DevOps represents the next evolution of agile methodologies, fostering a cultural shift that unites development and operations teams. It encompasses a blend of cultural changes, new management principles, and technological tools designed to implement best practices effectively. In this blog, we will explore the DevOps tools, provide a comprehensive list of DevOps tools, and explain their functionalities. We'll examine how these tools contribute to streamlining and enhancing the DevOps lifecycle.
A DevOps tool is a software solution designed to streamline and automate various aspects of the DevOps lifecycle, which integrates development and operations to enhance collaboration, efficiency, and continuous delivery. These tools support tasks across the development process—from coding and testing to deployment and monitoring—by automating repetitive tasks, facilitating seamless communication, and providing real-time insights. By bridging gaps between development and operations teams, DevOps tools help accelerate software delivery, improve quality, and enable quicker responses to changes and issues.
These tools help bridge the gap between development and operations teams by automating processes, facilitating collaboration, and providing real-time insights. DevOps tools cover various phases of the software development and deployment process.
In a DevOps toolchain, the aim is to find tools that enhance collaboration, minimize context-switching, automate processes, and leverage observability and monitoring to deliver superior software more rapidly. There are two primary approaches to building a DevOps toolchain:
Regardless of the chosen approach, a successful DevOps process requires the right list of DevOps tools to cover the key phases of the DevOps lifecycle:
In an open DevOps toolchain, the tools chosen often span multiple phases of the DevOps lifecycle. Below, we highlight some of the most popular DevOps tools. However, the market is dynamic and ever-changing. New capabilities are frequently added by providers, allowing these tools to cover more phases of the DevOps lifecycle. Each quarter, new integrations are announced, and sometimes providers consolidate their offerings to address specific user needs more effectively.
In the Discover phase, the DevOps team focuses on understanding and outlining the project’s scope. This stage includes key activities such as conducting user research, setting clear objectives, and defining success. It’s all about gathering insights and establishing a solid foundation for the project.
Tools like Mural and Miro enable the entire software team to brainstorm ideas and conduct thorough research. Jira Product Discovery helps organize this information into actionable inputs and prioritize tasks for development teams. While prioritizing, it’s essential to keep your backlog of user feedback in mind.
Product discovery is the initial step in product design, forming the foundation for subsequent decision-making. During this phase, you can gather all critical information about user problems and devise solutions for them.
We recommend using tools that facilitate “asynchronous brainstorming.” It’s crucial that everyone can share and comment on various elements, including ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps, and documentation.
Adopting agile methodologies, it’s beneficial to use a list of DevOps tools that enable development and operations teams to break down work into smaller, manageable chunks for faster deployments. This approach allows for quicker user feedback and helps optimize the product based on that feedback. Tools that support sprint planning, issue tracking, and team collaboration, like Jira, are highly recommended.
Continuously gathering user feedback is essential. This feedback should be organized into actionable inputs and prioritized for your development teams. Tools that promote “asynchronous brainstorming” are particularly valuable. They allow everyone to share and comment on various elements such as ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps, and documentation.
Don’t overlook the importance of integrations and feature flags. When scoping your feature or project, ensure it translates into user stories within your development backlog. Feature flags, which are conditional statements in the codebase, enable teams to toggle features on and off as needed.
Developing against virtual, disposable replicas of your production environment enhances productivity. When every team member operates from identically-provisioned environments, the phrase "Works on my machine!" loses its humor because now, it's a reality.
Developers create modular applications because they’re more reliable and maintainable. This same principle can be applied to IT infrastructure through the practice of infrastructure as code (IaC). Using code for provisioning allows you to handle the ever-changing nature of systems more efficiently. IaC ensures that re-provisioning is faster than repairing, and it’s more consistent and reproducible. This approach enables the easy creation of development environments that mirror production configurations.
Provisioning code can be applied and reapplied to set a server to a known baseline. It can be stored in version control, tested, integrated into continuous integration (CI) pipelines, and peer-reviewed. When institutional knowledge is codified, the reliance on run books and internal documentation decreases, giving rise to repeatable processes and reliable systems.
Robust source control is crucial for code management. Source control tools allow you to track changes, making collaboration easier by sharing those changes within your team. This setup eliminates the need to wait for change approval boards before deploying to production. Peer reviews via pull requests improve code quality and throughput.
Pull requests notify your team about changes pushed to a development branch in your repository. Your team can review these changes, discuss modifications, and integrate them into the main codebase. This process enhances software quality, reduces bugs and incidents, lowers operational costs, and accelerates development.
