DevOps Automation Tools: Top 24 Must-Have Tools

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools for DevOps:

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation is a service which allows users to use template files to automate the setup of AWS resources. As a user, it also allows them to model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources to treat infrastructure as code. It is recognized as one of the best DevOps automation tools that provides ease to developers and businesses to create a plethora of AWS and third-party resources.

This tool comes with various use cases. For example, it can be used as CloudFormation templates for AWS services; therefore, it offers many use cases, such as Ground Station, the AWS satellite management solution.

Important features:

1. Allows you to build your own resource providers using an open-source tool (AWS CloudFormation CLI), which streamlines the development process, including local testing and code generation.
2. Lets users to model the entire cloud environment in text files. It means that you, as a user, can use open-source declarative languages, for example, JSON, to explain what AWS resources want users to create and configure.
3. Enables to build serverless apps at minimal time. AWS SAM is an open-source framework. With a few lines per resource, the user can define the app which you want to model by using YAML (human-friendly data serialization language).

Terraform

With an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) software tool, Terraform, you can create and manage resources on cloud platforms via APIs. To put it simply, this DevOps automation tool allows users to build, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Important features: 

1. Generates a resource graph and enables to building resources as efficiently as possible while providing users greater insights into their infrastructure.
2. Implements complicated changesets to the infrastructure with virtually no human interaction.
3. It can create an execution plan automatically when the user describes the infrastructure. This plan is all about what this DevOps automation tool will do and ask for approvals before initiating any change in infrastructure.

Progress Chef

Progress Chef or Chef is one of the powerful DevOps automation tools that can deploy, repair, manage, and update servers and apps in any environment. It is also known as “configuration management.” DevOps tool manages the infrastructure by writing codes instead of using manual processes.

Important features:

1. Since it has a client-server architecture, Chef supports various platforms, such as Windows, Ubuntu, Centos, and Solaris.
2. Easily integrated with cloud platforms, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and OpenStack.
3. It can easily manage hundreds of servers with ‘n’ number of employees.
4. Creates and maintains a blueprint of the entire infrastructure.

Ansible

An open-source IT automation tool, Ansible, automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and many more IT processes. From an organization’s point of view, this tool can help you demonstrate value, connect teams, and deliver efficiencies.

Important features:

1. Since the Ansible tool does not rely on any agent software and has no additional security infrastructure; therefore, it is easy to deploy.
2. It uses automated workflows and provisioning. Hence, it makes orchestrating tasks easier. In other words, a seamless orchestration involves bringing different elements into a run operation.
3. With the Ansible tool, users do not need to monitor each machine for security compliance manually.

Helm

Helm is also known as the package manager for Kubernetes, helping in app deployment by packaging all essential resources for a seamless Kubernetes deployment.

Important features:

1. Makes apps deployment easy, seamless, and standardized
2. Lessens the complexity of deploying microservices
3. Improves the speed of deployment
4. Enhances productivity

Puppet

A configuration management tool, Puppet, is used to deploy, configure, and manage servers. This tool allows developers to build, test and launch apps without relying on the Ops team in order to provide the required resources. Puppet is widely famous among more than 500 Fortune companies, such as Porsche AG, Swiss Reinsurance, ANZ, etc.

Important features:

1. Due to the Resource Abstraction Layer (RAL), Puppet can target the specified configuration of the system without knowing the implementation details that are defined in the underlying configuration file.
2. Supports Idempotency. Its unique and useful feature helps to keep machines updated for several years. To put it simply, there is no need to rebuild the same machine so many times whenever configuration changes occur.

DevOps Tools for CI/CD:

CircleCI

CircleCI is a CI/CD platform that can be used to implement DevOps practices. In other words, it is a CI solution that emphasizes speed, flexibility and reliability.

Important features:

1. It provides fast builds that can be easily optimized for speed.
2. Configure to run complicated pipelines efficiently with caching, Docker layer caching in order to run faster machines.

Jenkins

Jenkins, a continuous integration tool, allows developers to create new code with seamless ongoing development, testing, and deployment. With this tool, each task is continuously monitored by the CI Server, which enhances the efficiency of code builds and verification. It simply lessens the burden of testers, and provides quick integration with less wasted resources.

Important features:

1. An open-source resource that is backed by heavy community support.
2. Comes with easy installation, configuration, and distribution.
3. Embraces hundreds of plugins.

Docker

Docker allows building and running of distributed apps on several systems. This is a high-end DevOps tool that helps in assembling the applications swiftly from the components. It is best suited for container management.

Important features:

1. Enhances productivity and configures the system faster.
2. Provides containers for the apps that run in an isolated environment.

Buddy

The cloud-based CI/CD and DevOps automation platform, Buddy, provides a set of tools for building, testing, and deploying apps. It embraces over 100 built-in actions for simplifying development and deployment pipelines.

Important features:

1. Embraces docker-based builds and tests
2. Provides automatic deployments on push-to-branch
3. It offers 10 minute setup for a complete environment

Juju

An open-source orchestration engine, Juju is basically for software operators, which enables the deployment, integration, and lifecycle management of apps on any infrastructure or at any scale. This DevOps automation tool also makes it simple, intuitive, and efficient to manage the lifecycle of DevOps for complicated apps in a hybrid cloud.

