devops

By Michael Zhou

Integrating development with operations is a great way to bring a new view to software development for any business. This is why more companies are seeing the value of DevOps. Last year, around 17 percent of companies fully adopted DevOps, nearly double from the year before.

And DevOps is still on the rise. In fact, 60 percent of businesses are actively seeking to hire software developers in multiple disciplines to grow their tech teams. This includes DevOps for open source cloud, big data, app development, and security.

But in today’s digital age, your software developer and engineer teams are only as good as the DevOps tools they have at their fingertips. Let’s take a closer look at a few of the top tools you can employ in 2020 for your business.

1. Raygun

Monitoring errors can be essential to a business’ DevOps process. Raygun, an application performance monitoring (APM) tool does this very well, from monitoring to crash reporting.

Developers and engineers can use Raygun to examine and diagnose performance issues and track down the specific area where the issues derived, like in the code, API, or function. This tool can also find issues and prioritize them for developer and engineer teams.

2. Gradle

Gradle is a developer build tool that has been in use by DevOps teams for a decade. It is a multi-tool developers utilize for writing code in Python, Java, C++, and more. Gradle is also compatible with IDEs such as Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA. And this developer tool is very scalable. In fact, Google used Gradle to build out Android Studio.

One of the best aspects of Gradle is the incremental builds. This is enticing to a lot of developers, since it can save time building out projects. It has actually been touted as over 100 times faster than popular build tool Maven. It does this by repurposing task outputs with the daemon building out information between builds. Pretty efficient.

3. Ansible

When it comes to configuration management in the DevOps space, Ansible is a developer tool of choice. This developer tool configures infrastructure and also automates deployment. Kind of like tools Puppet or Chef, only Ansible is easier to use and has a general simplistic feel compared to other DevOps tools like it.

Ansible also boasts agentless architecture, meaning no agents or daemons run in the background during operation. It is also a highly secured tool that is preferred for configuration management automation, due to being so lightweight. Many tech companies are utilizing the Ansible for application deployment, and will continue to do so in 2020.

4. Git

Let’s take a deeper look at one of the most used DevOps tools out there. Git is a distributed source code management (SCM) developer tool that open source contributors and remote DevOps teams can’t work without. You can track development project progress, save different variations of your source code, and easily jump back to previous versions when needed.

You can also experiment more using Git in the development process, since it allows you to create different branches and merge them when ready. However, integration requires repositories so the team can push work, like GitHub and Bitbucket.

5. Jenkins

When you need a DevOps automation tool, Jenkins is the most utilized by developers around the world. Jenkins is an open source CI/CD server that lets you automate multiple stages of your delivery pipeline. Mostly, development teams like Jenkins for its massive plugin ecosystem with over 1,000 plugins that are compatible with other DevOps tools.

It also allows you to plugin and customize your CI/CD pipeline on your terms. Available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, you can quickly get started using Jenkins. Iterate and deploy new code at lightning speed with the tool that developer teams love.

6. Docker

Docker is a container platform that could possibly be one of the most important developer tools available. By making distributed development possible while automating app deployment, Docker popularity by DevOps teams continues to soar. Essentially, this developer tool isolates apps into separate containers, making them secure and portable. This eliminates the need for virtual machines.

And you don’t need to worry about dependency management. All dependencies in an apps container can be shipped as their own independent units, allowing you to run an app on any machine seamlessly. Docker also integrates with Jenkins (see above), as well as Bamboo, another developer automation tool similar to Jenkins. You can even use Docker via the cloud.

What DevOps Tool Will You Utilize In 2020?

The above developer tools are just the tip of the iceberg. There are certainly plenty others, but these are among the most used by DevOps teams. When it comes to your business, be sure to arm your software developers and engineers with the tools they need to get the job done efficiently, and with as little headache as possible. What’s your favorite developer tool?

Michael Zhou is a Senior VP of Business Intelligence Development and has assisted the Fortune 1000 company with expertise in the web as a whole, including ground-zero marketing efforts that benefit both consumer and vendor. He is also contributor on Esprittoday.

DevOps stock photo by Panchenko Vladimir/Shutterstock