DevOps has revolutionized how tasks are done in the Information Technology world. With the increasing demand for the best DevOps tools in the market, the requirement for DevOps engineers has also increased.
In this article, we will talk about the best top 10 DevOps tools which you should be aware of as a DevOps engineer or System Administrator.
What is DevOps?
The name ‘DevOps‘ is a combination of Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops). It is basically a collection of best practices and tools that help in reducing the time taken for delivering the application and services in an IT environment. This helps in better customer experience and give a competitive edge from the companies using traditional methods for software development.
In a DevOps environment, there are DevOps monitoring tools
DevOps Best Practices
If we talk about best practices for DevOps, those can be classified in the below categories.
- Continuous Integration.
- Continuous Delivery.
- Microservices.
- Infrastructure as Code.
- Monitoring and Logging.
- Communication and Collaboration.
For keeping this article to the point, we are not going to discuss further on these best practices. You can subscribe to our blog for future articles as we will cover them in the future.
Top 10 Best DevOps Tools Which You Should Know
1. Git
Git is a free & open-source distributed version control system for monitoring changes in source code during the software development process and is a very important DevOps tool.
Programmers can easily collaborate using Git and can maintain their own set of versions of the code which can be committed later very easily. The aim of Git is to provide speed, data integrity, and efficiency.
You would be surprised to know that Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for the development of the Linux kernel. Currently, companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Linkedin, Netflix, etc. are using this software.
2. Docker
It is one of the most loved containerization software in the world. With the help of Docker, you can create, deploy and run software packages using containers that runs over Docker Engine. Most interestingly Docker is open-source software.
Basically, a container is an isolated environment that contains all the important stuff like application code, tools, and libraries that are needed to run the application smoothly irrespective of which environment they are running.
They are also isolated from other containers and act like individual servers. So, in the main server, you can run multiple containers running different applications.
3. Nagios
We hope you already have heard of Nagios which is one of the best open-source tools for monitoring and alerting. It comes under the category of DevOps monitoring tools and is highly used in the IT industry.
It allows companies to monitor their infrastructure and easily find out the issues and fix them. Nagios also helps the user to keep records of events, and failures and forecast outages, errors, or any threat with the help of Nagios graphs and reports.
Nagios is open-source software available under the GPL license and you also have full access to the source code and can also contribute to it.
4. Selenium
Selenium is a very popular open-source web-based automation tool. Its main objective is to automate web applications for testing purposes. Selenium was created by Jason Huggins in 2004, who was an engineer at ThoughtWorks.
Selenium works with many browsers and operating systems. Some of the famous browsers with which it works are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. Also, it is supported on Operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux.
If you are looking to create quick bug reproduction scripts, you should use Selenium IDE, and if you want to create robust, browser-based regression automation suites and tests, use Selenium WebDriver.
5. Jenkins
It is one of the favorite DevOps automation tools for teams who are looking for an automation server. This is also open source software and with the help of thousands of plugins, it supports building, deploying, and automating any project.
In a DevOps environment, it is also known as CI/CD server that helps in automating the various stages of a delivery pipeline. The main reason why Jenkins is loved by DevOps engineers is its huge plugin database. Currently, it offers more than a thousand community-contributed Jenkins plugins.
6. Puppet
It is another amazing DevOps tool that is used for configuration management and automated provisioning. It makes software discovery, management, and delivery automatic. It is a cross-platform tool and is written in C++, Clojure, and Ruby.
Puppet is an agent-based tool and follows a client-server architecture. The client is known as an agent and the server is known as the master. Currently, Puppet is used by AWS, Microsoft, VMware, Google and many other notable companies.
7. Chef
Chef is another configuration management tool used to deploy, configure, and manage servers. It is a highly scalable DevOps tool and works on master-agent architecture.
Chef objective is to solve automation across the enterprise IT space, and across functional roles, to provide an environment where a business can build, deploy, and manage any software, anywhere. Chef can easily manage servers from 5 or 50,000 by converting the configuration of infrastructure into code.
Manual patching, software installation, configuration updates, and other time-consuming activities are now automated with Chef.
8. Maven
Written in Java, Maven is a build automation tool by Apache. It automates the software build process & dependencies resolution. Maven can build & manage projects on Java, C#, Scala, Ruby, and other languages.
It was first started as an attempt to simplify the build processes in the Jakarta Turbine project. Maven’s main aim is to allow a developer to understand the complete state of a development effort in the shortest period of time.
Maven uses an XML file to describe the project and is based on a fixed and linear model of phases. Sometimes it is difficult for DevOps engineers to select between Gradle and Maven when it comes to ease of use and simplicity.
9. Ansible
This is one of our favorite DevOps tools. It is also used for provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment similar to Chef & Puppet. Its USP is that it is very easy to configure and learn. It is an agent-less tool and only requires an SSH connection to connect to the remote hosts.
Being an open-source software its source code is available to anyone and it is written in Python, PowerShell, and Ruby. It is currently managed and sponsored by Red Hat.
If you are doing the same activity again and again on multiple servers, Ansible could be your answer for its automation. It will not only save time but also gives no room for mistakes & errors.
10. Kubernetes
Written in Go language, Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration tool that is used for automating application deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It was originally developed by Google and is currently, managed by ‘Cloud Native Computing Foundation‘.
Kubernetes helps in increasing the fault tolerance and also load balances the container cluster. It can restart the containers which fail and can also reschedule or replace containers when a node dies. There are many more features that make Kubernetes the number one choice when we talk about the orchestration of containers.
These were the best DevOps tools that you should know about. If you are thinking to become a DevOps engineer, you should know these tools. As we have started the DevOps tutorial section on our blog, so please subscribe to our blog for more tutorials & informative articles.
If you have any suggestion or want to tell us about other DevOps tools which you are using and is not on this list, please let us know through your comments.
