How To Choose the Right DevOps Tool for Your Project

Infrastructure automation plays a key role in the DevOps process. Enabling repeatability so that environments can be set up quickly helps teams to manage their workloads more efficiently and deploy software faster. DevOps tools for infrastructure automation streamline processes and minimize the need for manual intervention. The best ones help teams to be more productive and efficient while gaining much-needed control and visibility over their applications and operations.

Let’s look at the factors you should consider when selecting a DevOps tool for your project, as well as some of the most useful tools in various categories.

DevOps Practices

Firstly, embracing DevOps practices can not only improve software delivery but also facilitate a more cohesive and productive team environment, leading to the overall success of the organization. Those practices include:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Configuration management
• Continuous integration and delivery
• Container orchestration and image management
• Monitoring and logging

However, they require specialized tools to ensure successful implementation. Each tool plays a critical role in enabling DevOps teams to work more efficiently and effectively. 

What To Remember When Choosing Your DevOps Tool

The key factors to bear in mind when identifying the right tool for automating your infrastructure:

Is It Compatible With Your Infrastructure?

It doesn’t matter what kind of stellar reviews a tool has received if it does not work with your existing infrastructure. Ensure the tools that make your shortlist are a good fit with your current infrastructure and can be integrated into your existing workflow.

Does It Have the Features You Are Looking For?

Think about the features and functionality your team relies on to deliver for the organization. Do the tools you are considering have the functionality to meet those needs?

How Accessible Is It?

Your DevOps team likely has an arsenal of tools at their disposal already. They won’t thank you if the infrastructure automation tool you add to that arsenal is difficult to learn and takes considerable effort to adopt. Ensure your tool of choice is easy to use and has a user-friendly interface.

Is It Possible To Scale?

Your organization has ambitions. Pick a tool that can match those ambitions by scaling with your organization as it expands and evolves.

How Does It Integrate With Other Tools You Are Using?

As well as being compatible with your existing infrastructure, the tool must integrate well with the other tools and platforms your team uses.

Does It Have Good Support and Documentation?

Even the most intuitive and reliable tools won’t work as you expect all the time. Find a tool with robust documentation and a strong support network to give you peace of mind when those gaps and issues arise.

How Much Does It Cost?

Does the cost of using the tools align with your budget? Consider both once-off and ongoing charges.

Some DevOps Tools Options

Once you’ve identified the features your infrastructure automation tool must have, you’ll need to navigate the available options. Below are listed some of the most popular tools to help you with DevOps practices.:

Terraform

Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure as Code tool created by HashiCorp. It enables you to define and provision infrastructure on various cloud providers in a high-level configuration language, also known as Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL).

Pulumi

Unlike other IaC tools, the open-source IaC tool Pulumi allows users to define and manage infrastructure resources using programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, and Go. This means users can harness the full power of these languages to define and manage their infrastructure and rely on familiar tools and libraries to automate complex tasks.

Ansible

The open-source platform Ansible is often combined with tools such as Terraform and Packer. Its simplicity and flexibility make it a popular choice for configuration management.

Chef

Unlike Ansible, Chef relies on a pull-based model in which nodes pull their configuration information from a central server periodically instead of having the configuration pushed to them. This enables enhanced flexibility and scalability because the manual configuration is not required to add or remove nodes from the system.

Puppet

Both Chef and Puppet are configuration management tools built in Ruby. Configuration code is written for Puppet using its DSL and wrapped in modules. However, Chef is more developer-centric than Puppet, which is targeted at system administrators.

Spacelift

The collaborative continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) platform Spacelift helps you manage infrastructure provisioning workflows. Its easy-to-use interface is compatible with cloud-agnostic IaC tools like Terraform and Pulumi and cloud-specific IaC features like AWS CloudFormation and Azure ARM templates.

Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server widely used in the software development industry to automate tasks such as building and testing code, releasing software updates, and deploying applications to production environments. Designed for maximum extensibility and flexibility, it is easy to customize using the many plugins available.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for automating software releases and deployments. It simplifies the management and deployment of applications across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid.

Kubernetes

Designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes enables a platform-agnostic approach to deploying and managing containers. With Kubernetes, it is easier to build and maintain scalable, reliable, and portable applications.

Nomad

The open-source workload orchestrator Nomad is simple and flexible. Developed by HashiCorp, it allows you to easily deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-premise and on clouds at scale.

Red Hat Openshift

OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container orchestration platform that gathers together other software such as Tekton, Grafana, Prometheus, RHEL CoreOS, and CRI-O in a single set of software to easily run Kubernetes in production.

Packer

Developed by HashiCorp, Packer creates identical machine and container images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Its “Images as Code” approach enables it to standardize and automate the process of building machine images.

Vagrant

Designed for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow, Vagrant works with various infrastructure providers, including VirtualBox, VMware, and AWS. With its simple command-line interface to manage the lifecycle of virtual machines, it allows developers to create and configure lightweight, portable, and reproducible development environments.

Prometheus

The open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit Prometheus helps you collect and track metrics from your applications and infrastructure, as well as identify and troubleshoot issues. Widely used in cloud-native environments, it is a popular choice for monitoring Kubernetes clusters.

Sensu

Sensu is an observability platform for monitoring and troubleshooting infrastructure and application issues. Highly scalable and flexible, it can be used to monitor a wide variety of systems and services, including bare metal and cloud-native environments.

Nagios

The industry-standard IT infrastructure monitoring tool Nagios is used to monitor IT infrastructure, sort log data quickly, and analyze bandwidth. It alerts administrators when issues arise or thresholds are reached and can be used for a wide range of resources.

Cloud Provider–Specific Tools

• AWS CloudFormation
• Azure Resource Manager
• AWS CDK
• Google Cloud Deployment

These tools can also function as IaC tools but are used mainly for configuration management.

Making a Decision

Infrastructure automation allows you to focus your energies on where it will generate the most value, so it is important to choose the right tool. Take the time to identify your key requirements and review the tools we’ve mentioned for provisioning, configuration management, continuous integration and delivery, container orchestration, and monitoring.

Regardless of the scale of your organization, one of these tools will help you automate your infrastructure and enhance your overall development and operations workflow.