In the past, it has never been easy for users to create a code that gets updated or to keep servers running smoothly. But these issues have been resolved since DevOps appeared, combined with the assistance of related tools like DevOps automation tools.
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What are DevOps automation tools?
DevOps automation tools are IT devices and products that operated under an automation process. Their function is to prepare source code, which will be deployed to the environment by using scripts. Depending on the language, it is necessary to compile, transform or perform unit tests,… for the code. The building automation concept is running a command-line tool to run code that has been scripted or set up in the config. Building automation should not be dependent on the IDE as well as the computer’s configurations. It means your code can be built on any PC, whether yours or someone else’s.
10 automation tools for DevOps
Now, let’s take a look at 10 notable candidates in the DevOps automation tools list:
Gradle
Gradel is a completely free and potent open-source tool. This DevOps tool can help to build most types of software quickly, and flexibly.
If you are having trouble with a software project in a short time, Gradle will assist you in automating the process of building software, managing libraries, etc. Later, Gradle will continue to optimize the compilation/interpretation, software packaging, and deployment.
Advantages:
- Gradle brings new improvements through the use of Groovy (one of the JVM languages) in solving the encapsulation problem. As a result, building scripts written in Gradle become more concise and intuitive.
- In addition, Gradle also pays attention to support many other features to improve the packaging process as well as increase developer productivity.
- In the future, Gradle will allow testing code to be distributed across multiple machines to reduce waiting time. Instead of stopping the process as soon as an error is encountered, Gradle will perform all possible tasks and aggregate all the errors encountered in a single package.
- Gradle supports many different programming languages including Java, Scala, Python, C/C++, Android, iOS
Git
Git is also considered one of the best DevOps automation tools. It is a free and open-source distributed version control system — that handles any project type and size with maximum speed and maximum efficiency.
It is a Source Code Management (SCM) tool that maintains different versions of source code and allows developers to easily track application development and progress — helping roll back to earlier versions is easier whenever required.
Outstanding features:
- Free open-source DevOps tool.
- Provides several options for code repository management and team collaboration for branches and codebases.
- Branch workflow feature.
- Enables faster release cycles.
- Provides direct integration with IDEs such as VS Code, Eclipse, and IntelliJ.
- Allows distributed development.
Jenkins
Jenkins is defined as an open source which used to perform continuously integrated functions (it is also known as CI – Continuous Integration) and can build automation-type tasks.
It integrates most of the source code of the team members quickly and continuously, tracking the execution and status through the test steps. This will help the product run more stable.
Advantages of Jenkins:
- Easy to install.
- There are more than 1000 plugins for you to work easily. If a plugin doesn’t exist, you can re-code it
- Although installing Jenkins is quite easy and simple, production causes difficulties for users. Therefore, deploying the pipeline using Jenkinsfile will require programming in its declarative languages.
Docker
Docker is a popular platform in DevOps automation tools list which develops, deploys, and runs applications with containers. It allows the creation of independent and isolated environments for application launch and development, and these environments are called containers. When you need to deploy to any server, just run the Docker container and your application will be launched immediately.
Benefits of Docker:
- Unlike virtual machines, Docker starts and stops in seconds.
- You can launch containers on each system you want.
- Containers can build and remove faster than virtual machines.
- Easy to set up the working environment. Just configure it once and never have to reinstall dependencies. If you change machines or new people join the project, you just need to take that config and give it to them.
- It keeps your word-space cleaner when you delete the environment that affects other parts.
Drawbacks:
- It does not offer a hosting option.
- Bad tracking.
- No automatic reprogramming of inactive buttons.
- Actions must be performed in the CLI.
- You need to support other tools.
- Complex manual cluster deployment.
- Docker is a for-profit company, and some of its key components, such as the Docker Engine and Docker Desktop, are not open source.
SeleniumHQ
Selenium is a set of specialized software tools capable of Automation Testing (automatic testing) utterly free of charge and supports operating on browsers with many different platforms such as Linux, Windows, and Mac,… With Selenium, you are completely capable of writing test scripts in many other popular programming languages such as C#, Java, Ruby, Java, Python, PHP, Perl, and Javascript,…
Outstanding advantages:
- Selenium is open source, anyone can download the source code to use, and change the code according to their needs.
