Choice of the best DevOps tools for each life stage is very key to achieving DevOps best practices. These tools should be focused on improving collaboration, reducing context-switching, introducing automation, and leveraging observability and monitoring to ship better software, faster.
The toolchain is categorized into two namely;
all-in-one toolchain- uses one complete solution that doesn't allow other tools to play a part.
open toolchain - allows for customization with different tools With an open toolchain, there are preferred tools for the various stages of the DevOps lifecycle. Though the tools may vary, new capabilities may be added in every stage to improve productivity levels.
Stage and Tools used
Plan
Jira Software, Confluence, and slack
High recommendable tools are tools that allow development and operations teams to break work down into smaller, manageable chunks for quicker deployments. Jira provides sprint planning, and issue tracking, and allows collaboration. These tools also encourage asynchronous brainstorming so to say. It’s important that everyone can share and comment on anything: ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps, and documentation.
Build
Production-identical environments for development - Kubernetes and Docker
Developers use open-source tools like Kubernetes and Docker to provision individual development environments.
Infrastructure as code - Chef, Docker, Puppet, Ansible, and Terraform
Infrastructure as code means you can easily spin up variations of your development environment with a similar configuration as production. It also implies that re-provisioning is faster than repairing – and more consistent and reproducible. These tools help in version control and continuous integration.
Source control and collaborative coding - Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab
These tools enable source control support that helps store the code in different chains so you can see every change and collaborate more easily by sharing those changes.
Continuous Delivery - Jenkins, AWS, Bitbucket, CircleCi, SonarSource
Continuous integration is the practice of checking in code to a shared repository several times a day and testing it each time. That way, you automatically detect problems early, fix them when they’re easiest to fix, and roll out new features to your users as early as possible.
Test
MEND, mabl, snyk, VERACODE, stackhawk, XRAY, SmartBear
Automated testing pays off over time by speeding up your development and testing cycles in the long run. Test automation can increase software quality and reduce risk by doing it early and often. They also yield reports and trend graphs that help identify risky areas.
Deploy
Deployment standards- Jira Software
This tool has a single dashboard integrated with your code repository and deployment tools. It gives you full visibility of branches, builds, pulls requests, and deployment warnings in one place.
Automated deployment - Bitbucket, AWS Codepipeline
One should try automating deployments to the lowest-level environment first, where you’ll be using that automation most frequently, then replicate that up to production.
Operate
Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Opsgenie, Statuspage
These tools enhance collaboration by making sure DevOps teams are viewing the same work.
Monitor
AppDynamics, DataDog, Slack, Splunk, New Relic, Opsgenie, Pingdom, Nagios, Dynatrace, Sumo Logic
Ensures application and server performance monitoring. These tools ensure integration of your group chat client so alerts go straight to your team’s room, or a dedicated room for incidents.
Continuous Feedback
GetFeedback, Slack, Jira Service Management, Pendo
Analyzing and incorporating feedback may feel like it slows the pace of development in the short term, but it’s more efficient in the long run than releasing new features that nobody wants.
Discover
Jira Product Discovery, Mural, Miro
Tools that encourage “asynchronous brainstorming” are highly recommended. It’s important that everyone can share and comment on anything: ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps, and documentation.
In conclusion
Having a DevOps toolchain that integrates with the tools development and operations teams love to use is very essential. These tools facilitate the smooth running of DevOps practices.