A list of Must-Have Open Source DevOps tools

• 06.07.2018
• DevOps
• 0

As a DevOps team with rich hands-on experience with providing DevOps-as-a-Service for our customers, we have to use a wide array of open source DevOps tools. The list is below, split by categories.

No doubt, the choice of the tools used mainly depends on the experience of the team members. For example, if your team has ample experience with IT infrastructure management using the tools like Salt, Puppet or Chef, working with Ansible and Jenkins, storing the code on BitBucket and working with Jira for issue tracking — this is a completely viable approach.

However, for the purpose of having the most cost-efficient operations and running the most optimized IT infrastructure, there are certain tooling combinations that clearly perform better. We list 10 main components of the software delivery (or cloud infrastructure management) workflow, and the open source DevOps tools best suited for executing the tasks during these stages:

1. Configuration management
2. Version Control
3. Code review
4. Continuous Integration
5. Continuous Delivery
6. Monitoring
7. Logging
8. Smart alerting
9. Analytics
10. Messaging

Below we list the most popular DevOps tools for each stage of the workflow and their best-performing combinations.

1. Configuration management tools like Kubernetes, Ansible, Puppet or Chef help ensure uniformity and repeatability of provisioning Infrastructure as Code. When all the team members use the same tools for provisioning and configuring the required environments, the process has is fluid and error-proof. This speeds up shipping the product to the customers greatly and shortens the things like time to market or onboarding a new team member a lot.
2. Version control management tools are essential for ensuring the continuity of software development and services delivery. Git is the core tool of modern IT industry and various source control platforms like Gitlab, Github or Bitbucket help enable the distributed code development or roll back to the latest stable code version should the need arise.
3. Code review stage is essential in ensuring the new code functions properly, does not break any previous functionality and complies with the common conventions. Github and Gitlab are the best tools for that purpose.
4. Continuous Integration coupled with automated testing is important to remove any bottlenecks in code submitting, building and testing. This is essential for reaching shorter development times, and the tools like Jenkins or Gitlab CI are essential for ensuring the needed infrastructure is provisioned without issues and automating the process.
5. Continuous Delivery of new code is essential in ensuring service continuity and positive end user experience. We use Jenkins or Gitlab CI to ensure that after a successful testing the new code is automatically pushed into production.
6. Monitoring is crucial in ensuring operational stability, optimal infrastructure performance and security. The most essential tools for this purpose include Grafana and Prometheus, Zabbix, Amazon CloudWatch, and Google StackDriver.
7. Logging is essential to provide the means for the easy performance audit, issue root tracing and compliance checks. The best tools for that from our point of view are ELK stack and FluentD.
8. Smart alerts enable the swift responses, as the issues are escalated to the appropriate persons automatically and with all the data required to solve the issue quickly. The list of tools best suited for this task includes Zabbix, Google StackDriver, Amazon SNS, Nodeping or Elast Alert.
9. Analytics is yet another essential part of software development and support. This activity is aimed at providing the overview of system performance, possible ways to customer experience improvement and the best approach to workflow optimization. We utilize the tools like Sumo Logic and Splunk for that purpose.
10. Messaging is essential for providing smooth system performance by accepting, storing and delivering various cross-language messages from different system components. The most popular message brokers are Amazon SNS and RabbitMQ and we recommend sticking to them.

These are the must-have DevOps tools in a nutshell, and almost any of their combinations will be a viable toolkit for your business. Our DevOps engineers have vast expertise with these tools and can compose the needed infrastructure for any project.

Final thoughts on the must-have open source DevOps tools

We hope the tools listed above will suffice for providing a resilient, cost-efficient and easily manageable environment for your apps, services and products. In case your IT department would need some assistance in deploying these tools for your projects — contact us and we would be glad to help!