DevOps Automation Tools

DevOps Automation Tools

The process of software development and delivery has transformed tremendously in the past few years to be more agile, rapid, and accurate because of the constant advancement in technologies. One such technology responsible for this transition of development processes is DevOps.

DevOps, with its collaborative practices, helps enterprises incorporate consistency, reliability, speed, and scalability into the existing SDLC and enhance their productivity. However, these practices, from continuous integration and testing to continuous deployment and monitoring, are significantly dependent on automation, as it helps ensure frequent and timely deliveries across platforms, allows effortless scaling of environments, and prevents repetitive and redundant tasks. Moreover, allows the workforce to focus on critical and complex tasks that cannot be automated.

Automation, in short, is a critical aspect of DevOps that makes it more beneficial and efficient.

Hence, in this article, we have highlighted some of the most important DevOps Automation Tools that simplify the DevOps lifecycle and make it agile, efficient, and reliable.

But, before we dive into our list of the best DevOps Automation Tools, let us first understand what is DevOps Automation.

What is DevOps Automation?

Introduced to help organizations accelerate DevOps implementation, DevOps automation helps automate a wide range of tedious and complicated processes in software development and infrastructure to increase their accuracy, speed, reliability, efficiency, and consistency.

It is an important aspect of DevOps that allows teams to perform tasks with reduced human assistance, enabling them to focus on more critical and integral tasks. Moreover, DevOps automation improves the feedback loops between operations and development teams and allows them to deploy iterative updates to the application in production faster.

Hence, with the help of DevOps automation teams can increase the number of deliveries, as it allows them to easily discover and troubleshoot problems and deliver quality products and features to the end-users.

Best DevOps Automation Tools

DevOps Automation tools are an essential means for accomplishing efficiency between teams as well as prioritizing things like continuous delivery and testing. However, DevOps automation is evolving continuously, which has resulted in the introduction of miscellaneous automation tools in the market, which has made deciding and selecting the right set of tools an ever-growing challenge.

Therefore, to help you overcome this challenge, we are here with a list of some of the best DevOps Automation Tools to meet every specific DevOps requirement.

