and automating app deployment. Dockers also give you flexible image management where it maintains a private registry where images are stored, managed, and configured for image caches.
Another easy to deploy DevOps configuration management tool, Ansible is relatively simple. It provides continuous delivery features that enable faster deployment. Ansible can automate the deployment of applications as well as other repetitive tasks. It does even require additional or further custom security infrastructure.
Vagrant is a DevOps tool that works seamlessly with various operating systems like Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. This tool emphasizes automation and offers configuration in virtual machine environments to make it a single and easy-to-use workflow. It decreases the setup time while improving production uniformity.
Vagrant creates a single file for every project, with a description of the type of machine and software that users may install. It also comes with plugins that work well and easily integrates with other DevOps tools like Puppet, Ansible, and more.
If you are looking for open-source DevOps security tools, Snort can be an excellent choice for you and your team. Snort can protect your system by detecting malicious activities and intruders. It is capable of analyzing protocols, real-time traffics, and any packet logging. You can have fewer problems as Snort can also search and match content while it spots CGI attacks, OS fingerprinting attempts, buffer overflows, and other notable attacks.
A DevOps tool that manages the infrastructure, Chef, is a Ruby-based configuration management tool. Having a massive scale IT infrastructure can be hard to manage and configure, unlike those that deal with small operations. Chef treats infrastructure as code, making it possible to scale it up and automate it quickly. This DevOps tool can also deploy applications and manage configuration even across your network. As Chef can adapt and duplicate any of your infrastructures, it can ensure you of a low downtime and availability of machines also if something goes wrong.
Chef is one of the most famous and used by many big names in different industries like Facebook, HP, Mozilla, Disney, and many more. These established companies use Chef to manage data centers effectively and speed up complex tasks. Chef can be integrated with other cloud-based platforms like Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, and OpenStack to automate and configure your new machines.
[Also Read: DevOps Trends and DevOps Best Practices]
Final Thoughts
With the influx of DevOps tools in the market today, it can be downright confusing and overwhelming when looking for the tool you want to utilize. However, you may want to note that the selection of tools you wish to integrate into your business processes can depend on your distinct needs, business goals, and, more importantly, your budget. In this article, we’ve provided you some of the best DevOps tools that you may want to consider in making things automated and easier for your business organization.
