DevOps Automation Tools: Top 24 Must-Have Tools

Quick Summary: Discover how DevOps automation tools reform software development, improving efficiency and reliability. Explore their pivotal role in increasing release cycles, minimizing errors, and fostering collaboration between development and operations teams. In this article, you will learn how the DevOps automation tools are pivotal for modern software development success.

Automation plays a critical role in every area of technology. The technology sector is booming, and automation is undoubtedly responsible for this, whether we believe it or not. When automation is attached to DevOps, this makes it more agile and coherent.

But wait? Do you know why DevOps automation is a hype?

Here, we’ve gathered a few important points that can help you to understand what it is all about!

• The size of the global DevOps market is forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 19.7% from 2023- 2028. 
• The adoption of DevOps automation helped Netflix, one of the widely popular video streaming platforms, to improve their customer experience with innovation to meet their consumers’ demands.
• Other than Netflix, other big companies that adopted DevOps automation are Amazon, Walmart, Nordstrom, Facebook, Etsy, and Adobe.

Currently, DevOps is more than a collaborative culture and software development automation. The emergence of DevOps automation tools has also seen significant growth in software development. They are responsible for enhancing the efficiency of development and virtualization.

In this blog post, we’ve compiled a list of the best DevOps automation tools that will help you to choose as per your business’s requirements and get the most out of it.

What is DevOps Automation?

Simply put, DevOps is an approach to culture to deliver business values and responsiveness by offering rapid and high-quality service delivery. On the other hand, automation is a simple method to use technology to perform tasks without human assistance. The main objective of automation is to accelerate processes, scale the environment, and build continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) & continuous deployment workflows.

So, DevOps tools are important to create and deliver software faster and more efficiently by facilitating seamless team collaboration. It eliminates human errors, repetitive tasks, increases productivity, and provides visibility into the development process.

Benefits of DevOps Automation Tools

To get a scalable business, your team needs to be highly collaborative, reliable, and stable and can quickly deliver a final product. Using DevOps automation tools, your business can be successful by preventing human errors and repetitive tasks. With improved collaboration, DevOps automation tools can help in several ways:

• Speed: The high speed of development of deployment can be achieved by the introduction of automation in DevOps. It simply leads to faster project delivery by eliminating manual tasks that trigger the overall speed of the project. 

• Scalability: DevOps automation tools enable businesses to scale in any automation-driven environment. Developers can also share resources and workloads. This way, they can enhance the scalability of the final product. 

Faster recovery time, enhanced operational efficiency, increased collaboration, and continuous delivery are other benefits of using DevOps services. 

Top 24 DevOps Automation Tools and Their Features

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools for DevOps:

1. 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:

• 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.
• 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. 
• 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). 

2. 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: 

• Generates a resource graph and enables to building resources as efficiently as possible while providing users greater insights into their infrastructure. 
• Implements complicated changesets to the infrastructure with virtually no human interaction. 
• 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.

3. 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:

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

4. 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:

• Since the Ansible tool does not rely on any agent software and has no additional security infrastructure; therefore, it is easy to deploy. 
• 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. 
• With the Ansible tool, users do not need to monitor each machine for security compliance manually. 

5. 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:

• Makes apps deployment easy, seamless, and standardized
• Lessens the complexity of deploying microservices
• Improves the speed of deployment
• Enhances productivity

6. 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:

• 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. 
• 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:

7. 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:

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

8. 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:

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

9. 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:

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

10. 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:

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

11. 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:

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

DevOps Testing Tools:

12. 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:

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

13. 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:

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

14. 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:

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

15. 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:

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

DevOps Security Tools

16. 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:

• On-demand and configuration resource scan frequency
• Comprehensive compliance coverage & reporting

17. 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:

• Third-party integration
• Risk assessment
• Vulnerability/Threat Prioritization
• Web app security

Container Orchestration Tools in DevOps:

18. 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:

• Excellent community support
• 100% Opens-source

19. 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:

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

20. 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:

• Image push & pull support
• OCI image spec support
• OCI runtime spec support (runC)
• Container runtime & lifecycle support

DevOps Monitoring Tools:

21. Sensu

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

Important features:

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

22. 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:

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

23. 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:

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

24. 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:

• Availability & error monitoring
• Alerts & notifications
• Synthetic monitoring
• Key business transaction monitoring
• Lets native integration with third-party tools, for example, Slack & PagerDuty
• Offers external service performance monitoring

Why is DevOps Automation Important?

DevOps automation is essential for businesses because it allows them to accelerate the whole procedures and scale environments and completely leverage the various benefits, such as building continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment workflows.

Here’s what your business can get the most out of DevOps automation by implementing it.

• Simplifies the complete process: It reduces the risks of businesses implementing any changes through software by simplifying how software is developed, delivered, and managed.
• Detection of errors at an early stage: With DevOps automation, your business can detect defects and resolve them as early as possible in the development process.
• Enhanced Application quality: DevOps automation compasses the nature of knowledge sharing across the teams. As a result, the continuous monitoring and testing of the code eventually improves the quality of the overall build of the application.
• Lower the general costs: The cost is always one of the important concerns for businesses. So, implementing DevOps automation can help your organization to reduce the general costs and requirements of IT staff.

Which DevOps Tools are Best to Use?

Undeniably, there are a plethora of options when it comes to choosing the best DevOps tools for your business. Every business’s requirement is unique. Based on this, we’ve gathered some points that every business should go through once before picking up the ideal tools for their business growth.

• Choose automation: DevOps is a blend of speed and accuracy, and both can be achieved through automation tools. So, the “run it anywhere” approach is the best for choosing DevOps automation tools. It also makes production less painful.
• The cloud plays an important role: When it comes to the on-premises approach to DevOps, it could be a good option. However, the cloud can help to bring scalability and agility. Since on-premises architecture requires consistent maintenance and upgrades.
• Picking up tools that enhance the productivity of your team: It’s pivotal to ensure that the tools your business invests in must support the requirements of your development and operation teams. Opting for tools that make their work scalable and more productive.

Hence, the success of your business heavily depends on choosing DevOps automation tools. Such automation processes and tools involved actually make the whole process easy, straight, and complex-free. Scaling your business can be achieved only through choosing DevOps tools wisely. 

Conclusion

You don’t have to be a big monster organization to try DevOps automation tools for your business. Whether your business is young or old, big or small, your business can do significant growth and complete transformation by implementing the above-mentioned tools. All you need to take utmost care of is to make sure your business’s needs and what the tool can do while choosing the correct tool for your organization. 

You can opt for the DevOps consulting services with Moon Technolabs and get solutions that can help your business grow and create value in your niche. To know more about DevSecOps services and solutions, get in touch with us, and our experts will be happy to assist you!