Effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. Well, that’s the buzzword that we come across so often. Despite this, many organizations fail to deliver business critical applications on time and in turn jeopardize organization’s capital, time, and reputation.

Change and rate of change

Business and technology scenario have changed at a rapid pace in recent times. In particular, the technology changes have made a massive impact in the way we do business. Which means, older ways of developing applications / products for business have totally undergone transformation.
In the area of IT the older process of application / product development has changed from traditional waterfall methodology to a totally new approach. The older ways of long development cycle and then just maintaining the application has given way to continuous development, continuous improvement and continuous evolvement. The application architecture has evolved from monolith to microservices.
Also during this period, new technologies have evolved – such as Big Data, NoSQL databases, NGINX kind of web server, development environments, besides deployment platforms such as Cloud, Containers, Kubernetes to name a few.
We are in the world of continuous evolvement and interconnectedness of new technologies, new approaches, new platforms and new processes. This has resulted in blurring the boundaries of development teams and operations teams. The need for developers and operations team to work together has evolved more prominently with the objective of addressing business needs – collaborated development, faster deployment, round-the-clock monitoring and giving continuous feedback resulting in continuous improvement. In short, it has become a loop.

Enter DevOps – development and operations in real time

“DevOps is a process”
“DevOps is a methodology”
“DevOps is an approach”
“DevOps is a culture”
There is a lot of discussion about what it is, and what it is not. But the real point is what do you achieve through DevOps, why it has come into picture, and what open source tools are available?
I would address the question ‘Why DevOps’ very briefly and then look at the list of open source tools available for each phase of the cycle.
DevOps has gained popularity among enterprises as it brings agility in application development resulting in reduced time to market. DevOps as a culture, as a process requires close working of development and operations teams. In layman’s terms, one can say that it is a process wherein there is a continuous hand-holding between these two at almost every stage – from development to deployment.
Now with DevOps, iterations (if, any) are done almost in real-time. Overall, a connected ecosystem practically helps as information is relayed in real time ensuring better operational efficiency; which in turn, helps organizations to focus on customer delight and customer service in a proactive manner.
Moreover, the continuous feedback helps in rapid improvement, in developing new strategies, and quick launches. In short, it’s a road map to success wherein multiple teams are aware of the fact that continuous deployment is the best way to ship software. This in turn helps the bottom line and ultimately delivers value to  both – the organization and its customers.
In order to leverage DevOps cycle, plenty of tools have evolved, and have evolved very rapidly. I am listing below the some of the more popular open source options available to you for each phase of DevOps cycle.

Phases In The DevOps Cycle

Now, let’s look at the phases in the DevOps cycle and what are the popular DevOps tools. Also, an important aspect to remember is that no single ‘best’ tool or application would address all your needs. (You would need a combination of tools to achieve your desired results.)
Typically, DevOps has the following phases – Continuous Development, Continuous Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and Continuous Monitoring

Diagram 1 – phases

For each of these phases there are many tools and choices available. As the process is continuously evolving more tools are emerging.
Here are the some of the popular tools from open source world. By no means this is an exhaustive list.

Diagram 2 – Tools

As seen from the above diagrams, there is no one particular tool that would address all the phases. You got to deal with multiple tools. It makes life of people more challenging. But that is what makes DevOps space interesting.
Our team is ready to engage with you on multiple areas of this DevOps life cycle. You can reach us at success@ashnik.com