Top 10 Best DevOps tools in 2020

February 06, 2020

GIT

GIT is one of the most popular DevOps tools used by the software developers for handling distributed version control features which includes check-in, commits, branches, merging, labels, push and pull to/from GitHub, etc. GIT is an excellent feature set for source code management which is ideal for remote teams and open source contributors.

GIT tool allows you to track the progress of your development work. You will be able to save different versions of your source code and return to a previous version when required. It’s also great for managing a software development scenario where the project might require to branch in multiple directions, allowing independent code to merge and delete without impacting the common base code.

To integrate Git with the DevOps workflow, you must host repositories. Currently, GitHub and Bitbucket are the two best online repositories in the market. By using the services of GitHub and Bitbucket, your team members can push their work. GitHub is a famous repo compared with Bitbucket. Bitbucket renders with a free unlimited private repository which is ideal for small teams of up to 5. With GitHub, you get access to the public repository for free which is an excellent solution for most of the projects. These two host repositories have seamless integrations. For Example, if you integrate these Github and Bitbucket with Slack, everyone on your team gets notified whenever someone makes a new commit.

Features of GIT:

       • Free-Open Source Tool

        • Feature Branch Workflow

        • Allows Distributed Development

        • Supports Pull Request

        • Enables Faster Release Cycle

Why Should Developers Use Git?

Branching workflow feature in GIT helps developers to create an isolated environment for every change to their codebase to ensure that the master branch is not affected by the feature branches created for specific purposes.

GIT delivers a distributed development environment where every developer gets their own local repository with a history of commits.

Git allows SCM tools such as BitBucket or GitHub to perform pull requests, through which developers can ask other developers in the team to merge their branches into other’ code repositories.

GIT allows you to track changes in your file and, by using it you can easily coordinate the work among your team.

GRADLE:

Gradle is an open-source automation tool that was introduced in 2009. Since then Gradle observes constant enhancement and gains more popularity. It is used to automate, testing, deployment of application code.

Gradle is a flexible tool that allows developers to compose code in Java, C++, Python or other programming languages. By using Gradle scripts you can automate the tasks, for instance, you can copy files from one directory to another before the build even happens. You can also import your ant builds into your Gradle.

Gradle is developed based on the principles of Apache Ant and Apache Maven. Maven and Ant use XML for configuration whereas Gradle uses a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL) for builds.

Gradle has incremental builds as they save an extensive amount of compilation time. Comparing with Maven the performance of Gradle is almost 100 times quicker because of its incrementality and also due to Gradle’s build cache and daemon.

In the year 2016, the Gradle team released a Kotlin based DSL, which enables developers to build scripts in Kotlin as well.

Gradle runs on the JVM and to use it you must Install Java Development KIT. Gradle is supported by major IDEs such as Netbeans, Eclipse, Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA. These IDE’s allows the import of Gradle builds and interact with them.

On the whole, Gradle comes up with quicker shipping and numerous configuration abilities and helps DevOps teams to build, automate and deliver fast and better software from mobile apps to microservices.

JENKINS:

Jenkins is the most widely used DevOps automation tool by many software development teams which helps them in automating, building and deploying their projects. It’s an open-source tool and has a continuous integration server written in JAVA that allows you to automate different stages of your delivery pipeline

Jenkin has a great ecosystem with more than 1000 plugins and add-on, so it integrates with almost all DevOps tools, from Docker to Puppet. Its capabilities can be expanded to various stages in the development life cycle.

Jenkins is entirely free and available at no cost. It’s easy to get started with Jenkin’s as it is portable across all major platforms like Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. You can also easily install it with Docker. It runs as a standalone application with a built-in Java servlet container or application server.

By using the web interface, you can set up and configure your Jenkins. If you are a first- time user, you can choose to install it with frequently used plugins. However, you can also create your own custom configuration as well.

The Following are the Features of Jenkins:

It is a Free Open-Source Tool

It Integrates all your DevOps stages with the help of around 1000 plugins

The work can be easily distributed on multiple machines and platforms.

You can easily start with Jenkins by using a WAR file

Provides multiple ways of communication with web-based GUI, CLI and REST API

It can act as a continuous delivery hub for projects.

NAGIOS:

Nagios is an open-source tool, with all the basic functionalities. This tool helps in network monitoring, server monitoring, and application monitoring.

This is one of the most popular free DevOps monitoring tools, which alerts users when anything goes wrong with the infrastructure and also alerts them when the issue is fixed.

By using the Nagios tool, you can monitor the entire data center from a single server and identify the issues in server, systems, networks and in the applications.

Using Nagios, you can keep records of events, outputs, and failures. You can also keep an eye on insights with the help of graphs and reports. This way, you can easily forecast outages, errors and help in detecting security threats.

As Nagios has been around for a while, it has a pool of plugins, add-ons, tutorials, translations and many more.

Nagios offers four open source monitoring solutions.

Nagios core

Nagios XI

Nagios Log Server

Nagios fusion

Nagios Core:

It is a command-line tool with all the basic functionalities. It requires advanced technical resources to manage the organization's infrastructure monitoring setup, configuration, and day-to-day tasks.

Nagios XI:

Nagios XI is ideal for non-technical users because it comes up with a user-friendly web-based GUI and monitoring Wizard.

Nagios Log Server:

It helps in searching the log data and sets up alerts about potential threats in the log server.

Nagios Fusion:

It allows you to monitor multiple networks at the same time.

