How to choose the right DevOps Tools?
How to choose the right DevOps Tools?
DevOps has taken off in only a few years to become a major influence on software development and deployment. And it has, through its use of infrastructure as code, greatly sped up the development cycle. DevOps simply means the cross-department integration between Development, the department creating the code, and Operations, the department using that code. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops) which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
DevOps is lean thinking blended with agile philosophy. Agile philosophy /Agile software development is a kind of approach to software development comprising of a collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s). It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. But how can you implement this effectively? What are the best tools for DevOps?
Contents
1. Planning
2. Continuous Integration
2.1 Automated Testing
3. Deployment
3.1 Automated Deployment
4. Operations
4.1 Communications & Swarming
5. Continuous Feedback
6. Jenkins
7. Summary
1. Planning
Planning is, of course, important for any task. It is the most important step in development. We recommend tools that allow your development team to plan in iterations. This way, you start learning from users sooner and can optimize your product from that feedback. Look for tools that provide sprint planning features. Confluence, Hip chat, Jira software can help a lot in this aspect.
User feedback can also help make great improvements in the development cycle. Gather the user feedback and update those changes in your production cycle. Wherever you decide to scope your feature or project should be converted into user stories in your development backlog.
2. Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is the practice of checking in code to a shared repository several times a day and testing it each time. This way you can fix the bugs easily and get shiny new features to your users as early as possible. Bamboo or Hipchat can help you with this. Since the suspicion for bugs is done continuously it helps to make the development cycle error-free.
Look for tools that automatically apply your tests to development branches, and give you the option to push to master when branch builds are successful. Along with that, you can get real-time alerts in your team’s chat tool with simple integration.
2.1 Automated Testing
Automation proves to more efficient and error-free than manual work. Automated testing pays off over time by speeding up your development and testing cycles in the long run. And in a DevOps environment, it’s important for another reason: awareness. Unlike manual tests, automated tests are executed faithfully and with the same rigor every time. They also yield reports and trend graphs that help identify risky areas. Look for tools that support wallboards, and let everyone involved in the project comment on specific build or deployment results. Bamboo, Bitbucket & Capture for Jira are some of the automated testing tools.
3. Deployment
Deployment is the most tedious task in the development cycle because it requires a well efficient and error-free product. Look for tools with a single dashboard integrated with your code repository and deployment tools. Find something that gives you full visibility on branches, builds, pull requests, and deployment warnings in one place.
3.1 Automated Deployment
Automated deployment can be done by AWS, Bamboo, Hipchat, Puppet. Using Puppet or Chef with Hipchat allows you to control deployments from chat rooms. These provisioning tools reduce pain in standardizing environments. And there are loads of tools to help with deploy automation. Try automating deploys to your lowest-level environment first, where you’ll be using that automation most frequently, then replicate that all the way up to production.
4. Operations
Application and server performance monitoring: BigPanda, Hipchat, HostedGraphite, Nagios, New Relic, Pager Duty, Pingdom, Splunk
‘Server monitoring’ and ‘application performance’ monitoring are the two types of monitoring that require automation. To continuously evaluate your application, you need software that is listening and recording data 24/7.
4.1 Communication and swarming
BigPanda, DataDog, Hipchat, New Relic, Pager Duty, Statuspage can help you with communication and swarming.
Cross-team communication is the first step towards a cultural shift, and chat tools facilitate it in real-time. Many chat tools have dedicated rooms, where experts can hop in to swarm on incidents as they happen and get them fixed faster.
5. Continuous Feedback
Tools: GetFeedback, Hipchat, Jira Service Desk, Pendo, SurveyMonkey, Hootsuite
This is done by the end-user. It gives the final results of all the work you have done so far. Customers help you identify whether you have built the right thing for them. This includes NPS data, churn surveys, bug reports, support tickets, and even tweets.
In a DevOps culture, everyone on the product team has access to user comments because they help guide everything from release planning to exploratory testing sessions. Twitter and/or Facebook can also be integrated with chat for real-time feedback. Analyzing and incorporating user feedback may make you feel like slowing down the development cycle, but it’s more efficient in the long run than releasing new features that nobody wants.
6. Jenkins
Jenkins is the leading open-source automation server with some 1,600 plug-ins to support the automation of all kinds of development tasks. Jenkins offers a simple way to set up continuous integration and continuous delivery environment for almost any combination of languages and source code repositories using pipelines, as well as automating other routine development tasks.
Those 1,600 plug-ins span five areas: platforms, UI, administration, source code management, and, most frequently, build management.
Jenkins is distributed as a WAR archive and as installer packages for the major operating systems, as a Homebrew package, as a Docker image, and as source code. The source code is mostly Java, with a few Groovy, Ruby, and Antlr files. You can run the Jenkins WAR standalone or as a servlet in a Java application server such as Tomcat. In either case, it produces a web user interface and accepts calls to its REST API. When you run Jenkins for the first time, it creates an administrative user with a long random password, which you can paste into its initial webpage to unlock the installation.
Wrapping up
When it comes to embracing DevOps into your business processes, it is important to choose the right DevOps consulting services and the tools that matter a lot to it. The tools are specifically focused on automating software delivery processes. So when considering switching to the more efficient model, you have to consider both the tools and the Best DevOps consulting Company in India!!
Choosing the right DevOps tools is first and foremost about taking a hard look at your current software development and IT operations process and deciding where you need to improve. Within each type or category, there are many specific products to choose from. Careful selection can have a tremendous impact on the efficiency and ultimate success of the software development project.