DevOps is an emerging practice that combines software development and IT operations teams under one umbrella. The goal of DevOps is to help product teams produce better software faster by uniting people, processes, and tools throughout every phase of the software development lifecycle.
By shifting to a more holistic approach that includes everything from planning and building to monitoring and iterating, DevOps teams are able to:
- Deploy releases more frequently
- Improve product quality
- Resolve issues faster
- Increase organizational efficiency
- Create more stable operating environments
What Tools Are Used in DevOps?
A number of new technologies have emerged to help organizations realize the promise of these benefits. These DevOps tools automate many of the tasks and processes in the DevOps lifecycle.
Here are some of the most important tools for DevOps teams, including a brief summary of their capabilities.
- Version Control and Configuration Management Tools: Streamlines change control processes by tracking changes to all applications.
- CI/CD Tools: Supports continuous integration and continuous delivery by automating and documenting key stages of development.
- Performance Monitoring and Incident Response Tools: Automatically finds and resolves security breaches by monitoring networks, infrastructure, and endpoints for abnormal activity.
- Bug Detection Tools: Provides detailed bug analysis that allows teams to separate, prioritize, sequence, and communicate about bugs across numerous projects.
- Task Management Software: Enables development teams to work more efficiently and effectively by tracking tasks from ideation to execution.
- Knowledge Management and Document Collaboration Platforms: Helps software teams share ideas and information so they can build more effective products together.
- Resource Management Software: Gives product leaders complete workforce visibility as well as the ability to optimize and forecast workload.
What Are the Best DevOps Tools?
With hundreds of options in each of these categories, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when trying to find the best DevOps tools for your organization. So we’ve analyzed reviews, articles, reports, and Mosaic’s own development tech stack to identify the top DevOps technologies for you to consider.
Best Version Control/Configuration Management Tool: GitHub
GitHub is a cloud-based solution that lets software developers and DevOps teams store and manage code, collaborate with teammates, track and control version changes, and automate the development workflow. It is one of the most fundamental DevOps automation tools.
Top GitHub Features
- Codespaces: Develop in a dedicated and secure environment that you can configure to work how and where you want.
- Code Review: Review new code, see visual code changes, and merge code changes with automated status checks.
- Code Owners: Allows individuals to automatically require review or approval when changes are made to sections of code that they own.
- Protected Branches: Define which contributors can work on which branches and enforce restrictions on how code branches are merged.
- Team Discussions: Post and discuss updates among your team or across your entire organization.
- Public Repositories: Work on code with other GitHub members in a public repository that you control.
Best CI/CD Software: CircleCI
CircleCI is a DevOps automation tool that helps teams automate the build, test, and deploy stages of development so they can release code more quickly.
Top CircleCI Features
- Language Agnostic: Works with all languages and operating systems, including Linux, Windows, macOS, C++, Javascript, .NET, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
- VCS Integration: Integrates with GitHub and GitHub Enterprise to create a pipeline in CircleCI every time new code is committed.
- Automated Testing: Test every commit by running every pipeline in a clean container or virtual machine.
- Notifications: Get notified instantly if a pipeline fails so you can fix issues quickly.
- Automated Deployment: Deploy passed pipelines to various environments so your product goes to market faster.
Best Performance Monitoring and Incident Response Tool: Elastic
Elastic brings together applications, infrastructure, and user data for end-to-end observability, alerting, and resolution.
Top Elastic Features
- Observability: Unify logs, metrics, traces, and more in an open, free, and scalable stack.
- SIEM and Security Analytics: Detect, investigate, and respond to evolving threats.
- Endpoint Security: Stop attacks, centralize hunting and detection, and enable interactive response.
- Search by Petabyte: Equip analysts with data for search, threat intelligence matching, reporting, and more.
Best Bug Tracking Software: Sentry
Sentry helps developers diagnose, fix, and optimize performance by continuously scanning lines of code and sending notifications if it detects any errors. Added bonus: Sentry pairs with Elastic to deliver superior security and performance.
Top Sentry Features
- Application Dashboards: Clearly visualize errors and transactions throughout your organization.
- Cross-Project Issues: Quickly navigate between errors and performance issues across multiple projects.
- Custom Queries: Identify which pieces of code are creating the most errors or which locations are encountering the most problems.
- Stack Tracing: Filter code to view your application errors, include framework errors, or show the raw trace.
- Distributed Tracing: Trace performance issues to poor-performing API calls and slow database queries.
Best Task Management Software: Jira
Jira is an issue and project tracking software that development teams use to plan, manage, and report on work. Jira touts its solution as the #1 software development tool used by agile teams.
DevOps environments use Jira to visualize and measure progress from idea to production.
Top Jira Features
- Scrum Boards: Keep your team focused on delivering iterative and incremental value as fast as possible.
- Kanban Boards: Provide full visibility into current and upcoming work.
- Roadmaps: Communicate product vision with stakeholders and keep short-term work connected to long-term goals.
- Agile Reporting: Get real-time insights into how teams are performing.
- Open DevOps: Connect information from your version control, build, deployment, and monitoring tools for instant visibility into your development pipeline.
Best Knowledge Management and Documentation Collaboration Software: Confluence
Confluence is an open and shared workspace that software teams use to share information and ideas related to projects. It facilitates strong collaboration so teams can plan to build better products.
Top Confluence Features
- Spaces: Organize all work by individuals, teams, and/or strategic projects.
- Pages: Allow teams to create, collaborate, and comment on project plans.
- Knowledge Base: Create custom knowledge bases for product requirements and documentation.
- Jira Integration: Support a seamless connection from planning to developing work, including dynamically updating roadmaps and automated issue-tracking.
Best Resource Management Software: Mosaic
Mosaic is an AI-powered, web-based resource management software that's guaranteed to boost profitability and productivity. It integrates with Jira to help effectively manage capacity and strategically plan workload. Mosaic is one of the best tools for DevOps teams to create more efficient and effective organizations.
Top Mosaic Features
- Resource Planning: See who is working on what and when, manage capacity, and get AI-powered suggestions to efficiently allocate people to projects and projects to people.
- Workload Forecasting: Get workload under control and strategically plan for the next quarter and beyond.
- Demand Analysis: Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team and pinpoint gaps, so you can plan who to hire next.
- Project Portfolio Management: Integrate with existing task or project management software to get a complete, high-level view of everything in flight.
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