• Puppet: A powerful and open-source infrastructure automation and delivery tool, Puppet helps centralize and automate the configuration management procedure. Developed by Puppet Labs, this system management tool eliminates manual work for the software delivery process by automating critical manual tasks and simplifying them by abstracting critical configuration details across different OS and technology platforms. Other important features include:
• Offers intelligent orchestration and visual workflows.
• Performs real-time context-aware reporting.
• Defines and continually enforces infrastructure.
• Helps model and manage the entire environment.
• Compatible with platforms that support Ruby, like Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS X, etc.
• Docker: Docker is an open-source DevOps technology suite for developing, shipping, and running applications in a loosely isolated environment called a container. It allows users to assemble apps from components and work collaboratively, ensuring fast consistent delivery.
  • Container versioning.
  • Flexible image management.
  • Easy and faster configuration.
  • Offers improved and seamless portability.
  • Automatically builds a container based on application source code.
  • Eliminates conflicts and enhances security by isolating apps in containers.
• Jenkins: A free and open-source automation server, Jenkins allows continuous integration and continuous delivery by automating software development like build, testing, and deployment. It is one of the most efficient software deploy tools as it easily integrates project changes by finding issues quickly. Moreover, this platform-agnostic, self-contained Java-based program can run with packages for Windows, Mac OS, and Unix-like operating systems. Other prominent features of Jenkins include:
  • Requires little maintenance.
  • Has a built-in GUI tool for easy updates.
  • Can be easily set up and configured via web interfaces.
  • Increases concurrency by distributing tasks across multiple machines.
  • Offers hundreds of plugins to support software build and testing.
• Chef: An open-source, ruby-based configuration management tool Chef is used to automate infrastructure provisioning. Chef can be integrated with multiple Cloud-based platforms and supports platforms like Microsoft Windows, RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris, etc. This Cloud-based system eases out complex tasks and performs automation to help organizations achieve speed, scale, and consistency.
  • Accelerate Cloud adoption.
  • Helps effectively manage data centers, Cloud servers, storage, and software.
  • Allows hassle-free multiple Cloud environments management.
  • Maintains high availability.
  • Offers excellent integration with Cloud.
• Ansible: Another prominent, open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool that uses infrastructure as code to make configuration management simple, reliable, consistent, and quick. Ansible allows teams to orchestrate the entire application environment and customize it based on the requirements. Components that further make this tool a popular DevOps automation tool include:
  • An easy and simple way for automating the entire application lifecycle.
  • Scales automation and speeds up productivity.
  • Eliminates repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategic work.
  • Helps to avoid complexity in the software development process.
  • Ideal tool for complex deployment management.
  • Handles configuration management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task execution, network automation, and multi-node orchestration.
• Terraform: Developed by HashiCorp, Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure as a Code software tool that enables organizations to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. This tool offers a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of Cloud services and codifies Cloud APIs into declarative configuration files. Moreover, Terraform can easily manage infrastructures including low-level components like computing instances, storage, and networking, and high-level components like DNS entries, SaaS features, etc. Some of its other prominent features are:
  • Offer super portability.
  • Ease of full-stack deployment.
  • Maintains the state of infrastructure using state files.
  • Helps facilitate public and private Cloud infrastructure provisioning.
  • Automatically downloads and installs community or partner modules from the registry.
  • Safely and predictably makes infrastructure changes.
  • Keeps track of metadata and improves performance for large infrastructures.
• Vagrant: Another prominent open-source DevOps Automation tool by HashiCorp, Vagrant helps build, configure, and maintain portable, lightweight, and reproducible virtual software development environments. Compatible with Mac, Linux, Windows, and more, this tool offers an easy-to-use workflow and focuses on automation. Moreover, it lowers development environment setup time and increases production parity.
  • Easily integrates with existing configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Salt.
  • Offers plugins that support Cloud provisioning, Cloud management tools, and Docker.
  • Creates a single file for projects to describe the type of machine and software users want to install.
  • Mirrors production environments by providing the same operating system, packages, users, and configurations, which helps reduce the cost of fixing a bug.
  • Offers users flexibility to use their favorite editor, IDE, and browser.
• Prometheus: Originally developed by SoundCloud, Prometheus is an open-source, lightweight system monitoring and alerting toolkit that supports Linux servers and container monitoring. It helps organizations record real-time metrics in a time-series database, with flexible queries and real-time alerting. Prometheus has a wide range of service discovery options to find your services and start retrieving metric data from them.
