Top DevOps Tools to Streamline Software Delivery

Introduction

DevOps is a set of practices that brings development and operations teams together to improve collaboration and automate processes. The main goal of DevOps is to enable faster and more reliable software releases. Adopting DevOps and utilizing specialized tools can provide a number of benefits including:

• Shortened development cycles and faster time to market - New features and fixes can be developed and released much quicker.
• Improved deployment frequency and recovery - Deployments can happen multiple times a day without errors or downtime.
• Higher application quality and reduced bugs - Automated testing finds issues early.
• Better visibility and monitoring - Analytics provide insights into system health and usage.
• Enhanced team collaboration and productivity - Breaking down silos between teams enables better cooperation.

This post covers some of the most popular DevOps tools across key categories like continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure automation, monitoring, and collaboration. Investing in these types of devops tools can help streamline development workflows, accelerate delivery, and improve reliability.

The tools below represent leading options to consider when building a DevOps toolkit. While DevHunt does not provide or endorse any specific tools, its platform allows developers to highlight and get feedback on the tools they find most valuable.

Continuous Integration and Delivery

CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) is a core DevOps practice that involves automating builds, tests, and deployments. CI/CD enables frequent, rapid releases by standardizing these pipelines. Some top CI/CD tools include:

• Jenkins - Open source automation server for CI/CD pipelines
• CircleCI - SaaS platform for CI/CD built on containers
• TravisCI - Hosted CI/CD service integrated with GitHub
• GitLab - Integrated DevOps platform with built-in CI/CD
• AWS CodePipeline - CI/CD managed service on AWS
• Azure Pipelines - Microsoft's cloud-based CI/CD solution
• GitHub Actions - CI/CD workflows natively within GitHub
• Bamboo - On-prem CI/CD server from Atlassian
• TeamCity - CI/CD tool with meta-runner agents

When evaluating CI/CD tools, key factors to consider include:

• Configuration and setup - Is it configurable via code or UI workflows?
• Integration - Does it integrate with your source control, infrastructure, etc.?
• Scaling - Can it handle increases in repos, tests, users, etc.?
• Extensibility - Is there a robust plugin ecosystem or API?
• Pricing - Is there a free tier or open source option?

Jenkins

Jenkins is the most widely used open source CI/CD platform. It is extremely customizable via plugins and can integrate with practically any tool in the development ecosystem. Jenkins is self-hosted and requires managing your own infrastructure. The highly flexible workflows come at the cost of a steep learning curve for new users.

CircleCI

CircleCI is a popular SaaS CI/CD tool that uses YAML configuration files to define builds and deployments. It features automatic parallelism to speed up pipelines and seamlessly integrates with GitHub or Bitbucket. CircleCI focuses on containerization and enables configuring orbs to reuse pipeline steps. The free tier is limited to one concurrent job, with paid tiers for more resources.

Infrastructure Automation

Infrastructure automation refers to programmatically provisioning and configuring infrastructure resources using code instead of manual processes. This is often referred to as "infrastructure as code". The two main approaches are:

• Declarative (desired state) - These tools use descriptive configuration files to define the desired end state. Terraform and CloudFormation work this way.
• Imperative (step-by-step) - These tools use scripts and playbooks that specify exact commands to execute in sequence. Ansible and SaltStack work this way.

Leading infrastructure automation tools include:

• Terraform - Declarative, codifies APIs into configuration files
• Ansible - Imperative, uses YAML playbooks executed over SSH
• Chef - Imperative, relies on recipes and cookbooks
• Puppet - Declarative, uses manifests to define resources
• CloudFormation - Declarative, infrastructure as code for AWS
• Pulumi - Declarative, supports TypeScript/Python/Go langs
• SaltStack - Imperative, uses highstate data files

Terraform

Terraform from HashiCorp is a declarative infrastructure as code tool that codifies APIs into descriptive configuration files. It supports provisioning infrastructure across public and private clouds. Terraform promotes immutable infrastructure and is open source, making it popular for multi-cloud deployments.

Ansible

Ansible uses YAML playbooks to define configuration tasks and relies on SSH to execute them on nodes. It is agentless and ideal for orchestrating deployments and application environments. Ansible is easy to learn compared to alternatives like Chef or Puppet and has a large open source community.

Monitoring and Observability

Monitoring tools provide visibility into systems, applications, and business metrics. Observability refers to the ability to understand internal states based on external outputs. Popular monitoring and observability tools include:

• Datadog - SaaS monitoring and analytics platform
• New Relic - Performance monitoring SaaS
• Grafana - Open source analytics and dashboards
• Prometheus - Open source systems monitoring
• Splunk - Analytics for machine data
• Elastic Stack - Open source monitoring based on Elasticsearch
• Dynatrace - Performance monitoring with APM
• AppDynamics - Performance monitoring and APM
• Sumo Logic - Analytics and insights for logs

Key capabilities to evaluate include metrics, tracing, and logs ingestion, dashboarding, anomaly detection, and alerting. Open source tools like Prometheus and Grafana provide powerful analytics on a flexible platform. SaaS tools like Datadog offer turnkey solutions including intelligent alerting.

Datadog

Datadog is a leading SaaS monitoring and analytics platform that ingests metrics, events, and logs from servers, databases, tools, and applications. It includes out-of-the-box dashboards, anomaly detection algorithms, and robust collaboration features for resolving incidents quickly. Datadog's APM provides distributed tracing for visualizing request flows across microservices.

Grafana

Grafana is an open source analytics and monitoring solution. It connects to data sources like Prometheus, Graphite, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. Grafana allows building custom dashboards with graphs, gauges, and tables to visualize metrics and logs for deeper insights. An ecosystem of plugins extends Grafana's functionality.

Collaboration and ChatOps

Collaboration is essential to increase empathy between teams and encourage a DevOps culture. ChatOps enables bringing tools and automation directly into team chat platforms for streamlined workflows. Popular team chat and collaboration tools include:

• Slack - Leading team collaboration app with robust integrations
• Microsoft Teams - Collaboration and communication hub for Microsoft stack
• Discord - Voice, video, and text chat optimized for communities
• Mattermost - Open source, self-hosted Slack alternative
• Rocketchat - Free, open source team chat solution
• Zulip - Threaded team chat for improved workflows
• Twist - Asynchronous team communication from Doist

Key features to compare include integrations, automation capabilities, notifications, search, threads, and ease of use. Integrating these tools with workflows improves communication, breaks down silos, and increases efficiency.

Slack

Slack is the leading team collaboration app with robust integrations via its API. A strong ecosystem of third-party apps enhances Slack with automation, productivity, and utility features. Channels organize conversations across topics, teams, and projects. Slack facilitates ChatOps workflows and is widely adopted by engineering teams.

Discord

Originally built for gaming communities, Discord has low-latency voice and video channels for communication. Servers are organized into topic-based channels. Bots can be configured to interact with users via webhooks. While free for most use cases, Discord offers premium tiers with advanced features for larger communities.

Conclusion

The right devops tools empower teams to deliver higher quality software faster. This overview covered leading options across core DevOps capabilities like CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and collaboration. Carefully evaluating integrations, usability, community support, and pricing is key to building an effective toolkit. The DevHunt community highlights new and innovative developer tools daily - check it out to explore options and upvote your favorites. Adopting the tools and practices outlined here can help streamline your workflows, accelerate delivery, and unlock innovation.