The following are the features of Nagios

Monitors on all major platforms like Windows, Linux, Uni and Web Applications.

Troubleshoot server performance issues with agent-based and agentless methods of server monitoring.

Plan infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems cause failures

During network monitoring, it checks network connections, routers, switches and many more.

Automatically fix problems when detected

Docker

Docker has been launched in the year 2013 and emerged as a forerunner in containerization. Docker has been the number one container platform since its launch and became one of the important DevOps tools with its continuous improvisation. It is a tool to create, deploy and run applications by using containers.

We use Docker in production for most services. It automates application deployment and provides integrated security. Docker eases configuration management, control, and scaling issues by allowing the container to move from one place to another place.

Docker container allows the developer to package an application with all of the required components and subcomponents, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out in the form of a single package. It automates application deployment and provides integrated security.

The most important advantage of Docker is that it distributes apps into containers to make them more reliable and transferrable. Besides, Docker simplifies the process of cloud migration. All major cloud service providers such as AWS and Google cloud extended their support for Docker. So if you have any plans for cloud migration, then Docker can help you in the process.

The following are the Features of Docker:

• Docker Container can be used with any language.

• Ship the container wherever you want, either in QA or even the cloud

• Scale up to 1000’s nodes.

• Update with zero downtime

PUPPET

Puppet is an opensource configuration management tool used to configure, automate, deploy and manage the software development cycle with platform independence.

Puppet is based on master-slave architecture. This is written in Ruby and has its own domain-specific language. This tool supports the concept of infrastructure as code and dynamic scale up and down of machines on a need basis.

To deliver a secure software puppet automates the entire infrastructure management, this is the reason nearly 42% of businesses use the Puppet tool.

Puppet runs on various systems, including the Unix system, IBM mainframe, macOS servers, Cisco switches, and Microsoft windows.

Puppet has two layers:

A configuration language which describes the appearance of hosts and services.

An abstraction layer which allows the administrator to implement the configuration on a variety of platforms which includes Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc

The following are the benefits of Puppet:

It eliminates the need for system administrators to use manual scripting for changes

It reduces cost and effort while maintaining a clear and auditable change control mechanism.

7. Selenium

Selenium is the most popular and open-source portable software testing framework for web applications. It supports automation tests across various browsers and operating machines. It also provides you with an easy interface for developing automated tests.

Selenium can be easily integrated with test management tools and other DevOps tools like Bamboo, Jenkins, etc.

Selenium is very flexible and can be used across various operating systems, browsers, and programming languages.

It requires less hardware when compared with other test automation tools in the market such as UFT, QTP, SilkTest, etc. One of the major advantages of Selenium is that it supports parallel test execution, which is very much useful for DevOps teams.

The following are the features of Selenium:

• Free Open-Source Tool

• It can create robust, browser-based regression automation suites and tests

• Selenium helps to write test scripts in multiple languages like Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Perl, Php, JavaScript

• Supports various multiplatform for testing like ios and Android

8. Ansible

Ansible is open-source configuration management, software provisioning, and application deployment tool, which runs on UNIX based systems as well as Windows-based systems.

Ansible is a simple yet powerful tool to automate both simple and complex applications.

Ansible provides agentless architecture. It connects via SSH or remote PowerShell to execute the tasks.

By using Ansible, Repetitive administration tasks can be automated for improving the scalability, consistency, and reliability of the application deployment environment.

The following are the Key Features of Ansible:

It provides agentless architecture.

It is powerful because of workflow orchestration.

It is simple and easy to use.

9. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration platform that is used for automating application deployment, management, scaling, networking, and application availability.

Kubernetes is originally designed by Google engineers to find a solution in managing containers at scale. You can group your containers into logical units by using Kubernetes.

Kubernetes works with other container tools as well including Docker. By using Kubernetes, Docker containers can be created automatically and assigned to business service on demand and can also be scaled down after its use.

Deployment automation is the biggest benefit of Kubernetes in the DevOps world.

Kubernetes allows you to manage hundreds of containers by automating its process. By automating container creation across on-premises and cloud, Kubernetes can increase the on-demand development environment based on business needs.

If you use the Kubernetes tool then you don’t need to tie your containerized applications to a single machine, instead, you can deploy it to multiple computers. Kubernetes is a useful tool for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

10. Chef

The chef is an open-source configuration management automation tool developed by Opscode using Ruby. It is used to automate, repair, update and manage the applications.

By using the chef tool, you can transform infrastructure into code. It helps in managing complex infrastructure on virtual, physical and cloud machines as well.

The following are the components of Chef

Chef server

It is a central command center where all the details of infrastructure are available.

Chef workstation:

This component includes recipes or cookbooks, that pushes the configuration to infrastructure.

Chef nodes:

These Nodes are simple devices that are configured by using Chef.

Chef provides a seamless orchestration engine that allows DevOps engineers to ensure continuous delivery of code releases and also helps in avoiding manual script-based changes.

The following are the Features of the chef:

Chef supports multiple platforms like AIX, RHEL/CentOS, FreeBSD

It Continuously helps in standardizing and enforcing the configurations.

It ensures that your configuration policies to remain flexible, testable and readable.

This tool can easily integrate with cloud-based applications. It has API support from Azure, Rackspace, AWS to extend configuration management to cloud platforms.

This brings us to the end of this article on Top 10 DevOps tools. To learn more about the DevOps and DevOps tools enroll in our DevOps Training course.

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