What is DevOps Toolchain? How to Build One?

DevOps toolchain isn’t a new term. It’s also not too complex like most DevOps definitions are. A toolchain is a digital array of resources that help you accomplish a particular task. The DevOps toolchain is a set of the most powerful tools for designing, delivering, and sustaining applications in compliance with agile concepts.

A DevOps toolchain is a community of tools that work together to design, develop, test, manage, measure, and operate software and systems. It helps development and operations teams to collaborate throughout the product lifecycle and discusses core DevOps fundamentals such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are the main DevOps concepts. By maintaining a stable software development pipeline, the DevOps toolchain helps companies fulfill the promise of DevOps. Toolchains support team members in completing and simplifying more complex development activities.

Why Do We Need DevOps Toolchain?

Many of the functional elements of your workflow are automated with a DevOps toolchain. It also brings various people together to concentrate on creating a strategic plan to move the company forward.

I’ve come up with few convincing points in favor of introducing the DevOps toolchain. You may use them to persuade the manager that it is worthwhile to spend the time and money in improving it,

◉ Budget and time optimization: By automating manual tasks, the business can save both time and money. The budget is naturally optimized once there are no extra costs incurred due to natural human mistakes or poor time management

◉ Timely incident management: Your incident management record can be enhanced with the aid of a DevOps toolchain. It accomplishes this by reporting IT incidents, escalating them to the required team members, and then following up until the problems are resolved. Since messages are correctly aimed, they are received and acted upon quickly

◉ Faster and more efficient product deployments: The bulk of the software development process is automated with DevOps tools. The company rapidly created new products and solutions, keeping it ahead of the competition

◉ Quality Assurance: It’s difficult to patch software bugs quickly and with precision. However, DevOps tools make it look as if it’s a walk in the forest. Since quality is one of the main selling points for most products, the DevOps toolchain delivers the best product with the best quality

◉ Efficient Development: By eliminating unnecessary delays between various aspects of development work, a DevOps toolchain makes the development process more efficient. Since the work of front-end and back-end developers and quality testers is coordinated, no one has to wait for the other team members to finish their part before taking over

◉ Faster Deployment means higher Quality: A DevOps toolchain ensures that bugs are easily and expertly addressed, resulting in the highest quality and a faster deployment phase. How do you do it? It helps you to send out personalized updates to your team in the event of a major incident. This helps you to avoid future concerns from worsening and adversely affecting your customer service

◉ Fine-tuned incident controls: Humans are reckless and make rash decisions, so it’s easier to trust computers. Using a centralized pipeline and infrastructure helps different teams respond quicker and more efficiently during an incident

What is DevOps Toolchain?

The tools and technologies that allow development and operations teams to collaborate over the entire software lifecycle are referred to as a DevOps toolchain. Continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration are among the main DevOps fundamentals covered.

There is no single tool that facilitates DevOps values and practices since DevOps is a cultural change in which architecture and operations function as one entity. On the other hand, a DevOps toolchain is a set of tools, often from different vendors, that work together to design, construct, test, manage, measure, and operate software and systems.

There are several open-source DevOps software to choose from. A DevOps toolchain is built by combining them based on your requirements. This increases the speed and reliability of product delivery. A toolchain is a set of resources that work together to solve a specific issue.

How to Create DevOps Toolchain?

Because of its widespread acceptance, the DevOps movement has grown an entire ecosystem around it, complete with thought leaders, conferences, DevOps-focused courses, and, of course, a wide range of resources. It evolved into a living, breathing organism. A self-evolving cultural model that improves over time thanks to a committed group of people who work hard to address current challenges.

Naturally, there are various options from which to choose, but DevOps tools are not the usual tools that you can add or remove from your toolbelt at any time. We create amazing monitoring and troubleshooting software at Sematext, and we know how difficult it is to select a product that your whole team can use.

There is an expense to remember, but it is unlikely to be a big factor for most people. What matters most is whether it can meet the clear specifications and the ease with which your team will implement the new tool; does it have sufficient documentation? What’s the state of their customer service team? Is their infrastructure well-balanced to meet your requirements?

Let us look into two main approaches which help us to create DevOps Toolchain:

All-in-one DevOps Toolchain

We’re starting to note how complicated many of the resources we use every day have become. Since we are dealing with complex distributed networks that must self-heal and efficiently deliver all communications, this is sometimes unavoidable. Instead, we may investigate a complicated tool and discover that it has turned a minor issue into a big headache: we may unwittingly introduce layers of abstraction that make it seem as though the problem has been solved when it has actually been renamed and moved to a new imaginary layer that none of us understands.