Source control tools should integrate seamlessly with other development and delivery tools. This integration connects different parts of the development process, allowing you to track if the feature’s code is running in production. In case of an incident, you can retrieve the relevant code to understand and resolve the issue quickly.
Continuous integration involves frequently checking code into a shared repository and testing it with each addition. This practice helps identify problems early, making them easier to fix and allowing new features to reach users more quickly.
Code reviews via pull requests, which require branching, have become a standard practice. The ideal DevOps workflow aims for fewer, faster branches while maintaining rigorous testing standards without hindering development speed.
Seek tools that automatically run your tests on development branches and provide the option to merge to the main branch once these builds pass. Continuous feedback is essential, and integrating real-time chat alerts keeps your team informed and responsive throughout the development process.
Testing tools cater to a wide range of needs, from exploratory testing to test management and orchestration. In the DevOps toolchain, automation is crucial. Automated testing not only speeds up development and testing cycles over time but also enhances overall awareness within the DevOps environment.
By conducting tests early and frequently, automated tests can significantly improve software quality and mitigate risks. Development teams can run these tests repeatedly, covering areas such as UI, security, and load performance. Automated testing tools also generate reports and trend graphs & help teams identify potential risk areas.
Risk is inherent in software development, but anticipation and mitigation are key. To this end, it’s beneficial for operations teams to have visibility into the testing process. Look for tools that offer wallboards and allow team members to comment on specific build or deployment outcomes. Additionally, tools that facilitate operations' involvement in blitz testing and exploratory testing add substantial value.
One of the most stressful aspects of shipping software is consolidating all the changes, tests, and deployment information for an upcoming release. The last thing you need before a release is a lengthy status meeting. This is where release dashboards prove invaluable.
Release Dashboards Seek tools that offer a unified dashboard integrated with your code repository and deployment tools. The ideal tool should provide full visibility on branches, builds, pull requests, and deployment warnings in one place, streamlining the release process.
Automated Deployment There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to automated deployment suitable for every application and IT environment. However, a common starting point is converting operations' runbooks into executable scripts using Ruby, bash, or similar scripting languages.
Begin by automating deployments to your lowest-level environment, where automation will be used most frequently. Then, replicate the process up to production. This approach not only highlights differences between environments but also helps standardize them. Standardizing deployments through automation reduces "server drift" within and between environments, ensuring consistency and reliability.
Unlocking collaboration between DevOps teams hinges on ensuring they view the same work. What happens when incidents are reported? Are they linked and traceable to software problems? When changes are made, are they connected to releases?
Nothing hampers DevOps collaboration more than having incidents and software development projects tracked in separate systems. Look for tools that consolidate incidents, changes, problems, and software projects onto a single platform. This unified approach allows you to identify and resolve issues more efficiently, fostering better teamwork and faster problem-solving.
Automating monitoring is crucial for both server health and application performance. Manual checks, like spot-testing your API or monitoring servers, are useful for quick assessments. However, understanding trends and maintaining the overall health of your application requires continuous, automated observability. This 24/7 data recording is essential for effective DevOps practices.
When choosing monitoring tools, look for ones that integrate seamlessly with your team’s chat client, ensuring alerts are sent directly to your team's room or a dedicated incident room. This integration facilitates immediate awareness and quicker response times.
Your customers are constantly providing feedback—it's up to you to listen. Continuous feedback encompasses both the cultural mindset and the processes needed to gather and act on feedback regularly. This includes collecting data from NPS surveys, churn surveys, bug reports, support tickets, and social media interactions.
In a DevOps culture, the entire product team should have access to user feedback as it informs release planning and testing sessions. Choose tools that integrate your chat platform with survey tools for real-time feedback collection. Additionally, integrating social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook with your chat tool can provide instant insights. For more in-depth analysis, invest in a social media management tool that offers historical data reporting.
Incorporating and analyzing feedback might seem to slow down development initially. Still, it ensures that new features align with user needs, ultimately saving time and resources by avoiding the release of unwanted features.
We understand the importance of a DevOps toolchain that seamlessly integrates with the tools your development and operations teams rely on. That's why the Atlassian DevOps platform is designed to work with over 171 leading third-party vendors, giving you the flexibility to choose and integrate the best tools for your needs. DevOps is about building a customized, efficient toolchain that suits your unique requirements.