  • Helps developers monitor highly dynamic container environments.
  • Offers great visualizations.
  • Allows easy integration with system statistics, Docker, HAProxy, StatsD, and JMX metrics.
  • Time series are stored in memory and local disk.
  • Offers easy-to-implement custom libraries.
  • Provides a variety of service discovery options for discovering scrape targets, including Kubernetes, Consul, etc.
• Embold: A static code analysis tool, Embold helps identify critical code issues before they become roadblocks through constant analysis and diagnosis to transform and sustain software efficiently. Moreover, it is an intelligent, multi-dimensional analyzer that enables organizations to understand the status of the software quality at a glance.
  • Uses AI and Machine Learning technologies to immediately prioritize issues, suggest ways to best solve them, and re-factor software where necessary.
  • Its unique anti-pattern detection prevents the compounding of unmaintainable code.
  • Offers deeper and faster checks than standard code editors.
  • It seamlessly integrates with Github, Bitbucket, Azure, and Git and plugins available for Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.
  • Identifies issues that impact software stability, robustness, security, and maintainability.
• QuerySurge: QuerySurge is a smart Data Testing solution for automating data validation and testing Big Data, Data Warehouses, and Business Intelligence Reports. It is the first full DevOps solution for continuous data testing that seamlessly integrates with the DevOps pipeline and dramatically increases data validation coverage. Some of the other features that make this tool a popular choice among DevOps teams are:
  • Improves data quality at speed.
  • Continuously detect data issues in the delivery pipeline.
  • Validate all data faster.
  • Efficiently resolves test automation issues.
  • Can integrate with most Data Integration/ETL solutions, Build/Configuration solutions, and QA/ Test Management solutions.
  • Offers Data Analytics Dashboard & Data Intelligence Reports to improve data analysis.
  • Integrates with leading Test Management Solutions.
• Kubernetes: Also known as K8, Kubernetes an open-source system for automating manual processes involved in deployment, scaling, and managing containerized applications. Originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, this container orchestration platform consistently delivers complex applications running on clusters of hundreds to thousands of individual servers. Moreover, organizations can use this tool to manage containerized applications in various types of physical, virtual, and Cloud environments.
  • Automates scheduling, rollouts, and rollback.
  • Offers environment consistency for development, testing, and production.
  • Allows application-centric management.
  • Provides a higher density of resource utilization
  • Offers horizontal scaling and load balancing.
  • It has self-healing capabilities.
  • It helps build an auto-scalable infrastructure, which is loosely coupled so that each component can act as a separate unit.
• Git: A free and open-source distributed version control system, Git is used for source code management in software development and has features like cheap local branching, convenient staging areas, and multiple workflows. Designed to handle small to very large projects with speed and efficiency, it helps teams track changes in the source code, enabling them to work together on non-linear development.
  • Supports non-linear development through its thousands of parallel branches.
  • Makes branching easier.
  • This scalable and free tool supports collaboration.
  • Allows distributed development, which helps create a more reliable environment.
  • Its capabilities like feature branches, distributed development, and pull requests facilitate an agile workflow and faster release cycle.
• Gradle: An incredibly versatile, flexible, and reliable build tool in the DevOps tool stack, Gradle is an open-source build automation tool designed to build software of any type. Built on the concepts of Apache Ant and Apache Maven, Gradle allows developers to write code in any popular languages like Python, C++, and Java, and most of the popular IDEs such as Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and Netbeans support it. Moreover Gradle:
  • Supports dependency management.
  • Provides very scalable and high-performance builds.
  • Supports project structures that consist of more than one project to build deliverables.
  • Offers rich API and mature ecosystem of plugins and integrations to automate, model, integrate, and systematize delivery.
  • Reduces project development time and increases productivity.
• Vault: Vault is a popular, open-source DevOps tool used to securely store, manage, and control access to sensitive information in modern application architectures using UI, CLI, or HTTP API and data encryption. Another product of HashiCorp, Vault helps organizations securely access secrets such as database credentials, service-oriented architecture communication credentials, API keys for external services, and more. Other prominent capabilities of Vault include:
  • Supports most of the major Cloud platforms and critical services commonly found on-premises, such as LDAP.
  • Centralizes and automates security controls.
  • Helps drive improvements to antiquated policies and procedures.
  • Centralizes critical security functions through identity management, secrets management, PKI certificates, and encryption.
  • Can be used to generate secrets on-demand.
  • Offers built-in support for secret revocation, which assists in key rolling or/and locking down systems in the case of an intrusion.
