List of 8 Most Popular DevOps Tools for Streamlined Software Delivery in 2023-24

NovelVista

Last updated 19/05/2023

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We keep saying that DevOps is a culture. But what does that mean?

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and information-technology operations which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. But the question is, how can DevOps build a culture?

Well, when an organization decides to go DevOps, that’s kind of a 180-degree change of scenarios. You need to develop new practices, train your employees to follow the DevOps norms and since it’s a drastic change from the traditional methodology, it will take a great amount of time for your organization to adopt it. 

If this doesn’t look like a cultural shift, then what does?

If you walk through history, what changes do you see in the culture of the medieval time period, early modern time period, and today, as in the modern time period? That’s easy to answer. Their attire, their food habit, the way of communication, vehicles- everything is much evolved in the modern time period and is still evolving. So, what does an organization’s cultural change can bring? Yes, you guessed it right! It’s new DevOps tools and technologies that impact cultural change truly. And using the proper DevOps automation tools with a pinch of AI and ML can do the trick towards business transformation easily!

Here’s How you can do it:

Since DevOps is more of a cross-functional mode of working, people working under this culture prefer using a DevOps toolset as a toolchain that performs the following functions:

• Coding – code development and review, source code management tools, code merging
• Building – continuous integration tools, build status
• Testing – continuous testing tools that provide quick and timely feedback on business risks
• Packaging – artifact repository, application pre-deployment staging
• Releasing – change management, release approvals, release automation
• Configuring – infrastructure configuration and management, infrastructure as code tools
• Monitoring – applications performance monitoring, end-user experience

So, all you have to do is look out for tools that take care of all the metrics helping you bring the highest DevOps ROI.

Although, in the past few years a lot of DevOps tools have come on board that can help you in multitasking. Apart from Azure DevOps tools and AWS DevOps tools, we have this 30 best DevOps tools list right here that literally falls under the trends of 2023 - 2024 :

1. Slack
2. Docker
3. Jenkins
4. Git
5. Buddy
6. Snort
7. Nagios
8. Kubernetes
9. Querysurge
10. Basic Technologies
11. Testrail
12. Vagrant
13. Pagerduty
14. Prometheus
15. Ganglia
16. Splunk
17. Chef
18. SumoLogic
19. OverOps
20. Consul
21. Stackify Retrace
22. CFEngine
23. Artifactory
24. Capistrano
25. Monit
26. Supervisor
27. Ansible
28. Code Climate
29. Icinga
30. Juju

Top 8 Best DevOps Automation, Monitoring, & Testing Tools:

1. Slack:

Slack was launched in 2013 and is still ruling the DevOps world like a pro. Slack is the most commonly used DevOps tool used by most organizations till date. It is mostly used for effective communication. It allows developers to collaborate using toolchains in the same environment they are communicating with other maintenance and service members.

Key Features:

1. Public channels allow team members to communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). Public channels are open to everyone in the workspace.
2. Private channels allow for private conversations between smaller sub-groups. These private channels can be used to organize large teams.
3. Direct messages allow users to send private messages to specific users rather than a group of people. Direct messages can include up to nine people. Once started, a direct message group can be converted into a private channel.
4. Slack integrates with many third-party services and also supports community-built integrations. Major integrations include services such as Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Box, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, Crashlytics, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk, and Zapier. In December 2015, Slack launched its software application ("app") directory, consisting of over 150 integrations that users can install.
5. Slack provides an application programming interface (API) for users to create applications and automate processes, such as sending automatic notifications based on human input, sending alerts on specified conditions, and automatically creating internal support tickets. Slack's API has been noted for its compatibility with many types of applications, frameworks, and services.

2. Docker:

Just like Slack, Docker too was launched in 2013 and didn’t stop its journey there, only continued to evolve. Docker is a set of Platform as a Service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels. All containers are run by a single operating system kernel and therefore use fewer resources than virtual machines. Research firm Forrester cited Docker as a leader in the enterprise container platform category for Q4 2018.

Key Features:

1. CaaS Ready platform running with built-in orchestration
2. Flexible image management with a private registry to store, manage images and configure image caches
3. Isolates apps in containers to eliminate conflicts for enhancing security
4. It makes distributed development possible
5. Helps in dependency management
6.  Integrates with Jenkins and Bamboo, too. If you use it together with one of these automation servers, you can further improve your delivery workflow.

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3. Jenkins:

Jenkins is a free and open-source automation server that helps to automate the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery. In fact, it is the best DevOps Testing tool you can ever find! Jenkins is a server-based system that runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat. It supports version control tools, including AccuRev, CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Perforce, ClearCase, and RTC, and can execute Apache Ant, Apache Maven, and sbt based projects as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands. The creator of Jenkins is Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Also, as a cherry on top, Jenkins is free software too!

