DevOps Open Source Popular Tools

What is DevOps ?

DevOps (a portmanteau of “development” and “operations”) is the combination of practices and tools designed to increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

In simple terms, DevOps is about removing the barriers between traditionally siloed teams, development and operations. Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams work together across the entire software application life cycle, from development and test through deployment to operations.

DevOps Stages

The DevOps process flow is all about agility and automation. Each phase in the DevOps lifecycle focuses on closing the loop between development and operations and driving production through continuous development, integration, testing, monitoring and feedback, delivery, and deployment.

1. Development
2. Integration
3. Testing
4. Monitoring and feedback
5. Delivery
6. Deployment
7. Operations

1. Development — Continuous development is an umbrella term that describes the iterative process for developing software to be delivered to customers. It involves continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. By implementing a continuous development strategy and its associated sub-strategies, businesses can achieve faster delivery of new features or products that are of higher quality and lower risk, without running into significantly bandwidth barriers.

2. Integration — Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice commonly applied in the DevOps process flow. Developers regularly merge their code changes into a shared repository where those updates are automatically tested. Continuous integration ensures the most up-to-date and validated code is always readily available to developers. CI helps prevent costly delays in development by allowing multiple developers to work on the same source code with confidence, rather than waiting to integrate separate sections of code all at once on release day. This practice is a crucial component of the DevOps process flow, which aims to combine speed and agility with reliability and security.

3. Testing — Continuous testing is a verification process that allows developers to ensure the code actually works the way it was intended to in a live environment. Testing can surface bugs and particular aspects of the product that may need fixing or improvement, and can be pushed back to the development stages for continued improvement.

4. Monitoring and feedback — Throughout the development pipeline, your team should have measures in place for continuous monitoring and feedback of the products and systems. Again, the majority of the monitoring process should be automated to provide continuous feedback. This process allows IT operations to identify issues and notify developers in real time. Continuous feedback ensures higher security and system reliability as well as more agile responses when issues do arise.

5. Delivery — Continuous delivery (CD) is the next logical step from CI. Code changes are automatically built, tested, and packaged for release into production. The goal is to release updates to the users rapidly and sustainably. To do this, CD automates the release process (building on the automated testing in CI) so that new builds can be released at the click of a button.

6. Deployment — For the seasoned DevOps organization, continuous deployment may be the better option over CD. Continuous deployment is the fully automated version of CD with no human (i.e., manual) intervention necessary. In a continuous deployment process, every validated change is automatically released to users. This process eliminates the need for scheduled release days and accelerates the feedback loop. Smaller, more frequent releases allow developers to get user feedback quickly and address issues with more agility and accuracy. Continuous deployment is a great goal for a DevOps team, but it is best applied after the DevOps process has been ironed out. For continuous deployment to work well, organizations need to have a rigorous and reliable automated testing environment. If you’re not there yet, starting with CI and CD will help you get there.

7. Operations — All DevOps operations are based on the continuity with complete automation of the release process and allow the organization to accelerate the overall time to market continuingly. It is clear from the discussion that continuity is the critical factor in the DevOps in removing steps that often distract the development, take it longer to detect issues and produce a better version of the product after several months. With DevOps, we can make any software product more efficient and increase the overall count of interested customers in your product.

DevOps Tools -

DevOps isn’t just a cultural shift — it requires great tools to come to fruition. Below, we’ve pulled together a list of some of the most well-loved DevOps tools available today. But, throwing loads of money into fancy SaaS solutions can quickly gobble up the cloud budget. These DevOps tools all are open source, and enable everything from container builds and orchestration to microservices networking, configuration management, CI/CD automation, full-stack monitoring and more. Here are some of our favorite open source DevOps tools for 2021.

