It’s not just about deciding to practice DevOps, Agile, and Lean, it’s also important to know the proper tools that make DevOps a success.
To be frank, there are no any magical tools that make you agile or lean. Hence, DevOps is more of a cultural shift rather than a toolset. This cultural shift should transfer from the top level management to the developers in the organization.
The top management should enable the use of certain set of identified tools to practice DevOps.
A proper understanding of the tools and training is required to use these tools.
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Plan : GitHub
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Build : Docker
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Continuous integration : Shippable
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Deploy : Heroku & Amazon Web Services
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Operate : Botmetric
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Continuous Feedback : Github
Let’s discuss each stage with the tools that can fit properly as DevOps tools,
Planning is the major and initial part of any software development life cycle. Choosing a tool that can help you easily plan and assign work to different teams or developers is very important.
Transparency, collaboration and clear assignment of issues with who should do what are some key factors to look for when choosing the right tool for planning. Here comes ‘GitHub’ that can help you ease this process.
After all the planning done, it’s time to get the work going. To build, there is a need for a tool/platform that supports various environments, languages etc and since it’s the age of containers, it’s obvious that developers use Docker to provision individual development environments. Docker gets more work done with the ease of containerization, many things are possible now.
In this stage, every code written by developers will be integrated immediately and this is the objective of continuous integration. Here you need to look for a tool/platform that can help do the testing faster and give you instant feedback. Although there are many tools available, Shippable is one best tool that gets you going all the way from continuous integration to continuous deployment.
Shippable enables teams to build and test their repositories for every code commit or pull request and get instant feedback. Shippable can be said as the fastest CI/CD platform.
Deploy is the critical stage and here you need to find a tool that gives you full visibility on branches, builds, pull requests, and deployment warnings in one place. Here comes the platform Heroku, a cloud application platform that helps app developers spend their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling. This increases the developer productivity by easing the deployment with less effort and full visibility.
Another best platform here is AWS, that let’s you use it’s amazing cloud computing services. Running your applications in the AWS Cloud can help you move faster, operate more securely, and save substantial costs.
Here is the stage where you critical need to monitor the application, server performance budget reports. You need to consider a tool that can let you know the application performance and whether the development is happening in the right path or not. Botmetric can run a comprehensive audit of your AWS Cloud to detect security issues, performance problems, disaster recovery bottlenecks, adherence to cloud best practices and cost optimization opportunities etc. The special features of this tool like budget alerts and daily reports help you analyze critical business data and take proper high-level IT decisions.
Continuous feedback is one thing that you can never neglect, if you consider it less, then you will go out of business soon. A continuous feedback loop is necessary where your customers will let you know what they liked, what they want and what are the issues they are facing. There are so many tools to name but many software powered organizations prefer GitHub issue board to know the customers’ feedback.
