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There are many benefits that organizations with successful DevOps practices.

Continuous delivery pipelines will enable teams to deploy more code, more frequently, and with fewer errors. DevOps services also means faster feature releases, a more stable platform, reduced development costs, and increased efficiency.

But how do you access these benefits?  What tools can DevOps teams use to automate development processes and reduce the manual effort associated with building, testing and deploying software?

Here is a selection of the top DevOps tools, favored by the Cloudreach technical community around the world:

Hashicorp Vault

With the massive shift to remote working that we’ve seen, security is more important than ever. Vault helps us be agile while still keeping security a top priority within our team.

GitHub Actions

Working with GitHub actions has been an absolute dream. The tight integration with our source management means our feedback loops are as fast as ever, enabling us to live the dream of ‘automate everything’.

Jenkins

One of the greatest orchestration tools (if not the best). It’s open-source and has massive support from the community. 1000+ plugins means it can be integrated with any tool from the DevOps landscape. It works on any platform and it’s easy to customize. There is also Jenkins X which is cloud-based and runs on Kubernetes

Sonarqube

Code quality and analysis tools. Has coverage for all the popular programming languages and more. It emphasizes the idea of failing fast as it helps you with the early detection of bugs and alerts developers to fix them before rolling to production. It can be integrated into most IDEs where you can get alerts on the fly or have it as a web dashboard where you can customize it for different projects/clients with the RBAC model. It can cover code standards, duplications, unit tests, code complexity, comments, and, more recently, security tests (highlights code vulnerabilities). Reports are based on sets of rules based on each programming language standards, however, it allows you to create custom sets as well in case there are more specific areas you require coverage in

Nexus

A repository manager where you can collect and manage code artifacts (think of them as libraries). IT makes it easier to distribute your software and codebuilds within the developer teams. The two main advantages of Nexus are:

    •  you have your managed central source for dependencies and you do not have to actively search for them. You can use it together with tools like Maven, Gradle, Ant etc. (build automation tools) which can be used for compiling source code, packaging binaries and dependencies, as well as run automated tests
    • you can avoid using external libraries that could potentially include security vulnerabilities or license risks (it provides library scanning for potential vulnerabilities.

Ansible

Configuration management and application deployment made easy. It’s agentless and uses YAML for its syntax. Easy to learn by anyone. It has loads of modules for automating IaC with great community support. You can create custom modules for any specific scenarios

Docker

Create your own isolated development environment with your choice of tools and application stacks in a container. It can run on any platform and it enables the capability of having ephemeral environments which facilitate productivity due to the fact that all application builds and deployments happen on a clean environment.

Elastic stack

It’s composed of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.  Monitoring, aggregation, analysis, and visualization in one go. It covers a critical part of the DevOps spectrum as it allows you to find any faults in your system, gather metrics, and gives you insight into building a future-proof system. You get the option to use it as a managed service on any of the main CSPs or you can manage your own. It has comprehensive documentation for any kind of setups.

ArgoCD

Deploy your applications the GitOps way and treat your repository as a real source of truth with integrated lifecycle management and automated healing from configuration drift.

GitLab

 Having a single source of truth for my source code and an execution/deployment pipeline in one integrated tool is like all my developer dream come true. Add an issue tracker to it and you’re good to go. With some additional pipeline configuration, you can achieve some great possibilities like deploying different environments (dev, test, stage, prod) out of a single pipeline.

Terraform

 It is well known and the de facto standard tool of a choice for Infrastructure as Code. What is less known, is that you can power all your deployments and application configurations out of a single code base. Using additional terraform providers, you can trigger your application logic, perform setup or hardening of your databases, create users, and all you actually need to do without creating additional shell scripts.

make

A few years ago make became the de-facto tool to build binaries and later to automate any kind of user actions to package and deploy artifacts.

Earthly

A new kid on the block that combines power of make and docker to build containers and artifacts using containers. 

Concourse

An enterprise-ready  CI/CD tool with the power of open-source. With its vintage-styled UI and the powerful target-based CLI tool, Concourse eases the management of multiple pipelines for more than a team. The jobs spin up containers of the resource defined in the pipeline, for any kind of tasks. Concourse resource-types exist for plenty of integrations, and it natively supports credentials management with Hashicorp Vault.

Docker Compose

A great tool to run multi-container applications. Really great for testing multi-container applications locally. Allows to define required containers in YAML and then start/stop them with a single command.

Liquibase

If we think about VCS we usually think about tools like Git / Mercurial / SVN. Liquibase is a great tool that allows versioning of database schema changes/schema evolution.

Packer

A great tool from HashiCorp that allows building custom machine images. Usually used by enterprises to pre-install required software and harden machine images. Works really great with configuration management tools like Ansible.

Test Kitchen/Inspec

Test Kitchen is an integration testing tool that enables us to use the Inspec framework to verify our Chef/CINC cookbooks. With this combination of tooling we can test across a range of Operating Systems and Cloud Service Providers to deliver confidence in the code we use to manage our customers environments. 

VSCode Live-Share

LiveShare is an extension for Visual Studio Code, which allows you to have multi-user collaborative input on a codebase. It’s been a huge enabler for our team during COVID-19, allowing us to pair program easily whilst remote. Also, when sharing, any files included in the host’s .gitignore file are not included in the shared directory, which means that secrets can be easily obfuscated from those you are collaborating with. 

GCP Cloud Build

Gone are the days for Google Cloud professionals to rummage through their groovy expertise just to get a CI/CD pipeline going! Cloud Build makes the entire process seamless, rapid and also integrates well with Container Registry to provide a much more lightweight experience.

Kaniko

This tool from Google allows you to build a docker image without a docker daemon and thus making it a good candidate for building docker images inside a docker (e.g inside Kubernetes cluster).

Want to learn more about how Cloudreach can help your organization adopt DevOps so that you can reap the full benefits of public cloud ? Discover how our new DevOps offering provides support across architecture, development, and operations to help enable simple and scalable cloud transformation in your organization.