Simply, Automation is a process to complete a job without any participation of humans. So, it boosts the production speed and minimizes possible errors with the help of technological tools. DevOps teams are also using automation tools and their technologies nowadays. These bring new revolutionary changes to the development and operational processes.
DevOps automation technologies make the development, operations, testing, and deployment processes easier. It works on the CI/CD pipeline workflow basis. DevOps uses this workflow for integration, testing, and deployment processes. This automation follows every process one after another. If any problems arise, it automatically corrects the faults and restarts the operation.
In this article, we will explain what DevOps automation tools are, why they are useful, and how to pick the best one.? So, without any further briefing, let’s dive in.
Why are Automation Tools Useful?
Automation is one of the important processes in modern technology. You will need greater and quicker development and production to stay up with the fast-paced environment. There will also be no sacrifice on quality or scalability. To meet these current needs, automation tools have become a must for DevOps. DevOps automation tools can?
- Minimize the Developers' need: You will not require any development assistance for processing thanks to automation. It can detect and manage situations without any human involvement. This allows developers to be free or can focus on other things.
- Minimize possible errors: Manual tasks can cause errors because humans often make mistakes. On the other hand, an automation tool can perform that task flawlessly. Moreover, it runs tests automatically and evaluates the quality simultaneously.?
- Increase Production Speed: Automation tools can finish the process quickly and effectively. They allow developers to focus on other tasks. These will save your time and therefore increase the production speed.?
Automation Tools?
Automation tools work under different requirements and working environments. We can classify automation tools based on their functionality and requirements. There are many other upcoming automation tools as well. Yet, these are the popular automation tools for the DevOps working environment.??
Automation Tools for Functionality
It means these tools are particularly used for functional working purposes. The tools and their uses for functionality purposes are
- Infrastructure Coding: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef, etc are some popular automation tools for infrastructure provision. They can work on cloud provisioning and are easy to write in codes.
- CI/CD Tools: Jenkins, Docker, AWS CodePipeline, Vagrant, Gitlab are automation tools for DevOps continuous integration and deployment. They work as a virtualization machine for code and cloud management.
- For DevOps Monitoring: Sensu, Splunk, Librato, Datadog, Kibana is a lightweight system and supports monitoring. They monitor app performance, server, and container monitoring, and also their deployment monitoring.?
- Configuration and Management: Vault, Etcd, Cloud KMS, Consul can retrieve the configuration and data. AWS Secrets Manager stores and retrieves secure data with secret key encryption.?
Automation Tools based on Requirements
These categories will help you to understand which DevOps automation tools are perfect according to your requirements. DevOps automation tools for?
- Measurement: Measurement factors are mainly sharing information to increase transparency. Graphite and Splunk are popular automation tools to provide effective sharing mechanisms.?
- Automated Testing: Automated testing approach will keep every step of the development cycle alive. Watir, Testsigma, Selenium automation tools continually analyze software quality, flag errors, and run for another round of continuous testing.
- CI and CD: There are many automation tools in this area because they require more automation than other tools. Jenkins, Kubernetes, Github, Ansible, Chef are the most used tools among them. They are also effective.? ?
Popular DevOps Automation Tools
These DevOps automation technologies are still in use and are quite popular. They are the greatest at what they do.
- Jenkins: DevOps use this tool to automate the regular task especially for CI/CD pipeline. It can be for coding combinations or source code repositories. It ensures to give us a stable integration and deployment process without compromising the software quality.?
- Docker: DevOps utilizes Docker to package applications in containers. Also, Docker is responsible to deploy and run the application on the server-side. This creates robust images using 7 million puppet codes.
- Kubernetes:? It works as a cluster and container management tool. First, it deploys containers to its virtual machine called clusters. Ultimately, it automates the process of deploying cloud platforms without requiring physical deployment.?
- Puppet: It is mostly popular for? Linux and Windows-based operating systems. As its name suggests, it can pull the strings of multiple application servers and configure software management. Also, DevOps use several platforms like IBM mainframes, Mac OS servers, and Cisco switches.
How to Choose DevOps Automation Tools?
DevOps involves managing, testing, creating, and deploying. That‘s why automation is crucial.? So, you need to consider these factors while evaluating DevOps tools.
- You can not automate the process everywhere. There are some places where manual work will bring higher-quality output. Therefore, understand your needs and choose the tool accordingly.
- If you are with a large DevOps team, communication and working gap are common. It will become difficult to continue speed and flexibility. Here your tool requirement will be to minimize the gap between team members' work.
- To deploy apps on the cloud, scalability is very necessary. This scalability process gets difficult and complicated to do manually. So, your priority is to choose scalable automation tools.
- If you are building or testing large apps, you should select containerized automation tools. Also, you will need scalable automation tools with it to keep pace.
Conclusion
DevOps automation tools simply automate the process of development, testing, and operations. It gets difficult to maintain these processes manually. Also, if any developers do any mistakes while coding, it will be quite tough to locate and resolve the problem. DevOps automation tools can handle all the processes easily.?
It is always a wise choice to look for a popular tool and use it for DevOps. But, you first know your requirements. According to your requirements, you should choose the perfect tool to extract the best quality output from it.