5 Best DevOps Tools Every Beginner Should Know

DevOps has evolved as one of the most popular software development approaches in recent years. Every software professional has a strong desire to become a DevOps expert. When it comes to DevOps, companies are necessarily asking the candidates if they know certain tools like Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, etc. Having the theoretical DevOps knowledge is not enough, it is very important to have a practical understanding of how each of these mentioned DevOps tools work. Today, we will see some popular DevOps tools that most firms are interested in and ask candidates questions about.

Jenkins:

Jenkins is still considered as the most popular CI tool in the DevOps space. With Jenkins, it is effortless to achieve visual ops. To convert a CLI into a GUI button, click, wrap up the script as a Jenkins job, and it is done.

Jenkins is the most widely adopted solution by software powered firms for continuous delivery; it has a vibrant and active community. The Jenkins platform offers more than 1,700 plugins that enable Jenkins to integrate with any tool in the software world.

Jenkins is an open-source automation tool through which organizations can accelerate their software development. Jenkins manages and controls software delivery processes, including build, document, test, package, stage, deployment, and much more.

You can make use of Jenkins to see for any code changes in GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab and automatically do a build with tools like Maven and Gradle. You can also utilize modern container technology and tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, initiate tests, and take actions like rollback or roll forward in production.

Docker:

Docker and containers are a gift to the DevOps space, a new way of packaging and running software that has completely revolutionized software development and delivery these days.

Docker helps development teams around the world to build, package, manage, and secure apps anywhere and allows teams to easily collaborate, making software delivery, and release an effortless task.

One most prominent advantage of using Docker is, it provides consistent environments across the delivery pipeline.

With Docker, applications are more lightweight, portable, reliable, and run inside intact containers, which are isolated instances that provide a more agile approach for software development and deployment.

Docker makes it easy and possible to configure, save, and share server environments using containers, making it more viable for developers across the teams and aids microservices architecture. Installing an application or even any large stack can be as simple as running docker pull or docker run commands.

Start learning Docker today: Docker for the absolute beginners

Ansible:

Ansible is an open-source software automation tool that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. Ansible has become a common name among developers for DevOps and IT automation. By automating tasks like server and cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment which are complex, and strenuous, Ansible brings substantial time savings and increases the overall productivity of IT people.

Ansible works by connecting to your server with SSH and thereby pushing out small programs, known as ‘Ansible modules’ to it. Ansible’s most powerful feature of creating playbooks, a small piece of YAML code, is used to automate almost anything related to your IT requirements.

Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and, most importantly, no additional custom security infrastructure, so this makes it easy to deploy. It uses a straightforward language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allows people to use it to describe automation jobs, and this way, it’s easy to use.

Know more about Ansible in our recent article ‘What is Ansible and How it Works’

Start learning Ansible: Ansible for the absolute beginners

Kubernetes:

Kubernetes is a powerful open-source platform for container orchestration platform that automates the deployment and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes has become a synonym for cloud-native technology, and many software powered businesses are migrating their whole infrastructure and architecture to reflect a cloud-native era. The platform has become particularly popular with organizations that are utilizing and embracing DevOps methodologies.

The Kubernetes project was initially developed by Google, which later donated to the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation. It has become a de-facto platform for deploying containers in production. It enables enterprises to systematically approach DevOps practices, including microservices and containerization, by helping them optimize hardware resource utilization and increase production uptime through fault-tolerant functionality at speed. Developers love this tool because Kubernetes takes containerization to the next level, making it too simple and easier for developers who are part of DevOps teams to manage and deploy containers.

There is an article we recently wrote describing the important features of Kubernetes, take a look ‘Kubernetes Features Every Beginner Must Know’

Start learning Kubernetes: Kubernetes for the absolute beginners

OpenShift:

OpenShift is Red Hat’s open-source cloud development Platform as a Service (PaaS), which allows developers to create, test, and run their applications and deploy them to the cloud without any hassle.

RedHat saw a million-dollar opportunity and shifted its focus towards this tool, Kubernetes-based container platform, OpenShift in 2018, which was the right move.

The OpenShift capabilities are designed to make it easier for developers to work with containerized platforms such as OpenStack, Docker, and Kubernetes.

Businesses who want to be creative, innovate, and deliver better cloud services to their customers have to deal with many challenges of managing, controlling, and deploying applications at a scale. Red Hat’s OpenShift comes handy here; it provides self-service environments for the entire app’s lifecycle: this way, devs have a solid basis for their code.

Resources allocated for applications can be automatically or manually scaled so that as demand increases, there is no degradation or downtime with regards to performance.

Start learning OpenShift: OpenShift for the absolute beginners

These above-mentioned tools play a vital role in any DevOps enthusiast’s life today. Knowing these tools thoroughly can get you a DevOps job easily. DevOps works with a basic motto of bridging the gap between Developers and Operations teams. Apart from that, DevOps helps firms with increased production time, secure deployments, improved code quality, faster release to market, better communication, reduced cost, optimal utilization of resources, etc. To embrace and get benefit from DevOps, firms use tools mentioned in the article (but not limited to) that help them reduce the siloed team structures and increase overall software development productivity.