I’m not going to pretend for a second that I know a lot about Kubernetes, but I can see how it isn’t right for every project. In some situations, teams are adding additional complexity to their projects just because everyone else is. All of us have strong opinions about product preferences and whether source code should contain spaces or tabs. I believe we’ve all been guilty of missing the big picture at some stage in our careers.

We can also see that these systems are overkill when we take a step back. Hundreds of hours of configuration management code in an uncomfortable DSL could have been completed in a fraction of the time using shell scripts. We understand that writing infrastructure as code providers is a bizarrely complex job, and we aspire to find a simpler, faster solution. It seems that all DevOps applications are trying to reflect any fact about the system as YAML; even the DSLs that some services generate sound more like writing YAML than capturing the language’s idiomatic experience and offering a more pleasurable development experience. Unfortunately, the truth of the situation is very different. We all have deadlines to meet, and it’s always easier to purchase a mediocre-to-average toolkit than to write something better.

You will have little time to develop your system if your employer does not encourage you to work on personal projects or engage in the OSS community. In certain situations, teams aren’t given a choice in the tooling they’re given in the first place. Unless you have management approval or are a DevOps startup, you will most likely be purchasing anything you require. I hope that the OSS group continues to innovate and that businesses note and, as a result, become more willing to take chances with in-house apps.

Custom DevOps Tools

It is easier to develop a process if a particular method or functionality already exists. However, it is possible that it will not work 100% of the time, in which case you will need to customize them to fulfill your requirements. (if that is even possible). Writing their own tools can be time-consuming for small businesses and require the attention of people who are focused on adding value to the product.

However, it should be noted that killing an ant does not necessitate the use of a cannon. So, if writing a deployment script suits your needs, you can do so rather than starting from scratch with a deployment pipeline. Only make a strategy, and think about growth and change, not just in terms of the current state of your development pipeline but also how you expect to evolve it.

Must have tools for DevOps Toolchain

◉ Collaboration: Collaboration and communication between various teams are the most critical aspects of the DevOps community. Different departments, such as development, testing, and product management, cooperate and work together to automate the process. Collaboration software allows teams to communicate through time zones and places. Faster app launches are a result of improved communication. Slack, campfire, and skype are few examples

◉ Planning: Stakeholders, customers, and staff from various departments should all have the same goals. As a consequence, full accountability among all participants is crucial. Planning resources create this accountability. Asana and Clarizen are two examples of planning tools

◉ Source control: All of your records, documents, code, settings, files, and other things require a centralized storage location. This source control data can then be split into separate branches for different teams to work on. You may use source management software to take advantage of these features. Git, Subversion, and SVN are examples of source management software

◉ Issue tracking: Increased openness leads to better vision, making monitoring problems simpler and quicker. There are problem monitoring tools available, but there is a requirement that all teams use the same tool. Jira, ZenDesk, and Backlog are a few examples of problem monitoring apps

◉ Configuration Management: Wouldn’t it be awesome if your whole system was automatically installed and upgraded, so you didn’t have to? That’s what configuration management systems are about. These tools assist you in managing your infrastructure as code, preventing configuration drifts through environments. Ansible, Puppet, and Chef are examples of configuration management tools

◉ Continuous Integration: A successful software development cycle breaks down the code into chunks that ad by various teams and then continuously incorporated. Individually, the codes can work perfectly, but when combined, they may cause problems. Continuous integration tools help you to identify and correct errors quickly. Bamboo, Jenkins, and TeamCity are a few examples of continuous integration tools

◉ Binary Repositories: It’s conceivable that a product is being produced on a daily or hourly basis. A repository manager is a good way to bridge the gap between the developer’s machine and the production environment. The code must flow seamlessly from the developer’s machine to the production environment. Binary program objects, metadata, and code are all contained in repositories. Artifactory, Nexus, and Maven are some examples of binary repositories

◉ Monitoring: Monitoring is important in DevOps for smooth execution, as the name implies. Monitoring tools ensure that resources are accessible at all times and work at their best. BigPanda, Nagios, and Sensu are some examples of monitoring tools

◉ Automated Testing: Before moving it to the creation, the entire integrated code must be checked. The faster you complete the feedback loop, the faster you can achieve your goal. Telerik, QTP, and TestComplete are a few examples of automated testing methods

◉ Development: Development is another great DevOps principle that allows for regular and stable application deployment. Deployment tools help you get your goods to market quicker. The Docker toolset and IBM uDeploy are two examples of development tools

◉ Database: Finally, there’s data management. Data is important for obtaining insights, and any application development project necessitates a large amount of data. Database management software makes it easier to handle vast volumes of data. RazorSQL, TeamDesk, and other database management applications are examples

Source: invensislearning.com