1. Git — Code, Build
2. Selenium — Test
3. Chef — Deploy, Operate
4. Docker — Build, Deploy, Operate
5. Kuberetes — Build, Deploy, Operate
6. Gradle — Build
7. Ansible — Deploy, Operate
8. Puppet — Deploy, Operate
9. eG Enterprise — Monitor
10. Jenkins — Build, Test, Deploy

1. Git — GitHub is arguably the most popular source control and software collaboration platform on the planet. The GitHub platform itself, based on Git, has seen some significant updates in the past few years. Most notable is the GitHub Actions capability. GitHub Actions enable software packages hosted on GitHub to accept inputs and trigger other processes. This could help automate some cool DevOps workflows within GitHub, such as code reviews, branch management or CI/CD processes — the combinations of possibilities here are endless. GitHub Actions are, essentially, YAML files hosted in GitHub repositories that leverage GitHub webhooks. Though this is more of a feature than an open-source tool, we feel it’s important to include here. Actions is free for public repositories with a limit of 100 actions.
2. Selenium Selenium is a free open source automated functional testing tool to test web applications. It is normally installed as a Firefox browser plugin and helps to record and playback of test scenarios. It is very easy to learn.
3. Chef Like the gourmet world, Chef is synonymous with the term recipes. It is a system and Cloud infrastructure, which automates an entire building, by deploying and managing infrastructure through short repeatable scripts, often termed as recipes. But the real power comes into play, when pluggable configuration modules are employed. Chef can be used to ease out complex tasks, perform automations, which can often prove to be heavy on resources, efforts and time.
4. Docker — With Docker, you can expect portability, which is made possible through its unique containerization technology, often found in self contained units. The tool consists of a Docker Engine, a lightweight runtime and packaging tool and Docker Hub, which is essentially a cloud based service application, encompassing the concept of application sharing and workflow automation.
5. Kuberetes —In a Kubernetes cluster, Kubelet acts as a bridge between the master and the nodes. It is the primary node agent that runs on each node and maintains a set of pods. Kubelet watches for PodSpecs via the Kubernetes API server and collects resource utilization statistics and pod and events status. Kubelet fetches individual container usage statistics from Docker’s Container Advisor (cAdvisor). But Kubelet also accepts PodSpecs provided through different mechanisms and ensures that the containers described in those PodSpecs are up and running. These aggregated pod resource usage statistics are exposed via a REST API.
6. Gradle — Gradle is an open source build-automation software that is used to automate building, testing, deployment of application code. Using build.gradle scripts you can automate the tasks — say for example copy files from one directory to another before the build even happens. Gradle is developed based on the principles of Apache Ant and Apache Maven work. Instead of using XML (as used by Maven), Gradle uses a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL).Gradle runs on the JVM and you must have a Java Development Kit (JDK) installed to use it. Many major IDEs — Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, and NetBeans — allow the import of Gradle builds and interacting with them.Targeted at accelerating developer productivity, Gradle helps Dev and DevOps teams build, automate and deliver better software, faster — from mobile apps to microservices.
7. Ansible — Ansible is all about automation. Ansible, an open source project sponsored by Red Hat, can be used to automate things like cloud provisioning, networking, deployment, configuration management and other tasks. Ansible has a simple yet effective architecture that is relatively easy to assemble — all you need is a text editor and command line. You describe your infrastructure in a text document and organize your desired states in a playbook. For an example in practice, see how OpenIO uses Ansible. “Ansible is our standard tool not only to deploy the OpenIO core, but also our WebUI, OIO-FS and all upcoming options,” writes Cédric Delgehier, Ops at OpenIO.
8. Puppet — Puppet is an open source configuration management tool to automate inspecting, delivering and managing the software across the complete development lifecycle with platform independence. It automates infrastructure management to deliver software quickly and securely. Puppet is used by 42% of businesses that use DevOps according to a RightScale DevOps survey.
9. eG Enterprise — Monitoring is a critical part of software development and deployment. Through all the stages of DevOps, from code build to test and commit to deploy DevOps teams need to understand the impact that their code will have on pre-production and production environments.
10. Jenkins — is one of the most popular open-source DevOps tools to support continuous integration and delivery through DevOps. It allows continuous integration and continuous delivery of projects, regardless of the platform users are working on with the help of various build and deployment pipelines. Jenkins can be integrated with several testing and deployment tools.