Top DevOps Tools for the Right Process

If you are hearing about DevOps for the first time, read more on this link. Others, dive right in!

DevOps brings together the Development and the Operations process to make one great system. There are great minds at work behind the nuances of this revolution. DevOps essentially focuses on a multidisciplinary talent pool to get the Dev and the Ops together. And the result has been a truly magnificent repository of tools. We will have a look at some of them in this blog; but first, the types of tools out there.

Types of DevOps Tools

With DevOps, you have tools based on a script-based model and ones based on a container model.

Script-based model. A Linux user will love the tools whipped up on the script model. An endearing feature is that commands can be saved and run with replaceable parameters. A few tools based on this model are Chef (an open source model), Microsoft’s Windows Azure PowerShell CmdLets and Amazon Web Services’ CloudFormation.

Container model. Why you may like a container model (a.k.a Charm model) is because it allows you to “build up a set of reusable charms that describe application deployment and lifecycle”. This can be run as and when needed, which is of great benefit to cloud providers especially. An open-source project developed by Canonical Ltd. called Juju is one of the tools based on this container model.

The Right Tool

Finding the right tools that fit into your company’s strategy and goals needs some thought. There is no one-tool-that-fits-all out there. What we can talk about are the different DevOps tools that are out there, and let’s do it category-wise for clarity:

Continuous Integration and Configuration management: What tools in this category should enable is a track of changes to the software code base, an archiving and storing of files into a configuration management database, and a seamless solution to version control issues. 5 tools that have achieved this:

• Chef
• Puppet
• Ubuntu Juju
• Ansible
• RANCID

Continuous Delivery: This is the process that will get your product moving and you need the very right tools to get this done. Automation of releases is a major part of the DevOps process, and some tools that get it done right are:

• Capistrano
• Fabrics
• Jenkins

Continuous Testing: Tools in this category should essentially enable smooth automation of the testing process. Also included therein, will be the developer tasks like compiling source code into binary and creating documents. Some reliable tools:

• Ant
• Gradle
• Maven
• Travis
• BuildHive

Continuous Monitoring: This can be further classified into two types of tools i.e Application performance monitoring tools and Server Monitoring tools. These two come highly recommended:

• New Relic APM
• New Relic Server

Adopting DevOps in QA needs realignment of efforts to ensure all test cases are automated in a standardized environment to achieve near 100% code coverage. Discover how Cigniti gives you the best of Development and Operations with DevOps testing.