Top 10 Powerful DevOps Tools for 2022

DevOps is a fundamental idea in the technical community. It is the intersection of software development and operations to guarantee continuous integration (CI) and delivery (CD). For those unfamiliar with the subject, DevOps is defined as follows in layman’s terms:

A collection of procedures in which software engineers and operations engineers collaborate on all aspects of the software development lifecycle, from conception through production support.

Why is DevOps Important?

Initially, the development and service sides were regarded as distinct entities, each accountable for a certain aspect of a software cycle. However, many isolated problems such as higher development time, poor throughput, and so on were encountered.

Decreased production time, better communication, cost savings, and elimination of deployment errors are the primary drivers of DevOps. To fully use the potential of DevOps, a business must manage five critical processes: communication, continuous integration/continuous delivery, configuration management, security, and monitoring and alerting.

Operational maturity does not occur immediately as a result of the implementation of new tools. At its heart, it’s a deliberate attempt to change the culture so that employees can communicate more effectively and transparently to provide better software and procedures.

And, although tools alone cannot drive this change, they are a critical first step toward automating and structuring development in a way that enhances speed, accuracy, and cross-team cooperation.

DevOps Tools

Due to the abundance of DevOps tools available on the market, it may be difficult and daunting to determine which tools are ideal for you and when and how to utilize each product optimally. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, and if there were, it would almost certainly be too complicated to use. DevOps tools assist you in ensuring that automation, transparency, and collaboration are prioritized across your development processes.

Kubernetes

With microservices and container-based software becoming more prevalent, it’s unsurprising that Kubernetes leads this year’s list of open-source DevOps tools. Kubernetes are used to coordinate containers. Its usage increased by 48 percent in 2020, with more and more software companies using Kubernetes in their DevOps departments. Rather than manually releasing microservices, Kubernetes can automate the deployment, maintenance, and scalability of groups of production containers. The Cloud-Native Computing Foundation hosts Kubernetes, which is sometimes abbreviated as K8s (CNCF).

Significant Characteristics

• Kubernetes enables the automated management of hundreds of containers.
• Kubernetes does not bind your containerized applications to a single machine. Alternatively, you may distribute it over a cluster of machines.
• Kubernetes manages the distribution and scheduling of containers throughout the whole cluster in an automated manner.

Docker

Docker is a free and open-source platform for developing, shipping, and running applications in lightweight containers. Containers encapsulate the binaries, libraries, configuration files, and other dependencies that a program needs to execute. Containers have played a critical part in agile development over the last decade, with Docker containers spearheading the change. The Docker Engine is at its heart.

Additionally, Docker Hub is a great resource for discovering and sharing preconfigured functionality in containers. Additionally, to plug container vulnerabilities, open-source container auditing tools such as Docker Bench or Anchore may benefit.

Istio

While microservices are a convenient way to build, they introduce additional development and architectural issues. To be specific, how can we uniformly implement networking rules such as security, encryption, observability, and telemetry components across all of our services?

To that end, the service mesh is one solution. Each container is connected to a service mesh through a sidecar proxy, which encapsulates these networking capabilities to a control plane. Istio is a popular example of an open-source service mesh. Istio is based on Envoy, which allows for plugins and extensibility. Additionally, we should consider Linkerd and Kuma as open-source service mesh options.

GitHub Actions

GitHub is probably the world’s most popular source control and collaborative software development platform. The GitHub platform, which is built on Git, has seen some major changes in recent years. The most noteworthy feature is the GitHub Actions functionality. GitHub Actions allow software packages hosted on GitHub to take inputs and execute additional procedures. This might be used to automate some interesting DevOps workflows inside GitHub, such as code reviews, branch management, or continuous integration and delivery procedures – the combinations are limitless. GitHub Actions are basically YAML files that are stored inside GitHub projects and make use of GitHub webhooks. While this is more of a feature than an open-source tool, we believe it is worth mentioning. For public repositories, Actions is free up to a maximum of 100 actions.

Significant Characteristics

• Allows you to store several versions of your source code and to revert to a prior version if needed.
• Allows you to build distinct branches for new features and combine them only when they are ready to launch.
• GitHub and Bitbucket, the two finest online Git repository hosting platforms, offer incredible synergies.

Jenkins

A significant component of the DevOps concept is identifying methods to automate and deliver new versions more effectively. Creating a simplified continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is a component of this objective. Jenkins is an open-source automation server with hundreds of plugins for automating software development, deployment, and testing. Although GitHub Actions may potentially replace a continuous integration server in the future, many DevOps teams continue to choose CI solutions such as Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI, and GitLab Community Edition.

Significant Characteristics

• Increases the automation’s scope
• Has a built-in graphical user interface for simple upgrades.
• Provides 400 plugins to assist in the development and testing of practically any project.
• It is a Java-based application that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX.
• Contributes to continuous integration and delivery
• It can be customized and set up through the web interface
• Allows for work distribution over several computers, boosting concurrency.

Prometheus

Site reliability engineers rely on metrics and alerting systems to view applications and respond to problems. Prometheus is a well-loved open source monitoring system that is a graduate of the CNCF. A Prometheus server scrapes HTTP endpoints for time series measurements and provides a framework for interacting with the data, including deep querying, visualization, and storage.

Ansible

Ansible is entirely focused on automation. Ansible, a Red Hat sponsored open source project, may be used to automate operations such as cloud provisioning, networking, deployment, and configuration management. Ansible’s design is basic but effective, and it’s very straightforward to put together – all you need is a text editor and a command line. You create a text document to explain your infrastructure and a playbook to arrange your intended states. Consider how OpenIO makes use of Ansible in practice. “Ansible is our go-to tool for not just deploying the OpenIO core, but also our WebUI, OIO-FS, and any future options,” says Cédric Delgehier, OpenIO’s operations manager.

Significant Characteristics

• It implements an agent-free architecture.
• It is powerful due to the coordination of workflows.
• It is straightforward to use.

Chef

Chef is another infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool for automating the administration of your configurations. Chef automates server settings using Ruby and is compatible with all major cloud service providers (CSPs). This may be very beneficial when it comes to generating and deploying huge numbers of computers. As with the other automation tools on this list, the user defines their components and states declaratively. In Chef, they are referred to as “recipes,” which may be organized into “cookbooks.” You cannot criticize Chef for being off-the-mark.

Significant Characteristics

• It enables you to maintain flexible, versionable, testable, and readable configuration policies.
• It assists in standardizing and enforcing settings continually.
• It completely automates the process of verifying that all systems are set properly.

Terraform

Terraform is another IaC tool used to kick off a build, version it, and automate it further through configuration files. Terraform is a tool for securely and effectively creating, modifying, and versioning infrastructure, as defined on GitHub. Terraform executes an “execution plan” created by the user using high-level syntax. One of Terraform’s distinguishing features is its focus on versioning – this enables you to version the blueprint for your service in the same way that you would your software.

Conclusion

Each year, new DevOps tools enter the market, each with a new set of capabilities designed to make your DevOps journey simpler.

If you’re passionate about DevOps and have been thinking, “What are the DevOps technologies I should learn about to pursue a DevOps career?” If you want to learn about all of the DevOps tools and technologies necessary to launch a successful DevOps career, it’s better to learn from the professionals and stay tuned to DevOps Pakistan.