• New Relic: A powerful Cloud-based application performance monitoring (APM) tool for DevOps, New Relic offers real-time insights about the running applications' performance. It supports monitoring of Php, Ruby, Java, NodeJS, among other applications, and is used to gain end-to-end visibility across customer experience and dynamic infrastructure. With the help of this tool, organizations can be alert about application downtime and quickly fix it before issues are encountered by the users.
  • It is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for performance and availability monitoring.
  • Performs key business transaction monitoring, synthetic monitoring, external services performance monitoring, and errors monitoring.
  • End-to-end user monitoring through browser support.
  • Offers necessary alerts and notifications.
  • Native integration with third-party tools such as Slack and PagerDuty.
• Splunk: A powerful software platform, Splunk helps team search, analyze and visualize machine-generated data gathered from various sources like websites, applications, sensors, devices, etc. This next-generation monitoring and analytics solution makes gathered data more accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone and delivers operational intelligence to the teams.
  • Ingests a variety of data formats like JSON, XML, and unstructured machine data like web and application logs.
  • Performs data indexing for faster searching and querying on different conditions.
  • Provides necessary alters using trigger emails or RSS feeds.
  • Uses data searching to create metrics, predict future trends and identify patterns in the data.
  • Helps organization be more productive, competitive, and secure.
  • Offers data drive analytics with actionable insights.
• Graphite: Graphite is a free, open-source enterprise-ready monitoring tool for real-time computer system performance monitoring and graphing for querying, transforming, and combining time-series metrics. This tool helps teams convert machine-generated data into graphical representations like on-demand graphs and renders the available data into dashboards and graphs for easy deployment onto other applications or webpages.
  • Simplifies storing, retrieving, sharing, and visualizing time-series data.
  • Helps store numeric time-series data.
  • Renders graph of the time-series data on demand.
  • An agile tool with modular and scaling architecture.
  • Monitor infrastructure-level metrics, like CPU, memory, i/o utilization, network throughput, and latency, etc.
  • Can integrate with Grafana, Logstash, Nagios, Windows Server, and Redash.
  • Offers event tracking.
  • Rolling aggregation makes storage manageable.
  • Uses Whisper, a simple database library, for storing time-series data.
• OverOps: A continuous reliability solution, OverOps helps enterprises ensure rapid code changes do not impact software performance and customer experience. This tool allows teams to identify critical and unidentified issues in the application and prevent bad releases from being deployed. OverOps, in short, detects new and increasing issues, errors, anomalies, and regressions from the running applications directly and provides the true root cause for each. Some of its major features are:
  • Automates root cause identification.
  • Provides anomalies alerts.
  • User access management.
  • CI/CD monitoring.
  • Integrates with JIRA & ServiceNow.
  • Helps organizations with risk assessments, error detections, root-cause analysis, problem prioritization, and more.
  • Provides quick and flexible deployment and enterprise-grade security.
• Consul: An open-source DevOps Automation tool by HashiCorp, Consul is a widely available tool used for automating network configurations, discovering services, and enabling secure connectivity across any Cloud or runtime. This service discovery and configuration tool is scalable and distributed and can integrate with Terraform, Rancher, Traefik, Netdata, and Nomad. Its prominent features include Service Discovery, Health Checking, and Multi Datacenter.
  • Removes internal load balancers.
  • Provides a robust API.
  • Uses DNS or HTTP to easily find services applications depend upon.
  • Utilizes hierarchical key or value store for dynamic configuration.
  • Offers support for multiple data centers.
  • Provides a great service discovery infrastructure.
• Amixr - Incident Management: A Software as a Services (SaaS) platform for incident management, Amixr allows organizations to optimize channels, recipients, and content to increase the speed of incident response and team focus. Designed to help to build reliable systems through custom alert rendering, on-call schedules, escalations, automatic grouping, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Moreover, Amixr can seamlessly integrate with Slack, New Relic, Grafana, Datadog, Pingdom, and more.
  • It is a developer-friendly, on-call management solution.
  • A type of Monitoring Aggregation tool that offers brilliant Slack integration.
  • Multi-Channel delivery (Phone calls, SMS, Telegram, etc.)
  • Helps improve reliability and performance.
  • Ensures reliability through guaranteed SLA and carefully monitored multi-cloud infrastructure.
  • Easy and fast integration with other platforms.
  • Helps collect incidents from monitoring systems.
  • Analyzes historical data and records autopsies.

Conclusion:

In this tech-savvy and fast-pacing world, DevOps automation tools enabled enterprises to cater to the fast-growing consumer demand for rapid and agile delivery of software with remarkable, innovative, and unique features and unparalleled performance. Moreover, these tools helped increase collaboration, enhanced operational efficiency, and established a seamless flow across the value chain.

Considering the benefits offered by these tools, we can conclude that the future of DevOps Automation will be promising and extremely productive.