DevOps, a philosophy that sees advantages in combining development and operations teams, aims to streamline the software development process. By adopting DevOps practices, organisations can improve software quality, reduce time-to-market, and enhance productivity generally. However, only 10 per cent of organisations say their company is very successful at rapid software development and deployment.
But don’t let that put you off—the good news is that utilising DevOps tools increases software development and deployment success rates. This article will explore the DevOps tools available for the different stages of the software development lifecycle, including version control, continuous integration, configuration management, containerisation and monitoring tools.
Version Control Tools
In the ever-changing software development world, version control tools are indispensable components of the development process. They not only facilitate seamless collaboration between developers but also provide robust systems to track, manage and maintain versions of code through the project lifecycle. There are several version control tools available for DevOps teams to use:
GitHub
GitHub is a popular version control platform that uses Git, a distributed version control system designed to handle projects of all sizes. GitHub enables developers to collaborate on projects, track code changes and manage complex branches to streamline and simplify the development process. The platform offers helpful features such as project management, issue tracking, code review and integration with dozens of other applications, making it a must-have platform for busy DevOps teams.
GitLab
An alternative to GitHub is its similarly named competitor, GitLab. GitLab is a features-based platform that offers version control, continuous integration and deployment capabilities. The comprehensive platform enables developers to manage several key elements of the software development process, such as managing code repositories, tracking code changes and collaborating on projects of all sizes. For those looking for an all-in-one platform, GitLab is an ideal solution. It is an excellent alternative to GitHub as it has built-in CI/CD pipelines that integrate version control with other software development stages.
Continuous Integration Tools
Continuous integration (CI) tools are a crucial element for ensuring code changes are integrated into the main code base. Key benefits of continuous integration tools include improvements in developer productivity, the ability to discover bugs faster before they become bigger problems and deliver essential updates faster and more frequently. Let’s explore some of the most popular continuous integration tools:
Jenkins
Jenkins is a powerful open-source continuous integration solution written in Java. It automates the build process, which allows developers to catch and fix errors quickly, but it also supports parallel execution, which aids the running of multiple builds simultaneously, reducing overall build time and accelerating the development lifecycle. Boasting a feature-rich environment, Jenkins is easy to install, free to use with community support, and easily configurable to your specific requirements, allowing developers to release software continuously.
Bitbucket Pipelines
Bitbucket, a tool created for issue management and project tracking platform Jira, is another popular code repository used by DevOps teams. Bitbucket Pipelines is integrated into Bitbucket Cloud and allows users to automate code from test to production. Vitally, this tool removes the need to manage separate servers, synchronise repositories, or configure user management systems, saving teams time that can be better spent elsewhere.
Configuration Management Tools
Configuration management tools are essential for maintaining consistency and stability across IT infrastructure. With configuration management tools, organisations can define, automate and enforce configurations for their systems, reducing the risk of human error or configuration drift. In addition, by treating infrastructure as code, configuration management platforms empower teams to maintain control over environments. Let’s explore some configuration management platforms:
Ansible
Ansible is an open-source tool that automates IT and applications. It accesses servers, gives them instructions via modules and removes the script when completed. The platform is popular because it is user-friendly, agentless, highly customisable and efficient. If you want to learn more about Ansible, read our blog post, which explores the platform in more depth.
Chef
Chef is configuration management automation software designed to automate the deployment and management of infrastructure across environments. Chef Infra allows users to automate repetitive tasks to save time, enforce consistency across systems and ensure that infrastructure is correctly configured to meet organisational and compliance standards. But that’s not all—the platform also has built-in reporting and monitoring capabilities, making tracking changes and identifying issues in real time easier.
Containerisation Platforms
More organisations are moving towards containerisation. By providing a consistent and portable environment, containers enable developers to work efficiently across diverse infrastructures. Containerisation tools, such as Kubernetes and Docker, are essential tools in DevOps teams’ arsenals, allowing them to manage and scale containerised applications with ease. Let’s take a look at these two vital containerisation platforms:
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a powerful open-source platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications, providing built-in support for load balancing and rolling updates. The platform is popular with developers due to its scalability, flexibility, high availability, community support and self-healing capabilities.
Docker
Docker is designed to help developers build, share and run applications. Similar to Kubernetes, Docker packages software into containers with everything the software needs to run, such as libraries, system tools, code and runtime. Docker has many advantages—it’s lightweight, portable, easy to use and ensures applications run consistently across different environments.
Monitoring, Alerting, and Incident Response Tools
Always-on software services require reliable monitoring, alerting and incident response tools to maintain security, performance and user satisfaction with applications. According to IBM’s 2022 report exploring the cost of data breaches, it took companies an average of 207 days to identify data breaches and 70 days to contain them.
As a result, monitoring, alerting and incident response tools with security capabilities should be an essential part of any organisation’s DevOps toolkit. Let’s explore some of the monitoring, alerting and incident response tools DevOps teams use:
Elastic Stack
The Elastic Stack, formerly the ELK Stack, is a group of open-source tools (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and Beats) designed to help users take data from various sources and formats to search, analyse and visualise it in real-time, making it the ideal choice for organisations looking to gain actionable insights from system data.
The popular DevOps toolkit has various monitoring capabilities, including infrastructure monitoring to monitor the health and performance of infrastructure components, application performance monitoring (APM) to gain insights into application and service performance and security monitoring to detect vulnerabilities and respond to threats when they arise. If you’d like to learn more about the Elastic Stack, we recommend reading our blog post exploring the open-source tools in more depth.
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting tool which is particularly well-suited for monitoring containerised systems like Kubernetes. The platform offers monitoring features such as a pull-based model for gathering metrics, PromQL query language to filter, aggregate and analyse data with ease. But that’s not all—Prometheus also has alerting features such as Alertmanager, which groups and routes alerts based on custom rules, ensuring the right team members receive relevant notifications.
PagerDuty
PagerDuty is a leading incident response and management platform that keeps users connected to code in production and leverages machine learning to filter out noise, allowing teams to spend less time fixing issues and more time innovating. You can also ingest data from monitoring and customer service tools, group alerts into incidents, and see what is relevant to on-call teams through the channel of their choice. But the platform’s capabilities do not stop there. PagerDuty Process Automation can be used to assess and resolve incidents quickly and compile data into detailed and actionable analytics to expedite future responses.
In Summary
Adopting DevOps practices and leveraging the right tools will significantly improve software development and deployment processes that are vital to your organisation. By utilising version control tools such as GitHub and GitLab, continuous integration tools like Jenkins and Bitbucket Pipelines, configuration management platforms such as Ansible and Chef, containerisation platforms like Kubernetes and Docker, and monitoring, alerting and incident response tools like Prometheus and PagerDuty, allows organisations to streamline the software development lifecycle.
Need Some Assistance?
A successful DevOps strategy delivers solutions using agile methods, team collaboration and automation. Implementing such a strategy can be challenging, particularly for organisations new to DevOps or looking to optimise existing processes. That’s where Evolvere comes in. Our team of experts can help you harness the full potential of your initiatives and ensure a seamless transition. You can learn more about our DevOps services here.