Important features:

1. Provides cross-cloud capability that enables developers to deploy apps across multiple cloud providers, such as GCP, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.
2. Simplifies application deployment since Juju possesses the ability to accelerate the application deployment procedure.
3. Highly scalable and has in-built availability features that provide automatic recovery of services to reduce outage.

DevOps Testing Tools:

Katalon Studio

A free test automation tool, Katalon Studio is used for automating websites, mobile apps, and web services. It also helps non-programmers to create automation test cases since this tool has record and playback/manual mode.

Important features:

1. Provides in-built templates in order to maintain the object repository, test cases and custom keywords.
2. Integrated easily with Git, Jira, Jenkins, and qTest.
3. Possesses record/playback capabilities.
4. Supports languages: Java & Groovy
5. A free tool but not open-source

Cucumber

Based on the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework, Cucumber is used to write acceptance tests specifically for web apps. Ruby-written software tool Cucumber provides automation of functional validation in easily understandable and readable formats for developers, business analysts, and testers.

Important features:

1. Offers test reusability
2. Supports other languages, such as Java, .Net, other than Ruby itself.
3. Without any hands-on experience and knowledge of coding, anyone can write the test for the Cucumber tool.

Mocha

A widely-used JavaScript testing framework, Mocha simplifies the process of writing and executing tests for JS applications. The best thing about this DevOps testing tool is that it provides a flexible environment for testing code without compromising the quality and correctness of code.

Important features:

1. Flexible & versatile tool
2. It comes with file watcher support.
3. Uses JavaScript API for testing.

Selenium

With this open-source automated testing, Selenium is a free testing tool. It only works on a web framework and tests web apps but does not check any mobile or desktop app.

Important features:

1. A free testing tool.
2. It works well on multiple OS, such as Windows, MAC, and Linux.
3. Supports multiple browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, and Chrome.
4. Supports different languages for test scripts, such as Java and Python.

DevOps Security Tools

Fugue

Fugue is one of the popular tools for DevOps security by which teams can build, deploy, and maintain cloud security at every stage of the development lifecycle.

Important features:

1. On-demand and configuration resource scan frequency
2. Comprehensive compliance coverage & reporting

Orca Security

AI-driven cloud security platform Orca Security provides full-stack security visibility to vulnerabilities & risky configurations without installing any agent. It is designed to help businesses detect and identify vulnerabilities, malware, configurations, and weak & leaked passwords.

Important features:

1. Third-party integration
2. Risk assessment
3. Vulnerability/Threat Prioritization
4. Web app security

Container Orchestration Tools in DevOps:

Rancher

An open-source container orchestration tool, Rancher, uses Kubernetes as the container orchestrator. In other words, it is a complete software stack for teams adopting containers and addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Important features:

1. Excellent community support
2. 100% Opens-source

Linode Kubernetes Service

The Linode Kubernetes Service (LKE) is a managed container orchestration engine that is built on top of Kubernetes. It lets users quickly deploy and manage containerized apps without needing to build and maintain Kubernetes clusters. With no extra charges, LKE instances are embraced by a fully-managed control plane.

Important features:

1. It ensures the maximum utilization of resources.
2. There are no management fees. Users need to only pay for Compute Instances, NodeBalancers, and Block Storage Volumes.
3. It automatically scales clusters, resulting in high availability and scalable apps.

Containerd

Containerd is a container runtime that manages the lifecycle of a container on a physical or virtual machine. It is also known as a container runtime and is based on Docker technology.

Important features:

1. Image push & pull support
2. OCI image spec support
3. OCI runtime spec support (runC)
4. Container runtime & lifecycle support

DevOps Monitoring Tools:

Sensu

A cloud-based network monitoring solution, Sensu, assists all sizes of businesses with performance data collection and diagnostics.

Important features:

1. Provides unlimited scalability
2. Enterprise security
3. Monitoring-as-code for DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering (SREs)
4. Allows users to reuse existing plugins and instrumentation

DataDog

A monitoring and analytics tool, DataDog can be used to determine performance metrics as well as monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services.

Important features:

1. Supports for more than 250 product integrations
2. Allows for access to the API
3. Supports apps written in languages such as Python, Java, Go. Ruby, and Node.
4. It has customizable dashboards.
5. Offers an IT & DevOps team with a single view of their infrastructure, for instance, servers, applications, and metrics.

Prometheus

Originally built at SoundCloud, Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit, which has been adopted by several companies and organizations. This monitoring tool is used for capturing and processing any time series that contains only numbers. It is also a flexible metrics collection and altering tool, which works with its companion manager service.

Important features:

1. Supports for a diverse range of graphing and dashboarding methods
2. It is a multi-dimensional model which uses metrics in order to recognize time series data.
3. It has zero dependency on distributed storage and individual server nodes.
4. A pull model over HTTP is used for time-series collection.

New Relic

New Relic is a software-as-a-service offering that focuses on performance and availability monitoring. It uses a standardized application performance index (Apdex) score for setting and rating apps’ performances across the environment in a unified way.

Important features:

1. Availability & error monitoring
2. Alerts & notifications
3. Synthetic monitoring
4. Key business transaction monitoring
5. Lets native integration with third-party tools, for example, Slack & PagerDuty
6. Offers external service performance monitoring