DevOps Tools Selection For Your Business – What Needs To Be Looked At?

Velan has been assisting customers worldwide for more than a decade in IT and business process management (BPM). The goal is to help them to embrace the changes in the business world and still retain their position on the top with the latest digital services. Let see Devops Tools

DevOps, eCommerce, cloud services, mobility solutions, digital commerce, finance and accounting, engineering services, revenue cycle management, etc. are a few of the many services Velan provides. We help businesses to increase their process efficiency with data analytics, process automation, and DevOps services.

DevOps Consulting at Velan

The DevOps consulting at Velan is an end-to-end service that spans DevOps consulting and the best industry practices, managed build and release, continuous testing, infrastructure automation, and containerization.

You will be entitled to an exhaustive audit report of your existing business environment, groundwork consultation, and counsel from DevOps aficionados. After the initial consultation and understanding of the roots of your business, we will help you with customized DevOps architecture that will help you achieve your business goals and ensure a smooth process.

While there are a lot of DevOps tools in the market like Jenkins, Jira, Azure, Confluence, Dockers, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Git, TFS, Kubernetes, it is really difficult to pick one without knowing your business’s purpose and requirements. Frankly, there is no single tool that will comply with all your business needs. The tool can be selected only based on what you want to achieve for your business “together”. Remember, the concept of DevOps is to break silos and empower the team to work as a single unit. It is more of a paradigm cultural shift.

Look what one of Velan DevOps enthusiast “Peter Paul” has got to say about

• DevOps!
• And how can you as a business select the right DevOps tools?

He began by saying,

“As an organization, if you are primed to welcome DevOps, it indicates that you are prepared to transform, develop, test, fail, learn, recover, learn, and launch – rapidly.”

Organizations that are not ready for change cannot welcome DevOps, as the primary element in DevOps is ‘the change.’

DevOps principles will be beneficial for those companies that use a software platform from the service provider. Through DevOps, one can effortlessly lessen the technical blunders in the software and resolve issues in a very short span.

So when the question came to

“how businesses can choose the right DevOps Tools for them?”

he continued saying…

Although different DevOps tools cover almost all the development phases in one way or another, no individual tool can play a primary role. It is an amalgamation of all the tools to complete a task.

Most of the tools that are available help to automate the process of software delivery. Amongst the available options, you can select the right one depending on your requirements. Choosing the right DevOps tool also depends on whether the tool can help you with all the phases, which are – plan, build, continuous integration, deploy, operate, and continuous feedback.

I’ll get into its details. A DevOps tool will be the best only if it can help you with all the processes in the DevOps cycle. They are Plan, Build, Continuous Integration, Deploy, Operate, and Continuous Feedback phases.

Phase I: Plan

Team Up to discuss Vision

In the planning phase, settle for tools that will allow your development team to work in sprints. It will enable you to learn more about your customers and their requirements. With that information, you will be able to better optimize your product with the feedback.

Besides, you must continuously get feedback, streamline them into actionable input, and clearly define priorities to work on the feedback. The tools must encourage ‘nonsynchronous discussion.’

The tools must possess features that will help the entire team to define the plan, share ideas, chalk out goals, plan a strategy to execute the goals, assess, key in requirements, and define the roadmap.

Example Tools: Confluence, JIRA Software, and HipChat.

Phase II: Build

Orchestrating room for development

DevOps tools that promote coding in a disposable, virtual model of production will help you yield better results and allow you to complete more work. Simply because you can try as many variations as required without the fear of exhausting your production environment.

Your development team can build modular applications as they are flexible, reliable, and require less complicated maintenance. The tools that enable collaborative coding for your development team are notably on the rise.

Example Tools: Docker, Bamboo, Chef, Bitbucket, Puppet.

Phase III: Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a process where developers can submit the code in a shared repository numerous times a day and test every time they submit. It is the most efficient way to test – detect errors and bugs in the early stage and fix them before moving to production.

To support the Development Team, the Operations team must have the visibility to see what is being tested and how comprehensively are they being tested – in real-time. Automated testing yields reliable reports and helps to identify risky areas.

CI cuts down huge costs on fixing the bugs in the early stage, which otherwise would empty the pockets.

Look for tools that will allow a multi-branch environment – meaning you can apply your tests to the development branches, and get the option to move the code to master when branch builds turn out to be successful. You must also be able to get real-time alerts in your development team’s chat tool with just a simple integration.

Example Tools: Bamboo, HipChat, Bitbucket, Capture for JIRA.

Phase IV: Deploy

The most challenging situation in the deployment phase is to gather all the information associated with planning, change, testing, and deployment in a single location. To avoid this, you must have a tool that will give you end-to-end information and status reports of every phase until deployment in one dashboard. You must be able to integrate the dashboard facility in your code repository and get extensive details like deployment warnings, pull requests, branches, etc.

Example Tools: AWS, Bamboo, HipChat, Puppet, JIRA software.

Phase V: Operate

This phase includes Server monitoring and application performance monitoring, cross-team communication, and change, incident, and problem tracking.

(i) Server monitoring and application performance monitoring must be automated. To make a better decision on trends and understand the overall health of the environment and applications, you need software that is continually recording data.

Look for tools that allow integration with your team’s chat room so all the alerts could land directly in that room or dedicated rooms that record incidents.

Example Tools: BigPanda, HipChat, HostedGraphite, Nagios, New Relic, PagerDuty, Pingdom, Splunk.

(ii) Cross-team communication is the primary step, and chat rooms operate in real-time. Find a chat tool that is expandable and integrates with monitoring and status reporting tools, so there is no communication barrier.

Example Tools: BigPanda, DataDog, HipChat, New Relic, PagerDuty, StatusPage.

(iii) Having software projects and incidents tracked on different systems is the worst nightmare in DevOps. Look for tools that allow you to track incidents, change, problems, and software project updates on one platform. It will help you to be efficient and fix problems quickly.

Example Tools: JIRA Service Desk, JIRA Software

Phase VI: Continuous Feedback

The key to improvement is to actively listen to your client’s feedback. Having a tool that will allow you to integrate chat in the survey or feedback environment will be a great choice. This way, you will be able to capture feedback and assure in real-time about the actionable steps.

Social media must be concentrated on as that platform has a huge scope for real-time feedback. It is absolutely worth investing in a social media management platform to pull reports.

Example Tools: GetFeedback, HipChat, JIRA Service Desk, Pendo, SurveyMonkey, Hootsuite.

Take Away:

Selecting the right DevOps tools for your business depends on the areas your business needs maximum help. The main goal of every DevOps tool is to make the development cycle faster and boost cross-functional and internal communication and association.

Ready for DevOps? Talk to one of our experts, Mr. Peter Paul for insights and get your tools for DevOps.