DevOps Tools 101: Key Technologies You Need to Know
DevOps Tooling and Technologies Explained
DevOps is all about empowering development and operations teams to accelerate software delivery and deliver value faster. But what are the top DevOps tools your business can leverage to enhance its DevOps practice? Read on to find out. Using best-in-class DevOps tools helps businesses to streamline processes, increase efficiency, save time, and accelerate the route to market for new products and services.
However, with such a vast array of DevOps tools on offer, it can be difficult knowing which to choose based on your organisation’s needs.
In this article, we break down some of the most popular DevOps tools and practices you need to know.
DevOps communication and project management tools
Breaking projects down into bite-sized, manageable tasks allows your organisation to follow an agile approach to software development, deploy new features faster, and drive value.
Combining DevOps tools that help to facilitate sprint planning and monitor issues such as GitHub Projects, Trello and Jira, as well as collaboration-enhancing tools like Slack will enable your business to increase efficiency, boost productivity, and improve overall business outcomes.
Tools that encourage regular user feedback through brainstorming and commenting and translate input into actionable tasks are also highly beneficial for development teams—whether you’re setting measurable goals, gathering requirements, outlining the roadmap, or creating documentation. Download the checklist, ‘5 Ways to Scale Your DevOps Practice’ to discover how to accelerate software delivery and reduce the time to market.
Software provisioning tools you need to know
Provisioning identical production environments to increase productivity and velocity also requires a specific set of DevOps tools, including open source tools like Kubernetes and Containers. Other valuable tools for provisioning and building software applications include Ansible, ArgoCD, Flux and Terraform.
Related Read: Secure DevOps: The What, the Why and the How
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools for infinite scalability
Adopting a modular approach to software helps developers maintain and scale systems more easily; the same can be said for your infrastructure. Leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables you to spin up new environments fast for testing, continuous integration and review.
There are a number of DevOps tools that can help your business leverage IaC effectively, including Terraform, CDK for Terraform, AWS CDK and Pulumi. The result? Repeatable, scalable processes that help to drive greater efficiency and accelerate software delivery.
Top CI/CD and testing tools for accelerated delivery
Continuous Integration and Delivery (known as CI/CD) is an effective way to iteratively test code multiple times a day, to catch and fix errors in the early stages of development. For businesses, this results in faster features deployment and a better user experience.
Using pull requests to review code through branching is on the uptake, further accelerating software delivery and facilitating continual feedback.
Using GitLab Pipelines or GitHub Actions is one way to automate software development processes from code to production and deliver new features faster.
When it comes to testing your code, look to tools like Postman (APIs), TAP (backend), Playwright, Cypress (end-to-end), Storybook, React Testing Library (frontend), Artillery, Axe, K6 and Lighthouse (NFRs).
Related Read: Making DevOps Work for Highly Regulated Industries
Essential performance monitoring and feedback tools
While it may seem like a time-consuming additional step in software development, monitoring performance and collecting regular, actionable feedback is vital to driving user experience improvements.
If your organisation has a strong developer culture , then all members of your product team should have visibility across user feedback to ensure a consistent approach, from planning to testing and beyond.
There are two types of feedback that you may want to consider: Indirect Feedback Monitoring your application using tools like Prometheus, Datadog, Dynatrace, and Google Analytics can provide your organisation with immediate feedback on how users interact with the system, as well as how the system behaves in different scenarios. This is known as indirect feedback. Direct Feedback Incorporating pop-ups that ask users to rate their experience, either within the application itself or through social media networks like Facebook or Twitter, is a simple and effective way to generate direct feedback.
Depending on the data you need, you may want to consider utilising a dedicated social media management platform capable of producing more in-depth feedback reports. Ready to scale your DevOps practice? Download our free, practical checklist today to discover how to enhance DevEx and accelerate software delivery.
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