Nowadays DevOps is a necessary step of software development evolution. Some years ago the most popular software development model was a Waterfall. This is a cascade model of development where all the steps are going one by one, so you can’t do some actions simultaneously and the software lifecycle if very long and laborious.

In reality, it looks like endless throwing the project to each other. Developers write code and throw it “over the wall” to the Quality Assurance (QA) engineers, they are waiting for the deployment environment from the Ops engineers, testing and give the project back with a list of bugs and the process repeats.

DevOps philosophy helps exit this circle and automate the repetitive actions and tasks. DevOps methodology builds the whole process of software development. It allows making fast releases and quickly implement new features. You shouldn’t wait for updates for years anymore, you can make releases almost every week. You might read more about the DevOps services follow the link – https://itsvit.com/services/devops/.

The DevOps culture exists for more than 10 years, so there are a lot of tools you might use. Let’s have a look at some of them.

1. Terraform. This is an open-source tool for configuring infrastructure. It helps define and provision infrastructure of cloud data centers with descriptive language. Terraform allows creating the Infrastructure as Code and describing all available resources in the manifests. As a result, you’ll have an efficient and portable infrastructure for your code deployment.
2. Kubernetes. This is a framework for container orchestration. This tool works with containers and combines them in the cluster. Such a combination allows to run containers together, manage, deploy and monitor the software in the cloud automatically. Kubernetes has a lot of system components, drivers, utilities for the command line, applications and workloads.
3. Docker. This is a containerization platform allowing to create containers – the separate parts of code with all the needed instruments for running apps. Containers are lightweight code envelopes, that run fast and have a lot of ready solutions (Docker images) for various cases. Docker containers allow using the hardware more efficiently. You can run a container on your hardware and after the end of usage just delete the container from hardware. Also, containers have a high level of security. If one of the containers is damaged it won’t harm others and it can be easily restarted.
4. Jenkins. A lot of DevOps engineers call Jenkins the best tool for making CI/CD pipelines. Jenkins allows automating different parts of the software development process. This tool has a built-in graphics interface and multiple plugins that allows integration with other tools. Jenkins is simply installed and can be useful for different tasks.
5. Ansible. This is a configuration management system written in Python. This tool is used for automation of software development process and software deployment. Ansible allows you to create playbooks in the YAML (data-serialization language) where you’ll write the states for the system.

Of course, there are a lot of other tools, we’ve listed only the most popular. All of them allow you to automate your software development process. The main idea of DevOps culture is not in using the newest tools it is in changing the human mind. You can refer to the DevOps consulting company and change the whole infrastructure with the best tools but if your team won’t change the mindset, all these improvements are just a waste of time.

Final thoughts: how to choose tools?

As we said, there is a huge amount of tools that help you automate the software development. They have documentation and FAQs, so an experienced specialist can start to use these tools even if he didn’t work with them before. The main idea of DevOps culture in the mindset and not in the tools. But still, the more tools DevOps engineer knows, the better he will choose an instrument for your project.

The most experienced DevOps engineers usually work in MSP companies. MSP means Managed Service Provider. This is a company that provides different services and dedicated teams. A lot of great engineers work in the dedicated teams because here they can get acquainted with variable tools and projects. This opportunity is very important for skillful DevOps engineers.

Thus said, it is really hard to find the best tools for your project but you always can to refer to the MSP and receive high-quality services from the dedicated team.