Name the tools to implement DevOps – Any five

DevOps Testing

The realization that adherence to quality is not a one off affair but the essential requisite for businesses to earn customers trust is driving companies to adopt the DevOps approach. It is a move over Agile and includes elements like Continuous Integration/Delivery. DevOps QA requires the Development, Testing, and Operations teams to collaborate seamlessly to offer quality products and services to the end customer. It is no longer confined to the SDLC phase alone but goes beyond by creating a total quality culture. It is the culture that ensures the quality of products or services to be upheld during the entire product lifecycle.

The DevOps testing strategy helps in better and quicker identification of glitches and improves the rate of deployment. It entails the simplification of process workflows in departments, improving intra department/process communication, and creating a common objective. However, for DevOps to work to its full potential, it should be enabled by the use of tools. The tools are not ‘one size fits all’ type and help in achieving Continuous Integration/Delivery, information sharing, process automation, and a shorter process cycle.

Since these tools come with a robust reporting mechanism, they help in generating quality feedback for every stakeholder to understand and follow. Besides achieving the DevOps objectives, the tools are categorized into groups based on their functionality. These are Continuous Integration, Configuration Management, Continuous Inspection, Containerization, and Virtualization. The DevOps team should ensure the following before embarking on DevOps testing:

  • All stakeholders should be on the same page during transformation to the DevOps model
  • Take one department or process at a time and thereafter include others incrementally
  • Measure the output of your department/process before and after DevOps adoption on the basis of well-defined metrics
  • Automate processes that are needed instead of forcing all into DevOps test automation

5 tools to enable the adoption of DevOps

#1 Nagios & Icinga: Among the many open source tools, Nagios or Nagios Core is a highly effective infrastructure monitoring tool thanks to the presence of a dedicated community of developers who create plugins. Nagios comes in three variants viz., XI, Log Server, and Fusion. While XI monitors all mission critical infrastructure components of an OS, the Log Server audits your system and identifies the security threats and trends among others. Fusion, on the other hand, provides a centralized network view. Overall, the tool written in C language monitors as well as alerts users about malfunctioning servers, switches, applications, and services.

Similar to Nagios is Icinga. Its scalable fork with high level features provide a great user experience. It monitors the software infrastructure with an SSL protected cluster system.

#2 Jenkins: This Java-based open source tool helps in DevOps testing by building, testing, and integrating software continuously besides monitoring some of the externally run jobs. Its popularity among the DevOps testing specialists is due to its GUI-based scalability and customization features. The fact that it requires little maintenance and has a repository of over 400 plugins makes it easier to build and execute any type of test cases.

#3 Docker: This open source containerization platform helps developers and admins to send a product or service for delivery without the intervening cross functional environments. Through its containerization technology, Docker lends portability to applications by moving them across platforms in self-contained units. Its standardized format and the ease of writing test cases in virtually any language make it easier for both the development and operations teams to use it. The tools help in configuration management, scaling, and controlling glitches.

#4 Git or GitHub: This open source tool came about as a response to Linux community’s need for a Source Control Management (SCM) software. It helps in control management and lends support to distributed systems. Its features such as enabling repos, local branching, convenient staging, multiple workflows, and pull requests among others make integration and deployment easy.

#5 AWS: The Amazon Web Services provide flexible services for developers to deliver quick products or services through its robust cloud computing features. The many features include networking, database, analytics, storage, computation, deployment, management, mobility, and application services.

Conclusion

The aforementioned DevOps tools help in automating test cases and provide the right CI and CD environment to deploy products and services smoothly.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, 5 tools that enable kickstarting software development with DevOps.

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