What are the tools used in DevOps?

Embracing DevOps is unquestionable as the benefits are unsurpassed for the success of any organization, thanks to the highly versatile nature of DevOps. Standing at 2021, the valuation for the market size of DevOps was 7.01 Billion USD, and with forecasting methods, the projected valuation is expected to reach 51.18 Billion USD by 2030.

Source

But let’s take a pause and ask a very conceptual question. Is DevOps a methodology, philosophy, movement, culture, or a mix? What are the benefits of DevOps, and what are the pre-requisites for DevOps for testers are some of the inevitable questions. 

Even though DevOps has received a cliche status, having a clear understanding of it is the secret to adopting it effectively and productively.  Here is everything about DevOps, including what it means, how it works, tools in DevOps, and more. 

What is DevOps?

The automation and unified use of processes are the core concepts of DevOps. 

• It emphasizes technology automation, cross-team collaboration and communication, and team empowerment. 
• However, it’s only a flawless DevOps execution that takes software development and shifts gears to impeccable quality. 
• Hence, the importance of QA in DevOps is undeniable since that’s the key to new quality and acceleration of software engineering.

How does DevOps Work?

DevOps breaks down the conventional silo that existed between the Operational and Development teams.

• The DevOps testing strategy fosters collaboration between IT operations and software development teams.
• Teams in software engineering collaborate closer, discover problems quicker, and fix them, thanks to automated technologies and expedited processes. 
• It’s the continuous testing in DevOps  conducted as a part of the delivery pipeline to incorporate constant changes in software development.
• Owing to its benefit in the software pipeline of delivery, DevOps is all set to expand phenomenally in all its geographical, vertical, and organizational size and type segments.

What are the tools used in DevOps?

Modern DevOps Tools aid in automating the software development procedure. It primarily focuses on the interaction and coordination of experts in product operations, software development, and product management. Time to sneak a peek into the types of tools used for DevOps. 

We will first see the types of DevOps tools and address an essential tool in each category type. 

DevOps Automation Tools

To ease feedback loops between development and operations teams and to hasten the deployment of iterative changes to applications in creation, DevOps automation accelerates the integration of technology that executes jobs with less manual intervention. 

• One benefit is that automating repetitive chores frees engineers to work on more significant, creative projects. The possibility of error increases when activities are completed manually. 
• These tools used by DevOps can automatically examine traffic and packet tracking in real-time. 
• By automatically analyzing protocol, searching, and matching contents, it is intended to highlight harmful assaults against the system by spotting CGI attacks, buffer overflows, efforts at OS fingerprinting, and more. 

Jenkins

Developers and testers may automate each CI/CD process step using Jenkins, an open-source automation tool. Its main selling point is a vast plugin ecosystem with more than 1000 plugins, enabling integration with practically any DevOps tools on the market. 

Use a web interface to configure the Jenkins server, download the necessary plugins, or build specialized settings for a particular DevOps workflow. Jenkins makes it possible to iterate and deploy code quickly.

Features and Benefits:

• Every tool in the CI/CD toolchain, including Git, Amazon EC2, Maven, and others, may be integrated with Jenkins using one of its more than 100 plugins.
• Being Java-based, it’s ready to run with any OS – Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Jenkins’ straightforward online interface, which includes built-in error checks and assistance, makes setting it up and configuring it simple.
• You may conduct a variety of additional functionalities because of Jenkins’ excellent plugin extensibility.

To reap the most out of continuous testing in DevOps for reliable automated testing for Jenkin’s pipeline, integrate Jenkins with BrowserStack. 

DevOps Pipeline (CI/CD) Tools

A team can automate testing, deployment, and development with CI/CD pipeline tools. 

• Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) offer continuous and automation monitoring throughout the whole software lifetime, from the testing phases and integration to deployment and delivery. 
• Operations and development teams collaborate agilely using a site reliability engineering or DevOps methodology. These interconnected processes are collectively called a “CI/CD pipeline.”

Bamboo

As one of the main CI/CD tools, Bamboo aids in the creation of multi-stage build plans, trigger setup, and agent allocation for essential builds and deploys.

You get to choose between both paid and free software versions. Bamboo is free to use for creating open-source software projects, but it charges commercial companies for the build agents they need.

