Importance of DevOps Professional Tools and Automation

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Jun 1, 2024

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DevOps is a practice that requires the Dev and Ops teams to work in collaboration with each other and achieve their goals. No tool can achieve this practice in a team. The team members have to work towards communicating among themselves and creating the application. To simplify collaboration, DevOps uses different automated tasks to carry out different continuous processes such as continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment.

DevOps cannot be summarized as automation; automation is just a strategy used to achieve DevOps goals. There are different tools used to complete the automation task and help DevOps to communicate.

DevOps Tool Categories

Different tools help in completing different phases of application development. The different phases of the DevOps development life cycle are Plan, Build, Continuous Integration, Deploy, Operate, and Continuous feedback.

• Plan
• Build
• Continuous Integration
• Deploy
  
• Operate
• Continuous Feedback
  
  

1. Plan

Following the continuous approach to integrating, testing, and releasing is considered a great help in gathering customer feedback early and fixing issues quickly. DevOps tools should provide this functionality for developers. So, tools having sprint planning features are used at this stage.

DevOps tools should also provide continuous user feedback and set priority settings for developers to implement the feedback and enhance the application quickly. The tool should allow all team members to share and comment, and provide ideas, strategies, goals, and appropriate documentation. In addition, the tool should support integrations. Some of the common tools used in the planning phase are Confluence, Hip Chat, JIRA, Rally, and Mingle.

2. Build

This phase prepares staging environments for development. The goal of this phase can be achieved with the help of tools such as Puppet and Chef. Developers also use tools such as Docker, which help provision individual development environments. The following two methodologies are used by developers in this phase:

• Infrastructure as code: Most of the time, developers manually configure applications and use some traditional and old tools to manage infrastructure. This results in several issues and slows down the overall deployment process. To speed up the deployment process, many organizations use the infrastructure as code methodology; where the developers use the same software development tools and processes for managing source code. This enables the implementation of infrastructure changes more quickly and reliably.
  
  Developers use the provisioning code to bare metal. Later the code is re-applied to bring a server back to baseline. The provisioning code is stored in version control. The code is consistently tested, integrated, and shared across all user environments. When institutional knowledge is, well, code-fed into code, the need for running books and internal documentation fades. What emerges are repeatable processes and reliable systems Less talk, more rock.
  
  Some popularly used tools in this phase are Bamboo, Bitbucket, Chef, Docker, and Puppet.
  
  
• Collaborative coding: Waiting on change approval boards and then implementing the changes becomes a long and delayed step at times. So, developers can use peer reviews via pull requests to speed up the process and improve code quality. Pull requests are changes that the team has pushed to a development branch in the repository. The team uses internal reviewers to review the proposed changes discuss the modifications, and then integrate the reviewed changes into the main code line.
  
  
  

3. Continuous integration

Continuous integration is a development practice that helps developers integrate their code into the repository multiple times a day. So, one developer will integrate the source code as he/she is making changes to it several times a day. So, in case another developer has committed some other changes to the same source code, the system will flag a message and the first developer can detect problems early rather than unknowingly working on a copy of the source code offline.

An advantage of Continuous Integration is that developers can find out quickly where things went wrong and rectify errors early. We can describe Continuous Integration as continuous communication between team members. So, it ensures that other team members can easily view the current state of the system.

High-speed tools must be used at this phase. The tools should also automatically apply tests to development branches and the team should be able to push to master when branch builds are successful. The tool must also support real-time alerts so the team can use the chat tool with a simple integration. Some popular tools used in this phase are Bamboo and Jenkins.

The next step after Continuous Integration is performing automated testing. Automated testing speeds up the process of development and testing. In DevOps, the operations team must be aware of what changes are being implemented by the development team. Automated testing helps with this communication. Automated testing generates reports and graphs that help the team identify issues and bugs in the build.

The tools used at this stage must also let the operations team have a clear view of the build changes and testing output. This will smooth the next stages for both teams. Some popularly used tools for automated testing are Bamboo, Bitbucket, and Capture for JIRA.

4. Deploy

At this phase, the changes are deployed in production environments. The tools used at this phase should have a release dashboard where teams should be able to review all the changes made to the software. Test results, and other deployment information. The dashboard should be able to give the exact status of the build to the team and full visibility of all branches, builds, pull requests, and deployment warnings. Some popularly used tools in this phase are JIRA Software, Rally, and TFS.

Automating the deployment process saves time and money compared to manual deployment. Developers automate deployments to the lowest-level environment first to test the output. This practice enables them to identify the differences between the environments and provides them with a list of tasks for standardizing them. Some popular tools such as Puppet and Chef are used for automated deployments. Developers also use Puppet or Chef with HipChat to control deployments from chat rooms.

5. Operate

This is the phase where developers monitor application and server performance. Automated monitoring of application and server performance helps developers to track errors early and enhance applications. Tools that are capable of monitoring and tracing data about the application and environment are continuously needed at this phase. Some popular tools used in this phase are New Relic, Splunk, and Nagios. The tools should also be able to integrate with the group chat client so that developers get the appropriate messages and alerts instantly. Some other popular tools are BigPanda, HipChat, HostedGraphite, Pager Duty, and Pingdom.

Another important step in this phase is communication and swarming between different teams. Chatting tools play an important role in this task.

Different teams can communicate using chat tools and dedicated rooms to discuss and fix issues quickly. The chat tool should be able to integrate with the monitoring tools so that the teams can get all the alerts and communicate accordingly. Some popularly used tools for this task are BigPanda, DataDog, HipChat, New Relic, Pager Duty, and StatusPage.

The next step is incident, change, and problem tracking. The tools used for this purpose should be able to monitor incidents, changes, and issues. This will help developers to identify and fix issues faster. Commonly used tools for this task are JIRA Service Desk and JIRA Software.

6. Continuous feedback

Customer feedback is an integral part of the software development life cycle. A new feature can be added to the application or an outdated feature can be rolled back; all is dependent on customer feedback. Tools that can integrate the chat tool with the favorite survey platform are used for gathering and replying to customer feedback. Considering the popularity of social media, they can also be integrated with chat for real-time feedback. Some popularly used tools in this phase are GetFeedback, HipChat, JIRA Service Desk, Pendo, SurveyMonkey, and Hootsuite.