Dev ops tools

1
Professional Guru
DevOps Tools
If youre considering DevOps, you have many
moving parts to consider. Core to this structure
are automated provisioning, automated testing,
and automated build and deployment. At the same
time, you need to maintain continuous feedback,
with information continuously moving back and
forth, as well as making sure that you log pretty
much everything.
Figure 1 DevOps has many moving parts, and you
need to have best practices and technology in
place for each step. As to the best practices
for choosing DevOps tools you can use to approach
your DevOps implementation, these can be boiled
down to seven steps.
2
Professional Guru

• Step 1 Understand the collaboration and shared
  tools strategy for the Dev, QA, and
  infrastructure automation teams
• DevOps teams need to come up with a common tools
  strategy that lets them collaborate across
  development, testing, and deployment (see Figure
  1). This does not mean that you should spend days
  arguing about tooling it means you work on a
  common strategy that includes DevOps...
• Processes
• Communications and collaboration planning
• Continuous development tools
• Continuous integration tools
• Continuous testing tools
• Continuous deployment tools
• Continuous operations and CloudOps tools
• Coming up with a common tools strategy does not
  drive tool selection at least not at this
  point. It means picking a common share strategy
  that all can agree upon and that is reflective of
  your business objectives for DevOps.
• The tool selection process often drives
  miscommunication within teams. A common DevOps
  tools strategy must adhere to a common set of
  objectives while providing seamless collaboration
  and integration between tools. The objective is
  to automate everything Developers should be able
  to send new and changed software to deployment
  and operations without humans getting in the way
  of the processes.

3
Professional Guru
Step 2 Use tools to capture every request No ad
hoc work or changes should occur outside of the
DevOps process, and DevOps tooling should capture
every request for new or changed software. This
is different from logging the progress of
software as it moves through the processes.
DevOps provides the ability to automate the
acceptance of change requests that come in either
from the business or from other parts of the
DevOps teams. Examples include changing software
to accommodate a new tax model for the business,
or changing the software to accommodate a request
to improve performance of the database access
module. Step 3 Use agile Kanban project
management for automation and DevOps requests
that can be dealt with in the tooling Kanban is a
framework used to implement agile development
that matches the amount of work in progress to
the team's capacity. It gives teams more flexible
planning options, faster output, clear focus, and
transparency throughout the development
cycle. Kanban tools provide the ability to see
what you do today, or all the items in context
with each other. Also, it limits the amount of
work in progress, which
4
Professional Guru
helps balance flow-based approaches so that you
dont attempt to do too much at once. Finally,
Kanban tools can enhance flow. In Kanban, when
one work item is complete, the next highest item
from the backlog gets pushed to development.
Step 4 Use tools to log metrics on both manual
and automated processes Select tools that can
help you understand the productivity of your
DevOps processes, both automated and manual, and
to determine if they are working in your favor.
You need to do two things with these tools.
First, define which metrics are relevant to the
DevOps processes, such as speed to deployment
versus testing errors found. Second, define
automated processes to correct issues without
human involvement. An example would be dealing
with software scaling problems automatically on
cloud-based platforms. Step 5 Implement test
automation and test data provisioning
tooling Test automation is more than just
automated testing its the ability to take code
and data and run standard testing routines to
ensure the quality of the code, the data, and the
overall solution. With DevOps, testing must be
continuous. The ability to toss code and data
into the process means you need to place the code
into a sandbox, assign test data to the
application, and run hundreds or thousands of
tests that, when completed, will automatically
5
Professional Guru
promote the code down the DevOps process, or
return it back to the developers for rework.

• Step 6 Perform acceptance tests for each
  deployment tooling
• Part of the testing process should define the
  acceptance tests that will be a part of each
  deployment, including levels of acceptance for
  the infrastructure, applications, data, and even
  the test suite that youll use. For the tool set
  selected, those charged with DevOps testing
  processes should to spend time defining the
  acceptance tests, and ensuring that the tests
  meet with the acceptance criteria selected.
• These tests may be changed at any time by
  development or operations. And as applications
  evolve over time, you'll need to bake new
  requirements into the software, which in turn
  should be tested against these new requirements.
  For example, you might need to test changes to
  compliance issues associated with protecting
  certain types of data, or performance issues to
  ensure that the enterprise meets service-level
  agreements.
• Step 7 Ensure continuous feedback between the
  teams to spot gaps, issues, and inefficiencies

6
Professional Guru
Finally, you'll need feedback loops to automate
communication between tests that spot issues, and
tests that process needs to be supported by your
chosen tool. The right tool must identify the
issue using either manual or automated
mechanisms, and tag the issue with the artifact
so the developers or operators understand what
occurred, why it occurred, and where it
occurred. The tool should also help to define a
chain of communications with all automated and
human players in the loop. This includes an
approach to correct the problem in collaboration
with everyone on the team, a consensus as to what
type of resolution you should apply, and a list
of any additional code or technology required.
Then comes the push to production, where the tool
should help you define tracking to report whether
the resolution made it through automated testing,
automated deployment, and automated
operations. Picking the tools Here are the tools
that are part of the DevOps mix and that relate
to the best practices/steps listed above
7
Professional Guru
Figure 2 Tools for DevOps, by category The
number of tools from which you can choose for
DevOps is both large and confusing, so break it
down by focusing on categories and the functions
you need.

• Major DevOps tool categories
• The major tool categories include
• Version control Tools that track software
  versions as they are released, whether manually
  or automatically. This means numbering versions,
  as well as tracking the configuration and any
  environmental dependencies that are present, such
  as the type, brand, and version of the database
  the operating

8
Professional Guru

• system details and even the type of physical or
  virtual server
• thats needed. This category is related to change
• management tools.
• Build and deploy Tools that automate the
  building and deployment of software throughout
  the DevOps process, including continuous
  development and continuous
• integration.
• Functional and non-functional testing Tools that
  provide automated testing, including best
  practices listed above.
• Testing tools should provide integrated unit,
  performance, and security testing services. The
  objective should be end-to- end automation.
• Provisioning and change management Tools to
  provision the platforms needed for deployment of
  the software, as well as monitor and log any
  changes occurring to the configuration, the data,
  or the software. These tools ensure that you can
  get the system back to a stable state, no matter
  what occurs.