Features and Benefits:

• Integration with Bitbucket, Jira, and Opsgenie for seamless project management.
• The Bamboo automation pipeline requires less configuration time than Jenkins because it has built-in features.
• Users can get release management and build status with end-to-end quality all in one place

DevOps Version Control Tools

The deletion, updating, controlled access, and creation of files can be coordinated amongst teams and organizations with the help of version control systems. Automation and version control are closely related.

These files are essential to continuous automation integration since they include the automation’s source code and instructions for automating settings and distributing data.

Teams must employ version control for 

Aapplication configuration data 

• Infrastructure
• Test and deployment scripts
• Source code
• Packages and libraries they depend upon to improve product delivery. 

Dev and testing teams must be able to query their environments’ present (and past) state in the version control system. Indirect advantages of version control include disaster recovery and auditability.

Git

One of the most popular DevOps technologies is the open-source, free Git version control system. With the assistance of this distributed source code management technology, programmers can successfully arrange their work and keep a record of modifications made to files utilized in software development.

Features and Benefits:

• Capable of managing projects of all sizes, from modest to substantial ones, while preserving effectiveness and speed
• This is equally apt for both newbies and experienced ones.
• Features that give it a competitive edge include check-ins, several workflows, convenient staging environments, and numerous local branching options.
• Hosting repositories from Bitbucket or GitHub can help you integrate them into your workflow and make it simple for your team to push jobs.

DevOps Testing Tools

Test automation tools help developers deploy code changes faster. At the same time, DevOps makes testing a shared duty of the whole team. One of the critical stages in the DevOps lifecycle is testing. The test automation tools in DevOps required for DevOps’ quick feedback cycles are made possible by incorporating testing tools for DevOps with continuous integration.

Some of the top DevOps Testing tools are: 

• Selenium
• JUnit
• TestNG

You may automate and test the software deployment and development processes using tools in DevOps. Most testing procedures, such as deployment, dependency management, conflict management, build, etc., may be automated by teams using DevOps testing technologies, which also helps to lessen manual labor.

Automating your app testing is way more convenient with BrowserStack Cloud Selenium Grid in this context. 

• Run hundreds of tests to speed up the execution time of your test suite by more than 10x. 
• Integrate in minutes using popular languages and frameworks. 
• Add BrowserStack to your build pipeline using CI plugins.
• Debug using video recordings, automated screenshots of errors, text logs, console logs and network logs

Why do DevOps Teams need Cloud-Based Solutions?

The following common factors stand out as compelling reasons for DevOps teams to utilize cloud-hosted solutions:

• Centralization: DevOps principles apply to all phases of the development pipeline, including post-production monitoring, deployment, testing, builds, and coding, each of which calls for the use of one or more major DevOps tool categories. 

When these products are hosted in the cloud, they have a centralized architecture that all pertinent teams may rapidly and easily use from anywhere at any time. Again, this reduces the friction, effort, and time present if teams need to clear hurdles to access the required resources.

See all BrowserStack Integrations

• Robustness, Stability, and faster uptime: While the team operates to improve and re-organize testing, monitoring integration, and development, the vendor will concentrate on upkeep, updates, and resolving problems.

Teams are better able to innovate and create production channels that actively generate better software, accomplish faster time to market, and put the needs of the client first without having to divide their attention.

• Smooth Collaboration and Automation: Cloud computing fosters improved teamwork at every stage of the DevOps process. Team members are no longer required to spend time transferring files between their teams and other teams. Most significantly, cloud computing makes remote workspaces possible. Since everything is in the cloud, nobody needs to go to the office to complete their task.

Along with the aforementioned, ease of adoption, Scalability, and lower cost of ownership deserves special mention as the advantages of cloud-based solutions for DevOps.

Conclusion

The ultimate goal of DevOps is to accelerate the values of people, processes and products to translate them into business value.  The list of all DevOps tools enables teams to deploy software quickly, reliably, and innovatively for their customers. In a nutshell, the DevOps paradigm depends on powerful tools. 

These tools let teams manage complicated environments at scale, automate tedious chores, and keep engineers in charge of the rapid development speeds made possible by tools in DevOps.

Integrate the testing tools for DevOps with a Real Device Cloud to accelerate the processes of error bugging and implementing CI and CD.