6 Top DevOps Tools for All Development and Operations

If you are a software geek and would like to uplift your career in the field of DevOps, then a good knowledge of some these proven tools would be helpful. Below is a list of suggested tools, backed by a lot of research work done by some esteemed DevOps enthusiasts who believe these tools can suffice all your development and operations needs.

Top 6 Proven Tools for Your DevOps Needs

1. GIT

GIT is a free and opensource versioning control tool used for tracking changes in source codes and in any set of your files. The version control capability allows users to save different versions of source code and with these, you can easily roll back to the previous version. It provides features like Branches and a Master Branch. Changes made to source code can be checked by team members in their individual branches, which are and then merged into the Master Branch when the code is ready to go.

You also need to host your repositories so that your team members can push their code. If you are looking for references, then you may consider GitHub and Bitbucket — the two best repositories popular in the market for maintaining your repositories are GitHub and Bitbucket. BitBucket is known for providing you with an unlimited private repository to team consisting up to five members. GitHub, on the other hand, can give access to public repository for free.

These repositories can be integrated with third-party tools like Slack. The benefit is that everyone in a team would be notified whenever a new commit is made. This way, they don’t have to visit the Git URL every time to see who has recently made a change.

2. Jenkins

It is a continuous integration server used for testing and reporting changes in real time. With this tool, you can deploy a new code very quickly. It automates different stages of the delivery pipeline. You can even script your pipeline having more than a single build job into a single workflow.

The best part about Jenkins is that it supports more than 1000 plugins. It can be easily integrated with third-party tools like Docker, TestNG, Maven, Puppet to name a few. You can install Jenkins server on Docker.

3. Bamboo

This CI/CD server by Atlassian is just like Jenkins. It allows you to automate the delivery pipeline right from build, deployment, and straight to production. Bamboo is not an open-source tool like Jenkins. The best part about Bamboo is that it comes with many pre-built functionalities.

Plugin count support in Bamboo is comparatively lesser than that of Jenkins. You do not need any plugins with Bamboo as pre-built functionalities are already available in Bamboo. You will not face any problem integrating Bamboo with other tools like JIRA and Bitbucket. Compared to Jenkins, it is going to save your configuration time. It has a user-friendly UI and comes with some handy features. You can go for it if you have a good project budget.

4. Docker

Docker has always been the most widely used container platform used for hosting Jenkins and many other servers. It helps to support distributed development and at the same time automates the development of your applications. You can host many applications on a Docker and it will isolate them to make them secured and portable. The apps deployed on Docker will be independent of any operating system.

VMs can be replaced by Docker these days. Docker lets you easily manage the dependencies in your project. You can package all the required dependencies within the container and then install them using one single command. Once installed, you can run this unit on any app or machine and get the dependencies installed. It can even be integrated with CI / CD tools like Bamboo and Jenkins. It will help in uplifting the delivery workflow. Docker even helps to ease the process of cloud migration.

5. Puppet

It is a cross-platform configuration management platform. It automates infrastructure management and you can manage infrastructure as code. Using Puppet, the software can be delivered at a faster pace. The tool is available in both open source and premium version. For extra features, you may find the Puppet enterprise more appealing.

Puppet enterprise lets you handle big teams and resources with ease. It understands the relationship that your projects deal with in the infrastructure. It takes care of all the dependencies and the failures are handled very smartly. Features like Real-time reports, role-based access control, and node management make the Puppet premium version more interesting. Puppet can handle almost 5000 modules in a single go and has good integration support with other DevOps tools.

6. Nagios

It is a popular and open-source monitoring tool. It allows you to monitor the infrastructure. With this tool, you can fix infrastructure-related very easily. You can monitor events, outages, and failures. Nagios graphs and reports are good enough to keep track of the failures. It has a very rich plugin ecosystem. There is also a Nagios community from where developers can avail tutorials and add-ons translations.

Nagios provides four open-source monitoring solutions — Nagios core, XI, log server, and fusion. Nagios Core is a command line tool. Nagios XI provides you with a web-based GUI and a monitoring wizard to take care of your monitoring needs.

The Nagios log server will help you to search log data and set up alerts whenever a threat is detected in the infrastructure. Nagios fusion is a solution that will help you to monitor more than a single infrastructure simultaneously.

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