As evident from our previous DevOps blogs, this cultural shift brings the development and operations teams together. With almost 77% of worldwide organizations relying on DevOps to deploy their software, the trends for using DevOps in planning, building, and deploying software products are increasing exponentially.
With that being said, if a new business wants to begin using DevOps for its work, there are so many tools that use DevOps to collaborate with the teams and build potential solutions. In this blog of ours, we’ll tell you about DevOps tools that can prove to be life-changing for growing businesses like yours.
Be it any phase- planning, building, testing, or getting feedback, we have the tools to be specific to your product phase making it easier for you to work and get a hold of these tools.
What type of DevOps Toolchain should be used?
When it comes to a DevOps toolchain, organizations should look for tools that enhance collaboration, automate things, leverage observability, and reduce content-switching. There are two primary approaches to applying a DevOps tool chain in one’s business. An all-in-one DevOps solution that offers the full solution but has a loophole. It sometimes doesn’t integrate perfectly with third-party applications and tools.
Another approach is to have an open toolchain. This type of toolchain can be customized as per the requirements of the team and integrates well with different tools. We think that an open toolchain is actually better for businesses since it can be easily customized as per the needs of the organization, which later results in time efficiency and reduced time to market.
DevOps Tools for Each DevOps Phase
Since we’re focusing on an open DevOps toolchain, we’ll tell you about some selected tools that touch multiple phases of the DevOps lifecycle. The following segment takes you to various DevOps-centric applications and tools, but depending upon the market’s nature the list may vary.
So, let’s explore some of the must-have DevOps tools for growing your business:
1. Phase 1: Discover
In this phase, the DevOps team researches and works on the scope of the project to be developed. This phase involves activities like researching user requirements, and their demands, establishing goal boundaries, and defining success in terms of end-product.
Tools like Mural and Miro empower the entire DevOps software team to gather unique ideas and do operational research accordingly. These help in organizing the information into inputs and prioritizing work for different collaborating teams.
This phase acts as a baseline for decision-making throughout the DevOps lifecycle. This aids in collecting all types of relevant information from the user and put into a product that serves their purpose and offers a world-class solution.
2. Phase 2: Planning
This next phase involves a lot of thinking through. The whole process of product building and its deployment is discussed here. What will be the steps, the requirements, the advantages to be focused on, and the loopholes to be reduced, everything is discussed and planned at this stage.
Thus, the company needs to remove communication barriers and organize the relevant information & facts into actionable inputs. For this, those tools should be used that allow each and every company employee to give his/her valuable opinion about product building and its working.
For this, tools like Confluence and Slack are known to be the best ones. Asynchronous brainstorming is important for the collective success of the company.
3. Phase 3: Building
Producing an identical environment for Development
Providing an identical coding environment for each team is extremely important because this enables the employees to debug their code and work in a much more collaborative manner. Open-source tools like Kubernetes and Docker are known for providing identical development environments.
Infrastructure as Code
We all know how good of a practice it is to make our code modular and functional at best. So, in this DevOps phase, we have extended that thinking to IT infrastructure. This means that as compared to earlier slow versions of repairing, we have moved on to faster re-provisioning of the code. Re-provisioned code is significantly faster and can be applied over and over to servers and stored in version control. Tools like Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, and Docker are known for their repeatable & reliable systems.
Collaborative Coding
When the whole team is working on a single project, it’s important to have source control of your code. These tools help you to store the code in various chains so that you can see each and every change and collaborate with the Pull Requests in a much easier manner. With collaborative coding and good source control, you can review the proposed changes, reduce operational costs and deploy your code faster. Here, tools like Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket are major game-changers.
4. Phase 4: Continuous Delivery
Tools like Jenkins, AWS, Bitbucket, and SonarSource are known for their automatic problem detection, fixing them, and rolling out new features to potential customers much earlier. Using these tools, you can automatically apply your test cases to development branches and you can easily push them into builds when they become successful.
5. Phase 5: Testing
What is fun if we don’t automate things for a bit? Well, this is exactly what DevOps teams think while their testing phase. Using tools like Xray, Snyk, Mabl, Veracode, and StackHawk the company easily automates this phase with minimal supervision. This not only allows the employees to focus on debugging the actual product but also frees them from their tedious work routine.
6. Phase 6: Product Deployment
After all the things have been completed, the most stressful part comes which is deploying the product. But, before that it requires shipping the code, working on upcoming releases, and building a long report to present in the meeting.
That is why, the DevOps team uses automated Dashboard tools like Bitbucket and AWS CodepipeLine which are used during this deployment phase and integrate your whole code repository, offering you full visibility to branches, builds, pull requests, and much more.
7. Phase 7: Operating
Great collaboration in a company happens only when the whole DevOps team is working and viewing the same work. This reduces the dilemmas and helps them understand the right position of bugs, traceable software problems, and releases as well. Tools like Jira Software, Opsgenie, and Statuspage help you to identify and fix problems faster.
8. Phase 8: Observe
Be it server monitoring or application performance monitoring, you need software that listens and works 24/7 on the data. It should collect the relevant data and manage the overall health of your application as well. So, in this case, tools like Datadog, Slack, Splunk, Nagios, AppDynamics, etc. are quite useful.
9. Phase 9: Continuous Feedback
After deploying the product, customers offer their valuable feedback, but to build something better for them, you need to listen to them. This phase involves collecting cultural and procedural feedback regularly and reviewing them to guide the team for a better product or upgrade. For this, tools that integrate your chats, surveys, and data are worth investing in. Some of these include GetFeedback, Slack, Pendo, and Jira Service Management.
Final Words
After reading the above blog, we think you must have understood the importance of working not just in a DevOps-centric manner, but using the above tools as well. These align with your work schedule so perfectly that you won’t have to cross-check them, again and again, to get your work right.
