The word DevOps is the union of the terms Development and Operations. But what does DevOps mean for company? DevOps enables formerly separate roles—development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security—to collaborate and work together to produce improved and more reliable services.

The DevOps culture along with its practices and tools, help the companies to gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build, and achieve business goals faster.

The benefits of DevOps

Teams that adopt DevOps culture, practices, and tools become high-performing which results in greater customer satisfaction. This improved collaboration and productivity is also integral to achieve business goals like these:

• Accelerating time to market
• Adapting to the market and competition
• Maintaining system stability and reliability
• Improving the mean time to recovery

Main tools used by DevOps experts:

• For discovery: Mural, Miro and Jira.

Tools like Mural and Miro empower the entire software team to gather ideas and conduct research. Jira Product Discovery organizes information into actionable inputs and prioritizes actions for development teams.

• For planning: Jira, Confluence, Slack

Based on agile methodology, we recommend tools that enables you to do sprint planning, issue tracking and allow collaboration, such as Jira. This helps you to learn from users sooner and aids with optimizing a product based on the feedback.

Key features of these tools include continuously gathering user feedback, organizing it and prioritizing actions for your development teams. Check out apps that encourage “asynchronous brainstorming” so everyone can share and comment on ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps and documentation.

• For building:

Production-identical environments for development: Kubernetes and Docker

While Puppet and Chef primarily benefit operations, developers use Open-source tools like Kubernetes and Docker to provision individual development environments.

Infrastructure as code: Docker and Terraform

Infrastructure as code means re-provisioning is faster, more consistent and reproducible than repairing. You can easily spin up variations of your development environment with similar configuration as production. Provisioning code can be stored in version control, tested, incorporated into CI (continuous integration), and peer-reviewed.

Source control and collaborative coding: Bitbucket, Github and Gitlab

Rather than waiting on change approval boards before deploying to production, you can improve code quality and throughout with peer reviews done via pull requests.

• For Continuous Delivery: Jenkins, AWS, Bitbucket, CircleCI, Sonarsource

With Continuous integration you automatically detect problems early, fix them when they’re easiest to fix, and roll out new features to your users as early as possible.

• For Automated testing: Smartbear, Xray, Mabl, Snyk, Mend and Stackhawk

Development teams can execute automated tests repeatedly, covering several areas such as UI testing, security scanning, or load testing. They also yield reports and trend graphs that help identify risky areas.

• For Deployment: Bitbucket and AWS Code Pipeline

Converting operations’ runbook into a cmd-executable script using Ruby or Bash is a common way to start. Good engineering practices are vital. Use variables to factor out host names – maintaining unique scripts or code for each environment is no fun. Create utility methods or scripts to avoid duplicated code. And peer review your scripts to sanity-check them.

• For performance: Splunk, New relic, Opsgenie, Nagios, Slack and Datadog

Hitting your API with a test is fine for spot-checking but to understand trends and the overall health of your application, you need software that is listening and recording data 24/7. Ongoing observability is a key capability for successful DevOps teams.

• For Continuous Feedback: Get Feedback, Jira and Pendo

Look for applications that integrate your chat tool with your favorite survey platform for NPS feedback. For deeper looks at the feedback coming in from social media, it’s worth investing in a social media management platform that can pull reports using historical data.

Find the perfect DevOps for your company

Our process is pretty simple. Just tell us the kind of project you want to develop or the technical skills you’re looking for and leave the rest to us. We’ll then recommend the matching DevOps for you.

Write to us or schedule a free call to discuss your staffing, outsourcing, or development needs.