DevOps Tools to Build, Test, and Deploy with Ease
These are some of the DevOps tools that can help bring the development and operations teams at your organization closer.
Creating a DevOps practice is becoming the norm, but what DevOps tools can help drive this emerging way of collaboration? One study, which surveyed 1000 SQL Server professionals, found that 47% of respondents work at an organization that has already adopted a DevOps practice of some capacity, and the other 33% of respondents work at an organization that plans to start a DevOps practice within the next two years. This means that by 2019, 1 in 3 organizations could have a DevOps practice.
Although DevOps is becoming the norm, some IT leaders are struggling to successfully create a DevOps practice, as it is difficult to reorganize people and rethink the relationship between development and operation teams. Further, technology plays a vital role in this reorganization process. Still, some IT leaders find it challenging to understand which DevOps tools and technologies they should utilize to enable this collaborative environment.
There are countless DevOps tools available. Below, we list some tools for building, testing, and deploying with ease within the DevOps environment. The following list is not exhaustive and the tools are not listed in any particular order.
What DevOps Tools Are Out There?
DevOps Tools: Building
- Gradle: An open-source automation software that can be used as a DevOps tool. Granadle helps users develop, test, deliver, and package applications onto any platform. The tool has a series of open source plugins and rich APIs.
- Maven: A popular, open-source tool for both development and testing. It is a DevOps tool that can, amongst other features, conduct unit test reports that include coverage.
- Visual Studio: A tool from Microsoft that allows users to easily compile and build projects and applications in a customized and automated fashion.
Other tools include: Bitbucket, Docker, Git, and Perforce
DevOps Tools: Testing
- MUnit: A Mule application testing framework that allows you to easily build automated tests for integrations and APIs. It provides a full suite of integration and unit test capabilities.
- SoapUI: An open source API testing tool for SOAP and REST APIs. Features include REST API functional testing, WSDL coverage, and functional testing for SOAP Web Services.
- JUnit: An open-source DevOps tool that is used widely. It is an automation server that is a part of Jenkins. This tool makes testing easier and more automated.
Other tools include: Arma, Parasoft, Perfecto, and Zuul
DevOps Tools: Deploying
- Artifactory: A binary repository management tool that can be used alongside Maven, Gradle, and other tools.
- Puppet: An open-source DevOps tool that provides users with foundations for DevOps practices, including automated testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.
- Ansible: A simple IT automation DevOps tool that allows users to automate solutions by making it easier to deploy systems and applications. The platform is comparable to Chef and Puppet.
Other tools include: Chef, HP Codar, IBM UrbanCode Deploy, and Jenkins
Integrating DevOps Tools with API-led Connectivity
As indicated by the list above, there are a myriad of tools that enterprises can utilize to create a DevOps practice. Fortunately, many of these tools are open-source, which enables teams to jump right into building a DevOps environment. The proliferation of tools, however, leads to a serious challenge: how can users integrate different DevOps tools, expose assets, and ensure regulated control in the process?
One approach is API-led connectivity, a methodical approach to integration that connects and exposes assets through modern, managed APIs. As a result, each asset or API can be integrated easily through plug-and-play. The asset also becomes discoverable through self-service and easily governed through compliance. With API-led connectivity, organizations can ensure that they are not unproductively replicating efforts, creating applications in silos, or ineffectively exposing assets across the organization.
One of our customers, a large software company, improved their DevOps practice by adopting an API-led approach to integration. The customer already had a DevOps practice in place; however, rapid growth, the proliferation of SaaS applications and DevOps tools, created an unscalable and fragile IT infrastructure connected through point-to-point integration. This infrastructure suffered from various issues, including the lack of connectivity between DevOps and continuous integration and back-office integration. In order to solve this challenge and create an effective DevOps practice, the customer needed to move beyond point-to-point, as it is an approach to integration that heightened dependencies within the DevOps environment.
With API-led connectivity, this customer was able to reset their back-office architecture and adopt a new approach to integrating their data, systems, applications, and DevOps tools, while keeping reusability, scalability, and security in mind. The customer used a canonical model to extend DevOps and continuous integration to their back-office integration. They also set up a governance process that provides granular access to specific services without compromising security.
With this new IT architecture and governance model, the customer turned to MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ to build REST APIs that can abstract the complexity of underlying systems. Adopting an API-led approach to integration significantly accelerated the customer’s development process and improved the productivity of their developers by a staggering 300%.
There are a lot of DevOps tools that organizations have at their disposal. The key is not only to choose the tool that works best for one’s use case, but to also ensure that as more tools are used in the DevOps environment, there is an efficient, exposable, and agile approach to integrate and control all assets. MuleSoft enables organizations to achieve such an approach through API-led connectivity.
Explore how APIs can help enhance DevOps models and learn how DevOps practices and tools can be applied with Anypoint Platform™.