- Selenium allows writing test scripts in many languages from Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP… (but 77% of Selenium Testers use
- Java, Selenium IDE does not support any language, and QTP only allows writing in VBScript. ).
- Selenium supports many operating systems: Windows, Linux, and Macintosh… (write Test Cases that can be deployed in other operating systems)
- Selenium supports many major browsers (Mozilla, Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari,…) (write generic Test Cases and only browser driver changes)
Drawback:
- Free and reliable Technical support is not provided because it is open source
- Only Web Applications are supported
- Difficult to use, it takes time to learn to write Test cases (Selenium WebDriver only has a programming interface, k IDE; does not have
- Tool features such as Recording, Checkpoint, and Data Table, so you have to write step by step for each task).
- Little support for image testing
- No built-in features for the Test Manager
Chef
Chef is a cloud infrastructure automation system and framework that makes it easy to deploy 1 and multiple servers and applications to any physical, virtual, or virtual infrastructure. cloud regardless of the size & size of that infrastructure.
It consists of one or more workstations, a Server chef, and nodes created by the chef-client. Cookbooks and recipes are used to tell the chef-client how to create a node.
Feature:
- It maintains high availability.
- It can manage multiple cloud environments.
- It uses the popular Ruby language to create a domain-specific language.
- Chef does not make any assumptions about the current state of the code. It uses its mechanism to get the current state of the machine.
Ansible
Ansible is one of the modern configuration management tools, it facilitates the installation, management, and maintenance of remote servers, with a minimalist design that helps users get up and running quickly…Users write Ansible licensing scripts in YAML, a user-friendly data serialization standard, they are not tied to any programming language. As a result, users can create complex licensing scripts more intuitively than other tools in the same category.
Advantages:
- It doesn’t take a lot of resources to install
- Developed by python language, when creating more modules will also use this language.
- Quite light and easy to set up
- The scripts are mainly used in YAML. format
- There is a large interactive community, easy to exchange and learn.
Nagios
Nagios is one of the most useful automation tools in DevOps software that assists network administrators in monitoring Hosts, Services (DHCP, HTTP,…), and some system resources such as disk space, CPU activity, etc…in the network.
Advantages:
- Provides rich collection that allows users to collect performance and availability data from a wide range of operating systems including
- Windows and Netware
- High availability
- Alerts, monitoring via a web interface, accessible from anywhere
Drawback:
- Web GUI is not good, and to manage the server with this software, you have to learn and learn a lot.
ELK
ELK Stack is a collection of 3 pieces of software that go together for logging work:
- Elasticsearch: Database for storing, searching, and querying logs.
- Logstash: Receives logs from multiple sources, then processes logs and writes data to Elasticsearch.
- Kibana: Interface to manage and log statistics. Read information from Elasticsearch.
The strength of ELK is the ability to collect, display, and query in real-time. Can satisfy the query of an extremely large amount of data.
Splunk
Splunk – a remarkable factor in the list of DevOps automation tools, which is a security monitoring software based on the power of Log analysis. Splunk performs the search, monitoring, and analysis of large log data generated by applications, systems, and network infrastructure devices. It can work well with many data formats (Syslog, CSV, apache-log, access_combine…). Splunk is built on top of Lucene and MongoDB with a very intuitive web interface. You are viewing: What is Splunk
Features:
- Log Format: Splunk supports almost all types of system logs, network infrastructure devices, software, Firewall, IDS/IPS, Log Event, and registers of workstations…
- Splunk is strong in analysis and alerting capabilities, but it is not powerful and does not guarantee log collection and transmission. Specifically, it does not have a security mechanism on the transmission line, not suitable for systems that require high security.
- To fully exploit the power of Splunk, it takes time to learn and use. It does not have a mechanism to automatically detect attacks or problems from the outside. But this depends on the user’s experience and knowledge of the administrator.
- To deploy a system using Splunk effectively, we also need a separate system, which is also a big obstacle for small and medium-sized systems.
Summary
So, those are the top 10 most popular automation tools used in DevOps. Depending on the businesses’ tasks and needs, it is essential to consider, evaluate and choose the most suitable tool.
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