Key Features:

1. Increases the scale of automation
2. Has a built-in GUI tool for easy updates.
3. Offers 400 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
4. It is a Java-based program ready to run with Operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX
5. Supports continuous integration and continuous delivery
6. Can easily be set up and configured via the web interface
7. Can distribute tasks across multiple machines thereby increasing concurrency.

4. Git:

This one is the oldest, yet the most efficient DevOps monitoring tool. Created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for the development of the Linux Kernel, Git has become one of the most adored DevOps tools across the globe over the years. Git is a distributed version control system for tracking changes in source code during software development. It is designed for coordinating work among programmers, but it can be used to track changes in any set of files. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

Key Features:

1. Lets you save different versions of your source code and return to a previous version when necessary.
2. Lets you create separate branches and merge new features only when they’re ready to go.
3. The two best online Git repo hosting services GitHub and Bitbucket have amazing integrations.

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5. Buddy:

Buddy is a web-based and self-hosted continuous integration and delivery software for Git developers that can be used to build, test, and deploy web sites and applications with code from GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. It employs Docker containers with pre-installed languages and frameworks for builds, alongside DevOps, monitoring, and notification actions. Buddy’s configuration is performed by arranging predefined actions into sequences called pipelines. Pipelines can be triggered automatically on a push to a branch, manually, or recurrently. Actions include Docker-based builds, deployment to FTP/SFTP and IaaS services, delivery to version control, SSH scripts, website monitoring, and conditional notifications. Contrary to other CI tools like Jenkins or Travis CI, Buddy does not use YAML files to describe the process. 

Key Features:

1. 15-minute configuration in clear & telling UI/UX
2. Lightning-fast deployments based on changesets
3. Builds are run in isolated containers with cached dependencies
4. Supports all popular languages, frameworks & task managers
5. Dedicated roster of Docker/Kubernetes actions
6. Integrates with AWS, Google, DigitalOcean, Azure, Shopify, WordPress & more
7. Supports parallelism & YAML configuration

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6. Snort:

This one entered Infoworld’s open source hall of fame as the greatest open source software of all time! Snort is a free open source network intrusion detection system (IDS) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) created in 1998 by Martin Roesch, founder and former CTO of Sourcefire. Snort is now developed by Cisco, which purchased Sourcefire in 2013. Snort's open-source network-based intrusion detection/prevention system (IDS/IPS) has the ability to perform real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Snort performs protocol analysis, content searching, and matching. Snort can also be used to detect probes or attacks including operating system fingerprinting attempts, semantic URL attacks, buffer overflows, server message block probes, and stealth port scans.

Key Features:

1. Performs protocol analysis and content searching
2. It allows signature-based detection of attacks by analyzing packets
3. It offers real-time traffic analysis and packet logging
4. Detects buffer overflows, stealth port scans, and OS fingerprinting attempts, etc.

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7. Nagios:

Nagios is a free and open-source computer-software application that monitors systems, networks, and infrastructure. Nagios offers to monitor and alert services for servers, switches, applications, and services. It alerts users when things go wrong and alert them a second time when the problem has been resolved. Ethan Galstad and a group of developers wrote Nagios as NetSuite. In 2015 they were able to actively maintain both the official and unofficial plugins. 

Key Features:

1. Helps to monitors components like applications, services, OS, network protocols
2. Provides complete monitoring of desktop and server operating systems
3. Monitors the Java Management Extensions
4. Allows monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components on any operating system
5. Its log management tool is industry-leading.
6. Network Analyzer helps in identifying bottlenecks and optimize bandwidth utilization.
7. Simplifies the process of searching log data

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8. Kubernetes:

Among all the DevOps tools, Kubernetes is the most talked-about one till this year. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a "platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts". It works with a range of container tools, including Docker. Many cloud services offer a Kubernetes-based platform or infrastructure as a service (PaaS or IaaS) on which Kubernetes can be deployed as a platform-providing service. Many vendors also provide their own branded Kubernetes distributions. 

Key Features:

1.  Kubernetes allows you to automate the process of managing hundreds of containers.
2. Kubernetes doesn’t force you to tie your containerized apps to a single machine. Instead, you can deploy it to a cluster of computers.
3.  Kubernetes automates the distribution and scheduling of containers across the whole cluster.

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Conclusion:

Every year, new DevOps tools keep coming on the board with new features to make your DevOps journey easier. We suggest you keep an eye on these journals for every new DevOps update. 

If you have a keen interest in DevOps and have been wondering this whole time- “What are the DevOps tools I should learn about to pursue a DevOps career?” you might have just gotten your answer then! If you want to know about all the DevOps tools and technologies you need to create an impactful DevOps revolution, it’ best that you learn from the experts. Take our DevOps training sessions, and get to know about all of it!

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