By Sujay Maheshwari, Co-founder and CEO, Cloudanix — Jul 11, 2020

DevOps Must Have Top 10 Tools For Collaboration around Cloud Workloads

Introduction

DevOps enables both the Software engineers and the CloudOps professionals to work as a team throughout the entire software development cycle. This cycle begins with the ideation and ends with production support. DevOps ensures involving Continuous Integration (CI) and Delivery (CD), popularly known as CI/ CD.

Earlier development and services were considered two distinct entities and thus interpreted as two different dimensions of a single software cycle. The principal aim behind the development of DevOps was to reduce production support time, improve communication, reduce the cost, and avoid deployment failures. DevOps usually take an interest in five major divisions, which are Communication, CI/CD, Configuration Management, Security & Monitoring, and Alerting.

In recent years, various attempts have been made to ensure the development of team collaborations using various improved DevOps tools.

List of Top 10 Tools for DevOps teams

Here we have listed some recently developed DevOps tools that might be beneficial for the readers who want to ensure team collaboration.

Slack

Docker

Jenkins

Vagrant

Sentry

GitHub

Ansible

Splunk Phantom

Nagios

Bitbucket

We all are aware of the advancements occurring in the various fields of technology. So why should the field of DevOps and team collaborations be lagging?

Slack

The one that tops our list is a 2013 invention. Within this small period, Slack has emerged as one of the top communication tools, ensuring efficient collaborations among the teams. This DevOps tool is considered one of the best armaments to overcome the restrictions laid upon technical organizations across the globe.

Using Slack makes sure that every team member of a technical team can achieve a clear perception of the workflow they are dealing with. The feature in Slack that attracts most users is the ability to collaborate using toolchains in the same domain of the communication process. To be more specific, if you are a slack user, then you can communicate with the other organizing members, while still being in a conveyance with them, using toolchains.

Docker

The next on our list is the tool that is emerging as the kernel of containerization. The inclination towards the use of Docker by most IT companies in recent years has become very clear. The user of Docker can enjoy some privileges, including secure packaging, establishing and running applications, and disregarding the environment. There are specified application containers that contain the source codes, supporting files, run time, system configuration files, and other necessary information required for the application to execute.

Using Docker allows you to access the application containers even for working in remote locations. Docker comes with an added financial advantage. With the use of Docker, many organizations have been able to reduce their expenditure on infrastructures. As per the statistical reports, every two out of 3 Docker using companies have been adopting the application just in 30 days of usage.

Jenkins

Jenkins provides the software project builders with an open-source continuous integration server. This serves as a complete cycle for the software projects to get completed. The center of attraction is the USP tool, with the help of which the developers can perform codes automatically in the repository. Apart from that, the developers can also run test codes, get the reports once the testing is completed.

Jenkins is one of the customer-friendly tools since it provides instant feedback. This helps the developer stay informed about any forthcoming spirit, which might lead to a broken build or might harm the same. Another feature of Jenkins is that we can control most of the tools and tasks involved in SDLC. This increases the involvement of the team members of the organization.

Vagrant

A vagrant is a tool that enables its users to manage and work with virtual machines in single progress. Using Vagrant saves a lot of time, for the team members can share the software running environment and can test the applications faster. There is no need for any configuration setup. Vagrant also ensures the similarity of the environment across the device of every developer. Thus the excuse of the runs-on-my machine can no longer interfere.

Sentry

Sentry is a popular error or bug detection DevOps tool among various enormous companies like Microsoft and Uber. Not only does Sentry supports languages such as Ruby, IOS, JavaScript., but it also has inbuilt SDKs that can be customized for supporting most of the languages and frameworks. We can use the Sentry for continuous scanning lines of code across the entire system. It also sends a notification in case there is an error or some other problem. Sentry highlights the problem and also provides solutions that can be implemented with a single click.

GitHub

GitHub was launched in the year 2000 and continues to be one of the topmost used DevOps tools for easy collaboration. Using GitHub enables developers to make rapid iterations of the code. Not only this, but it also sends notifications instantly to the other team members. In case there is any fault or error detected, there are immediate rollbacks that can be done to the previous versions within seconds.

Ansible

No doubt, there are various competitors of Ansible in the market. Some of them are Puppet and Chef. However, the feature that distinguishes Ansible from its competitors is how it offers an easier outlook and does not hog on the device’s resources in the background of the users. Ansible is mainly utilized to push recent changes within the existing system, and it can also configure a newly deployed machine. Ansible also adds to various financial advantages to the organization, such as lowering the cost of infrastructure and increasing the replication speed of scalability. These are the crucial reasons Ansible has emerged as one of the most favorite tools used by most IT companies.

Splunk Phantom

One of the prime concerns for any DevOps team is the security of the software. In such a scenario where security is a prominent issue, Phantom comes as a substantial help for the various developers. Phantom helps the developers to build a defensible infrastructure from the very initial stages of SLDC. The use of the Phantom tool enables us to collaborate in a centralized environment on an incident and gives us insight into the rising security threats. DevOps can also use the tool professionally as an option to mitigate such security risks instantly by using techniques such as file detonation, device quarantine, etc.

Nagios

Nagios is one of the monitoring tools which keeps all the tabs on the application servers and your overall business infrastructure. This tool is of substantial help for large organizations where there is countless circuitry (involving various routers, switches, servers, etc.) in the back-end. Nagios warns the user of any fault occurring in the back-end or any device that is failing. It also helps maintain a performance chart and keeps track of the trends to alert the user of a failure that might occur shortly.

Bitbucket

Bitbucket is a tool that was made to ensure the management of project code throughout the software development cycle. Though GitHub still ranks as the top repository, people are shifting to Bitbucket in recent years because of Bitbucket’s economically friendly feature. Bitbucket is of lower cost than GitHub; it also provides us with a private repository. This feature is attractive to the Bitbucket users, for the GitHub users can only access it via a paid plan. Though Bitbucket resembles the core functionality of GitHub, there are few features such as easy integration with Jira and Trello, CI/CD functionality, which distinguishes Bitbucket from the rest of the software project management tools.

Bonus 11th

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Conclusion

Various companies are adopting the above listed 10 DevOps tools across the globe in recent years. These tools help both the development and operation team members gain velocity and foster collaboration.