About DevOps

DevOps has changed the world of agile development for good. Every successful IT organization is opting in for DevOps in 2019. The reason for this is quite simple, DevOps simplifies the development process along with speeding it up. 

There is a little learning curve for DevOps, but some developers find it relatively easy to learn DevOps. The high demand for DevOps in the market has boosted the number of students with interest to learn DevOps as well. DevOps has become a norm in any It company’s development flow because it comes with many advantages and increases the work speed. Along with this DevOps also fulfills a communication gap that there might be between the development team and the deployment team, and unites both as a single team. Apart from these two internal teams, as DevOps follow the agile development process, it also incorporates weekly if not daily communication with the client to get the client’s response on any major or minor change.

Being a DevOps engineer there are some tools that you must be familiar with like Git, Puppet, etc (we will discuss more in depth below). Most of these tools can be seen in any DevOps project out there and are used to manage DevOps projects more efficiently. These tools help assist the DevOps workflow in making the project development and deployment phase truly consistent and fast-paced. Majority of experienced DevOps engineers can opt for these tools as they use it daily in their work.

Top 10 DevOps tools to use in 2019

Here is a list of most famous DevOps tools that are used by DevOps engineers in 2019.

1. GIT
   GIT is a version management tool, that sets up code repositories. Each repository can have further branches. And each branch could be created for a new feature. When the developers are working on one specific feature they create a new branch from the master branch and then push their code on this new branch. This keeps happening until the feature is finished, then the new branch is merged in the master branch, hence changes are released.
   GIT is the most famous version management tool out there today, and it is trusted by many large organizations.

2. Docker
   Docker helps you keep all your project resources at one place, within a container. A container in docker is a package containing all the things necessary to run your application like all the libraries and dependencies in one places. This helps ship out the project as a whole and in one go. Using these containers it also becomes easy to develop, deploy and run your applications. For instance, without Docker, you might have to run the backend at some other location using some other terminal and the front end separately. But using Docker you can bundle them together and have only one command to run both.
   Docker is essential in large projects to keep track of resources utilized and keep the whole project confined.

3. Jenkins
   Jenkins is another famous open source automation server. It helps you create, deploy and test your applications with automation. It provides continuous integration and continuous deployment just like in GIT, also you can set up delivery pipelines in Jenkins. Whenever some code is pushed, it will run through your customized pipeline in Jenkins and some tests might be performed on this new batch of code. If all are passed then the deployment occurs otherwise not.
   Most developers consider Jenkins as their personal favorite, it is just a matter of choice.

4. Puppet
   Puppet helps you manage whole systems like Windows. In Puppet, some files are made called Puppet manifest in these files the user specifies all the resources of the system and their state. In puppet declarative language is used for system configuration. Puppet provides an agent which runs on all servers which might require configuration changes.

5. Chef
   Chef has most of the same capabilities as Puppet with some added functionalities like application deployment, and network configuration management. Chef can easily be integrated with any cloud-based platform like Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, etc. Chef has a very large community which is continuously growing. Some tech giants like Facebook, Mozilla, and Expedia also use Chef.

6. Selenium
   Long time javascript enthusiasts are a fan of selenium. Before continuous integration was a thing, selenium existed and it is a wonder for nicely it has aged. Selenium is a framework used to test web applications. It is written in Java, but most of the testing that you may perform in Selenium will be javascript based. It helps you run your normal HTML apps in a server which is called selenium server. The Selenium web driver is also available for most of the major web browsers.

7. Gradle
   Gradle is an open source build automation system. It is based upon Apache Ant and Apache Maven. Gradle actually covers the drawbacks which were faced in these two, with some new features as well. Unlike Ant and Maven, Gradle actually allows you to run multi-project builds at once. Apart from this, Gradle is like a combination of both Apache Ant and Apache Maven. It combines the best features from both.

8. WhiteSource Bolt
   It is an open source security tool that can find and fix vulnerabilities in GIT. White source bolt provides real-time security alerts and also suggests fixes for them. It has support for more than 200 programming languages. It tracks only open source vulnerabilities, but also multiple of them and inside databases too. This is a tool that is nice to have and that works well with GIT to overcome security vulnerabilities.

9. Kubernetes
   Kubernetes also takes a containerized approach much similar to Docker, but it takes containerization to the next level. Kubernetes is used for automation in deployment, scaling and managing of applications and it also works well with other containerized tools like docker. While Docker helps you create and manage container for all the resources of a project, Kubernetes helps you manage hundreds of such containers at a single time.

10. Nagios
    It is an open source DevOps monitoring tool that allows you to monitor the whole process and as well as fix problems. Nagios also keeps a record of such problems or failures and can also provide you graphs and reports. Nagios also has some child products like Nagios Core, Nagios XI, Nagios log server and Nagios fusion. Each covers a different area in DevOps.