These days it is quite difficult for businesses to survive in this competitive world. The world is changing really fast and it is very important for entrepreneurs to keep up with the pace. Now businesses are looking to automate the whole process so as to increase overall efficiency and productivity. DevOps is the new trend, which every business is going for as it is aimed at making technology-based infrastructures and software that can take the business to all new heights and for this businesses are always in search of highly proficient DevOps engineers who can help them in their vision.
Talking about modern technologies, cloud computing is the most growing and popular technology among all which has grabbed the attention of many businesses with its significant features. Also, for business automation, tools and cloud infrastructure really matters, and choosing the right one is important for your business. This is the main reason why business owners get too skeptical while choosing the right set of tools and platforms for their business.
Cloud computing and DevOps go hand in hand. Wherein cloud speeds up the productivity of developers and provides more control over their component, DevOps facilitate developers and operations to work together using the cloud as a common language. Both of these are aimed at increasing efficiency and productivity by saving time.
Cloud computing has three main categories SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). All these categories are highly popular and are in demand but today, we are going to talk about IaaS and some of the top tools for IaaS Cloud computing.
What is IaaS?
IaaS provides outsourced computing infrastructure to users and organizations. Being an Internet world, it offers services to consumers over the Internet. Businesses adopt IaaS cloud computing services to scale new or existing applications to larger audiences. Also, it provides flexibility to pricing based on “pay as you go”, i.e. users can easily rent or buy the specific services that they need. It automatically turns out to be a lower-cost alternative. You can compare the same by comparing an organization that is currently managing its on-premise infrastructure and the one that has switched the business to IaaS, i.e. outsourced computing infrastructure.
IaaS solutions help businesses to automate their whole process and to do so, various tools are required. Automation tools come in handy no matter which cloud you are using, public, private, or hybrid. These tools help automate processes like application performance management, error monitoring, and log management.
List down is the name of automation tools that have turned into game-changing Infrastructure automation tools in managing your workload.
Puppet
Puppet is one of the greatest DevOps programs for managing servers. It is majorly used for deploying, configuring, and managing servers. It helps you through event-driven automation and connect the cloud service providers, DevOps tools, and other APIs. In a system administrator where multiple servers get problematic, a puppet comes in help. By writing as simple code and deploying it to the servers having issues you are set to the new desired states in a matter of seconds. It automated the manual tasks and thus saves time.
Ansible
It is a simple IT automation engine. It is a powerful tool and is enough to automate complex multi-tier IT application environments. Application deployment, configuration management, cloud provisioning, and intra-service orchestration can be simply automated by this tool. As data has grown, the complexity has arisen. Ansible allows you to create a group of machines and issue a single command from a central location to perform the tasks.
SaltStack
SaltStack is a remote-execution tool that allows administrators to run commands against a remote server and automatically manage any infrastructure application at scale. Being a configuration management software, SaltStack establishes a master-minion model that executes the tasks specified in the commands and then returns the resulting data to the Master.
CFEngine
It is widely known as the godfather of configuration management tools and automation framework. It automatically rolls out updates and changes to every node in your infrastructure, no matter the count of nodes you have. Its autonomous agents run on every node providing the desired stage and report back continuously. It can easily handle tens of thousands of nodes and runs on the smallest embedded devices. This tool is quite popular among top cloud computing service providers in the world.
Juju
It is an open-source orchestration management tool that enables the modeling, configuration, and management of deployments to all major private and public clouds by following just a few commands. Juju takes care of how to subsequently scale and manage those applications which are configured or installed with the parent one to connect.
Jenkins
It is a java-based integration tool, majorly used for the faster delivery of applications. Through automation and built-in plugins, Jenkins is used to building and testing your software projects. It is free of cost and easy to install. It is used to build and test your software projects and thus makes it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project and obtain a fresh build.
Docker
It is a lightweight open-source containerization technology that automates the deployment of applications in containers. Majorly, it is being used now to create and run Linux containers. It is portable and thus provides the feasibility to run in each container across any desktop or data center. Multi-Docker applications can be run on a single platform, also it can run without Kubernetes. It is a great fit and even if your application is not a fit for the container, it pays back your efforts. Entrepreneurs are often confused between Docker vs. Kubernetes and are unable to decide which one to go for.
New relic
It works as a service and you can access it anytime and from anywhere, thus no installation is required. It lets you work in real-time with your live web app. It provides you the feasibility of monitoring and lets you prepare a nice report which shows the data of when downtime has occurred.
Vagrant
Vagrant lets you build a virtual machine environment in a single workflow. It is open-source software and majorly maintains virtual software development environments. It runs on top of VM solutions like VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V, etc.
Crowbar
Many IT organizations like Dell have adopted DevOps guidelines and have created an open-source project “Crowbar”. It accelerates multi-node deployments, simplifies maintenance, and streamlines ongoing updates.
Conclusion
Automation is a requirement of every DevOps development team and the selection of a tool depends upon factors like cost, skillset, functionality, etc. A single tool may not necessarily meet your requirements. Hope the above-provided details on core tools can be of use to you in a typical DevOps environment. No matter the kind of cloud you are working upon, private, public, or hybrid, the tools information provided above will come in handy.
