The DevOps Toolkit: Key Categories And Best Practices

“The most powerful tool we have as developers is automation.” – Scott Hanselman

A DevOps engineer is a relatively new IT position the urgent need for has been critically perceived. The DevOps is about breaking barriers and is ultimately making the overall project cycle perform well and rank high.

DevOps (an acronym for development and operations) is a software development methodology focused on extremely active interaction and integration in one team of programmers, testers and admins who synchronously serve a common service/product. The main goal of this is to create a single cycle of the interdependence of software development, operation and deployment, in order to ultimately help organizations (services, start-ups) create and update their software products and services that are operated in real time or in production faster and more painlessly.

Due to a wide scope and multilateral DevOps activity, there exists a variety of special tools to be used in myriad ways to cater to individual business needs and demands. In pursuit of maximum accuracy, value and effectiveness, the tools mentioned are going to be categorized and briefly characterized below.

Collaboration Tools (Jira, Asana, Slack, Trello, etc.)

This group of tools provides highly effective mutual cooperation by making the very process seamless and transparent. Collaboration tools serve the best options for making the whole process structured, easy to track and coordinate. 

Continuous Integration Tools (Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity, Buildmaster, etc.)

The tools of this group are all about cloud security together with a compliance solution. They appear to be highly complex and versatile with a good portion of planning needed. However, building a profound CI-CD pipeline allows extracting great value and reaching more accurate outcomes as well as enhancing the quality of the applications under development. 

Build Tools (Gradle, Maven, Make, etc.)

Building tools are certain programs a DevOps engineer uses to automate the working app’s creation based on source code. The building process includes the code compiling and linking together with a usable form packaging provision. 

Code Hosting-Review Tools (Bitbucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.)

The tools mentioned above are handling code review (analysis, audit, etc.) together with a specific code hosting provision catering to individual project needs and configuration dimensions. 

Testing Tools (Xray, Perfecto, Selenium, etc.)

These tools are dealing with automated testing and are aimed at the end-to-end automation process. Best practices, solid security as well as reliability are a pledge of a high-quality integrated unit. 

Monitoring Tools (Nagios, Grafana, Zabbix, Selenium, etc.)

A proper set of monitoring tools creates a highly successful monitoring platform, which is focused on an application performance observation. They are dealing with configuring, deploying and managing a range of services/applications. 

Configuration Management Tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc.)

Configuration management tools are used to provision and manage data by using certain plain-text definition files; they are aimed at making changes and implementation processes much faster, predictable and scalable. 

Containerization Tools (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS ECS/EKS)

At this point, we are talking about self-contained apps to be easily launched and updated by an IT team. Containerization tools handle issues of wide scalability while dealing with both large and small businesses. 

A DevOps engineer position broad popularity stems from the increasing need for the rapid and continuous development and deployment of cloud applications as part of digital transformation initiatives. These include technical issues, such as integration of legacy applications and test automation along with a wide range of tools to mainstream and facilitate development-operation processes. Successful implementation of DevOps practices can lead to improvements in overall business performance. 

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