There is a surge in the demand for DevOps from organizations that want to improve their application’s quality and time-to-market. DevOps eliminates the extra time taken by the development and operations teams enabling them to test the application while developing it. This way, the teams do not have to work separately. The main aim of DevOps is to improve agility and speed up the delivery process. However, DevOps include many operational tools from which you need to select the right ones to maximize the output.
In this blog, we will help you pick the right DevOps tools –
Collaboration & strategize
You need to build a common tools strategy that allows collaboration across the software development cycle. It means you need to start with a brainstorming session and come up with a plan that includes DevOps processes, continuous development tools, continuous integration tools, continuous testing tools, continuous deployment tools, continuous operations tools, and lastly, CloudOps tools.
Planning means you share ideas and collaboratively agree upon the tools strategy that will adhere to a common set of business objectives while offering a seamless software development process. The main aim is to automate the process and let the developers send new or changed software to development & operations, without human interference.
Use tools to capture every request
No changes or ad hoc work should be implemented outside of the DevOps process. DevOps tooling should be able to capture all kinds of requests for any software changes or new additions. This provides automation of acceptance of change requests that may come from either the business or other parts of the DevOps team, for example, making changes to the software to accommodate new models or requests that will improve the access and performance of the database.
Agile Kanban Project Management
Kanban is a framework that encourages the development teams to focus on enhancing the flow of the system by implementing agile development. It enables teams to work with a clear focus and offers more flexible planning options, transparency, and faster outputs throughout the development cycle.
Kanban enables the team to visualize the entire value system. This helps ensure a stable flow and balance flow-based approaches by limiting the amount of work in progress according to work capacities.
Use tools to log metrics
Choose the tools that will help you understand the productivity of the DevOps processes i.e. both the automated as well as manual processes. This enables the team to determine whether they are working for them or not. First, determine the most relevant metrics for the processes, such as, speed to deployment vs. errors that occurred. Secondly, make use of the automated processes to correct the errors or issues without involving human help. For example – automatically dealing with problems related to software scaling on cloud-based platforms.
Test automation
Test automation involves implementing the code & data and the solution i.e., testing routines to ensure the highest quality. There should be continuous testing with DevOps.
Acceptance tests
It is important to run acceptance tests as they help in each deployment. This includes infrastructure, apps, data, and also the test suite. Acceptance tests should be in sync with the selected criteria. To ensure this, the team should spend time to test and retest DevOps, & define the acceptance tests. With time, applications evolve and there are new requirements that require more testing against each requirement.
Continuous feedback
Finally, continuous feedback loops are required for automated communication between tests. This includes the tests that spot issues and the tests in which the processes need to be supported by the selected tool. The right tool will be able to identify the issue using manual or automated mechanisms, tag those issues for developers to understand the issue which leads to a collaborative approach to solving the problem.
Some must-have DevOps tools –
- Jenkins – To monitor and implement repeated jobs
- Vagrant – For a smooth transition to DevOps culture & improve the workflow
- Monit – To ensure the appropriate running of process on the software
- PagerDuty – To gain visibility into analytical system & apps, and help protect the brand reputation
- Prometheus – To monitor system via flexible query language for slicing & dicing time series data
- SolarWinds – For real-time correlation & remediation
It is important to identify the right DevOps tools for every part of the product and afterwards, choose the ones that will help you with the parts throughout development till deployment. But before you get started with the processes in any organization, you need to master DevOps!
Learn DevOps & upskill yourself
Cognixia – the world’s leading digital talent transformation company, is committed to offering learners exceptionally thorough training & certification programs in digital technologies that can help shape their career & future. We provide the best online training, an immersive learning experience for both the individuals as well as corporate workforce via highly interactive, live, online, instructor-led courses.
Get certified in DevOps with Cognixia’s DevOps Training – a course that has been designed for you to understand the significance of DevOps. This training will enable you to understand the concepts of how DevOps transformation can help focus on value & streamline delivery. You will also get to learn about the common infrastructure servers, scalability, alongside availability, which is another feature of this program. This online DevOps training will also help you develop a deep understanding of DevOps tools like Puppets, Jenkins, Nagios, GIT, and more, during this program.
Under this DevOps certification course, you will cover the following –
- Introduction to DevOps
- Significance of DevOps in software development
- Different software development methodologies and their significance
- Introduction to virtualization
- Types of server virtualization & virtualization products
- Installing and configuring Vagrant
- Version control systems
- Installing Git on Windows and Linux systems
- Docker and containerization
- Configuration management with Chef, SaltStack, Puppet, and Ansible
- Monitoring with Nagios application
- Continuous integration using Jenkins
- Container clustering with Docker Swarm and Kubernetes
- CI/CD pipeline automation
