10 Cool DevOps Tools To Know About In 2018

Source – crn.com

The rapid adoption of cloud has ushered in a paradigm shift in how software is developed, packaged, deployed, updated and terminated.

For starters, the multi-cloud world has created powerful use cases for containers, which offer unique application portability. Then come technologies, like Kubernetes, that orchestrate and manage those containers up the stack.

Developers are now leveraging container technologies to build cloud-native software with service-oriented architectures, where applications are broken into micro-services more adept at rapidly scaling to handle massive loads.

With all those changes has come a rethinking of the processes, methodology and culture of development teams that fall under the umbrella term of DevOps — the merging of developers and operators to facilitate rapid and agile software release cycles.

A new generation of tools is empowering DevOps practitioners with capabilities such as infrastructure configuration management, code repositories, release automation and management, continuous integration and delivery, team collaboration, and, particularly hot of late, service meshes.

XL Deploy

XebiaLabs offers a comprehensive DevOps platform for intelligence, automation and control of continuous delivery processes at scale.

XL Deploy is a popular tool in that kit among enterprises looking to simplify how they change and propagate software across heterogenous environments.

With a visual dashboard, built-in analytics, security and audit capabilities, XL Deploy enables DevOps teams to easily push new software, packaged as containers or virtual machines, into legacy environments or the cloud.

GitLab

GibLab offers an online Git repository stocked with DevOps functionality across the application life cycle.

The open-source and enterprise versions offer an end-to-end software development platform with built-in version control, issue tracking, code review, and CI/CD functionality.

The platform may be benefiting from a migration of some projects away from GitHub after Microsoft’s acquisition of the rival Git repository.

Envoy

Initially built by Lyft to scale its ride-sharing platform, this technology incubating under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation provides a universal data plane for apps designed with service-oriented architectures.

Envoy can be used as a proxy for monolithic apps, or a service mesh connecting micro-services by providing discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking, monitoring and logging.

The technology is used by some of the largest internet companies to abstract network functionality with common features.

HashiCorp Consul

HashiCorp recently upgraded Consul with network segmentation capabilities that turned the DevOps tool into a comprehensive service mesh for connecting micro-services.

In addition to service configuration and discovery, Consul can now segment individual services with automatic TLC encryption and identity-based authorization.

Consul can be used to gain visibility and control over service-oriented apps deployed as containers, virtual machines or run as serverless functions. There’s an open-source and enterprise version.

Netflix OSS

Looking to solve the unique scalability challenges it encountered, the movie-streaming service developed a set of frameworks and libraries for helping distributed systems reach massive scale.

The Netflix Open Source Software portfolio includes several individual DevOps-oriented projects with names like Eureka, Hystrix, Zuul and Archaius.

Many of those components have been incorporated into Spring Cloud, a popular technology among developers looking to quickly stand up distributed systems using boiler plate patterns.

Netflix OSS offers tools for configuration management, service discovery, circuit breakers, intelligent routing, micro-proxy, control bus, one-time tokens, global locks, leadership election, distributed sessions and cluster state.

BOSH

BOSH provides a popular open-source tool chain for managing the application life cycle.

Originally developed by VMware for applications built with Cloud Foundry, BOSH is now used by DevOps teams deploying a wide variety of data and messaging frameworks across both Windows and Linux environments.

The BOSH server communicates with a cloud platform running either VMs or containers. BOSH currently supports various service providers and environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere, OpenStack and CloudStack.

Istio

Now a core component of Google’s Cloud Platform Services, Istio is a service mesh developed by Google and partners of the likes of IBM, Cisco, Pivotal, Lyft and Red Hat.

Istio looks to make it easier for organizations to embrace service-oriented architecture for application design. The open-source technology enables greater control of micro-services with features like routing, load balancing and traffic control, in addition to logging, telemetry and policy management, all integrated with security.

The production-ready version of the technology, Istio 1.0, was recently released.

Drone

Drone is a cloud-native continuous integration/continuous delivery tool built from Docker components.

The open-source technology used to automate software testing and release workflows automatically provisions environments for pre-selected Docker images, and isolates every build in a Docker container.

Drone recently released a number of plug-ins to better integrate with Google Cloud, looking to help Google customers speed software delivery and reduce their costs. Among the new features was an auto-scaler for optimizing Google Compute Engine server resources.

Helm

Recently accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Helm looks to ease management and accelerate deployment of applications on Kubernetes clusters.

The open-source solution streamlines the process of defining, installing and upgrading applications orchestrated across large clusters with the technology first developed at Google. Helm introduces a packaging format called charts, which are collections of files that describe related Kubernetes resources.

Microsoft, Google, and Bitnami are some of the powerhouse contributors to the project.

Jira

Team collaboration is at the heart of DevOps.

Atlassian’s Jira is a solution agile software development teams often turn to for issue tracking, bug tracking and project management.

Those Jira capabilities enable DevOps teams to plan and distribute tasks, track progress, release software and benefit from real-time reporting. The teams can use out-of-the-box or custom workflows.