8 Important Tools to Have in a DevOps Toolkit

More companies are adopting DevOps to bring better quality applications to market faster. Here are eight essential tools DevOps organizations need.

In the software-centric economy, speed is everything. The pressure to deliver more, better, faster falls squarely on teams tasked with releasing high-quality Web and mobile apps for an increasing number of devices and platforms. In the new world of agile development and quickly iterating software, traditional quality assurance methods present a significant bottleneck. Effective DevOps practices require continuous, automated testing that waterfall QA tools and processes are unable to deliver. Through cloud-based automated testing platforms, such as Sauce Labs, organizations can achieve success with continuous integration (CI)/continuous delivery (CD), increase developer productivity, improve quality and reduce infrastructure costs.

Although the big data market will be nearly $50 billion by 2019 (as reported by researcher IDC), what’s most exciting is that the disruptive power of machine learning and data analytics is still in its infancy. This exponential growth in machine data provides a new set of challenges for DevOps teams, who require real-time, secure access to production data and the ability to recognize patterns across data sources to detect anomalies. Developers are able to tackle these issues through cloud-native machine data analytics platforms, such as Sumo Logic, providing full-stack application visibility to build, run and secure modern applications and cloud infrastructures.

Twenty years ago, software typically was updated monthly or quarterly; today, updates happen daily to stay competitive. With the advent of CI/CD, organizations need a universal binary artifact manager such as JFrog to sustain this extremely fast-paced software release cycle. Centralizing the management of all binary artifacts helps simplify the complexity of diverse binary types, their position in the workflow and the dependencies between them. With DevOps engineers using more and more CI/CD development technologies in their daily work, it’s critical to have one centralized tool that can work seamlessly across various platforms.

Modern enterprises must balance back-office legacy IT systems with digital front-office teams working to release faster with modern—often open-source—technologies. Good application release automation (ARA) solutions bridge that gap and give end-to-end visibility across the enterprise. It is the only way to integrate monolithic apps into the continuous delivery pipeline to ensure digital transformation does not produce digital discord.

CI tools, such as Jenkins tools, run automatic tests on the source repository every time someone pushes new code into it. This obtains feedback almost instantly to pinpoint faulty code, giving developers to the chance to use the rollback feature of their ARA solution. It reduces the need for rigorous manual checks before new code is pushed and saves time and finger-pointing when a fault is found. Once the code has been tested automatically, it can be promoted back into the continuous delivery pipeline for automated deployment.

Container providers such as Docker have fundamentally changed the way applications are architected, developed and delivered. Docker provides an abstraction layer to Linux containers that guarantees the runtime environment exposed to an application will be identical no matter where the container is hosted—it will run as long as the container is running in a Docker host. The Docker image is now the immutable package that can be promoted up through the continuous delivery pipeline and safely enables continuous deployment.

Almost every digital enterprise harnesses the power and flexibility of the cloud these days, and modern startups are born cloud-native. Now the differentiator is how fast you can provision cloud-based infrastructure. If your developers still have to wait for operations to provision application-ready infrastructure in the cloud, your development cycle is too long. Service orchestration allows processes that traditionally entail many manual steps to be conducted end to end with the push of a single button, even by non-technical staff.

Version control and rollback effectively offer the ability to unmake mistakes as soon as they are spotted. This gives invaluable flexibility when pushing code through environments and allows mistakes to be pinpointed and remedied quickly. Timestamps attached to versions give a full audit trail of who did what and where, which is particularly vital for heavily regulated companies that rely on releasing innovative customer-facing apps rapidly.