DevOps, the word seems to be a buzzword in the past few years, is the most searched for on the Internet by IT recruiters, software companies and agencies. Professional supporters believe that this has nothing to do with tools or automation, but they ignore the point that tools actually carry a DevOps culture. We all agree that
DevOps is not just about tools, or even about a single role. DevOps is actually a combination of people, processes, and tools. However, if an organization wants to implement DevOps, tools play an important role.
In this article, we will introduce eight
DevOps automation tools, and every company needs to rely on them for continuous improvement.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes, the de facto standard for container orchestration platforms. It is a very popular open source platform, was born in Google, Google open source in 2014. Kubernetes is used to manage applications composed of multiple self-contained runtimes (that is, containers). Containers are recently replacing virtual machines as the standard model for publishing applications.
A Kubernetes cluster has a master node and multiple worker nodes, and each worker node can handle multiple pods. Pod is a unit of work composed of multiple containers. Developers can start with Pods. After preparing Pods, the next step is to specify the definition of Pods to the master node and how many Pods we want to deploy. Kubernetes is responsible for the rest. It will acquire Pods and deploy them to worker nodes. If a worker node goes down, Kubernetes will automatically start a new pod on the other available worker nodes. Kubernetes simplifies the process of managing containerized applications, making it easier to build and add more features and improve customer satisfaction through improved applications.
Rancher
Rancher is a container management platform that can easily deploy container environments (including Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and Docker Swarm full releases), and makes container cluster operations on the cloud or infrastructure platforms easier. Rancher 2.0 is a multi-cluster management tool for managing
Kubernetes clusters. It provides a user interface that can help the Kubernetes team improve efficiency. If you want to achieve higher high availability and platform reliability, you generally use clusters. Clusters combine servers into a single set of manageable computing power, and often use containerized methods.
It is difficult for developers to manage these things themselves. Fortunately, Rancher simplifies cluster container management. As of early 2018, Rancher was only used to orchestrate Kubernetes clusters.
Spinnaker
As the company grows, the number of technologies, tools, and personnel managing these tools has grown tremendously, which often leads to confusion within the company and increases the complexity and fragmentation of the technology stack. For small companies, the fragmented continuous delivery process may be no problem, but as the company grows, maintaining and understanding this process becomes more and more challenging. Newcomers may take a long time to understand, discover, and organize all the tools and processes required for deployment, even to make the simplest change.
Spinnaker launched by Netflix is to solve this problem. It is a universal and extensible tool that provides users with building blocks to develop custom continuous delivery pipelines and can be effectively expanded.
Spinnaker is regarded as an ideal continuous delivery tool by many modern software companies. It provides developers with visibility and control of the software delivery process, helping them better understand how to deliver software.
Artifactory
Most developers access the Internet in various ways and obtain dependencies from external repositories. This severely affects the communication between the development team, because we can not track what dependent packages or versions are introduced into the company's software environment. Artifactory is a binary repository manager that can be used to store binary files. It's like a binary version of Git. As a DevOps tool, Artifactory's main goal is to help developers manage third-party dependency packages, thereby providing continuous integration, continuous delivery, and
continuous deployment capabilities to help enterprises achieve DevOps.
Fortune 500 companies, such as Google, Amazon, Cisco, etc., use Artifact Repository Manager as a common dependency package repository manager that can support all dependency packages, regardless of the language or tool they are developed in. Artifactory provides an automated end-to-end solution that facilitates the tracking of development and production environment dependency packages, facilitates the collaboration of DevOps teams, and automates tasks effortlessly.
Artifactory provides the DevOps team with all the necessary tools to help them effectively deal with the growing binaries, environment, and distributed sites to ensure a smooth application development workflow. Artifactory does not need to create different copies of the same file, helping developers save a lot of time. Only one copy of the binary file is stored in the file system, reducing confusion and interference within and between teams.
Why should you use dependent package repositories?
Speed up development;
Improve developer productivity;
Release faster and automate the development pipeline;
Seamless teamwork;
To save time, find the appropriate dependencies over and over again.
Although the main goal of Artifactory is to provide a neat and safe way to manage third-party dependent packages, it can also be used to store the software packages generated by the development team, label them, version them, and release them in time to make them clear Know what is packed.
Linkerd
Linkerd is an open source lightweight service
network developed by Buoyant. Many successful large companies, such as PayPal and Expedia, use them in production environments. It brings greater reliability, security and visibility to cloud-native applications. Buoyant first proposed the term service mesh in 2016, so Linkerd is the originator of "service mesh".
Linkerd provides observability, communication methods, and other subtle aspects of microservices running in a cluster without any code changes from the microservices.
The service grid is a specialized infrastructure layer. The basic functions are used to control, manage, and establish connections between services, so that various parts of the application can communicate with each other, making the operation of microservices more efficient. Service meshes are commonly used in
cloud-native applications, containers, and microservices to quickly package images and deliver high-quality software.
Linkerd provides the SRE team with visibility, reliability, security, and top-level service metrics at the platform layer rather than the application layer.
Helm
Helm is mainly used to help Kubernetes architects simplify the installation and management of Kubernetes applications.
Helm uses a packaging format called chart. A chart is a set of files describing a set of related Kubernetes available resources. A chart can be used to deploy something simple.
From an architectural perspective, Helm has two ends, one is the client, which is the Helm command-line tool, which we call the Helm CLI, and the other is the server, which is Tiller. Helm CLI is a command that runs on the local machine. It uses a template engine to generate easy-to-understand Kubernetes YAML based on source templates defined in Helm.
After generating YAML, it sends the request to Tiller running in the Kubernetes cluster. Next, Tiller performs an update in the Kubernetes cluster to ensure that it is up-to-date and correctly published, and then adds it to the history record, which can be rolled back later as needed. In the released Helm 3, Tiller was removed.
Sumo Logic
The Sumo Logic platform helps companies make data-driven decisions through analysis and prediction, reducing the time spent investigating security and operation and maintenance issues, so that they can free up resources to do more important things based on priority.
Sumo Logic converts computer-generated data into a simple dashboard, providing users with operational insights through easy-to-understand graphs, tables, and other visual elements. Many companies around the world use Sumo Logic to build, run, and secure applications and cloud infrastructure, making Sumo Logic an indispensable
DevOps tool in the industry.
Sumo Logic's predictive analysis is very powerful, can predict abnormal behavior and KPI violations, and send warnings, which improves DevOps efficiency and helps to fix all problems.
Slack
It is important to send instant messages, feedback and knowledge sharing among team members. When implementing DevOps, the flow of information, real-time interaction, and a high degree of collaboration are the most important. Don't you think Slack was born for this? Financial company Capital One considers Slack to be the most important
DevOps tool. Capital One deployed Slack in mid-2016 and quickly became the tool of choice for its IT department.
Now, you can automate a lot of manual and repetitive development tasks through Slack, and its message notification mechanism can easily let users see what is happening in real time. While many large companies are still looking for team-centric productivity tools, Slack has done a lot of work in this area.
