As DevOps has become mainstream, it is time for businesses to start leveraging the amazing benefits of SaaS DevOps automation tools.
While it started with Dev and Ops, the functionality is no longer limited to these two departments. DevOps transforms business operations and brings a culture change across the organization. Based on your project requirements and niche, you can create cross-functional teams composed of members from development, design, testing, QA, security, business, etc.
The key to fully leveraging the DevOps revolution is choosing the right DevOps automation tools for the infrastructure. This blog will cover some popular tools that help organizations automate infrastructure management and delivery pipelines.
Automation is an important component of today’s IT infrastructure. By incorporating automation across the infrastructure, administrators can run various processes without human intervention. Automation also enables you to build CI/CD pipeline workflows to accelerate software development.
SaaS DevOps tools and automation go hand in hand. Developers can combine API-centric code with automation and deliver software products faster and better. Similarly, administrators can apply Infrastructure as code (IaC) methods to automate provisioning and deployment with self-service capabilities without human intervention.
DevOps Automation Tools are sometimes confused with the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. However, IaC is a part of DevOps tools in automation. IaC enables administrators to provision and manage the infrastructure using code, while DevOps automation talks about a broader picture of managing the entire software development product lifecycle using SaaS DevOps tools for automation that include IaC tools as well.
AWS CloudFormation is a tool for CI/CD pipeline automation from Amazon that enables administrators to model and provision AWS resources by simply describing the target state of the infrastructure as a template. With CloudFormation, you don’t have to configure the remote state. CloudFormation manages the state of the infrastructure out-of-the-box.
You can use Change Sets to verify changes before applying them. It supports rolling updates for autoscaling groups. You can perform a rollback if needed. It is good at handling secrets. CloudFormation works across all the services offered by AWS. This managed service is free. AWS support also includes support for CloudFormation.
Modularization is not straightforward in CloudFormation. You have to take different approaches such as using nested stacks or import/export output values between modules. There is no central place for sharing templates.
Terraform is a popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool offered by Hashicorp Inc. This open-source tool was developed by Mitchell Hashimoto using the Go programming language and released in 2014. It supports all major platforms including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Solaris and OpenBSD.
In addition to supporting the AWS platform, Terraform also supports other cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Azure, IBM Cloud, OpenStack, Oracle Cloud, Digital Ocean, VMware vSphere and other 3rd party services.
Terraform uses a declarative model to define the state of the target infrastructure. Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) is the domain-specific language that you should use to write your configuration files. Optionally, JSON can be used as well. Terraform enables you to efficiently manage high-level components such as SaaS features and DNS entries and low-level components such as networking, storage and compute instances.
Terraform uses a domain-specific language HCL. It means you need to learn HCL just to manage the infrastructure. Secondly, the infrastructure should always be in sync with the states. There is no error handling and automatic rollback feature. Refactoring or renaming resources is not easy.
Ansible is an open-source provisioning and configuration management tool that was released in 2012 by Ansible Inc. It was written in PowerShell, Python and Ruby by Michael DeHaan and supports Linux, macOS and Windows operating systems. Ansible was acquired by RedHat in 2015 and is now included as a part of the Fedora distribution of Linux. Ansible uses an agentless architecture, meaning no code is running on the controlled nodes.
During an orchestration task, the module process communicates with the controlled node via a JSON-based protocol. When Ansible is not managing nodes, the node machine has no resource consumption. It allows you to describe the configuration in its own declarative language. You can create consistent environments using Ansible. Tasks are stored in YAML files called Playbooks.
Ansible was initially a CLI tool. Later, AWX GUI was introduced with a GUI capability. The improved version of AWX GUI is now called the Ansible Tower. However, the UI Interface is not visually appealing and can still be improved. You might experience conflicting query results owing to synchronization issues between the GUI and CLI. Windows support is limited. Ansible doesn’t track dependencies which means there is no notion of state.
Pulumi is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool released in 2017. The best thing about Pulumi is that it allows you to manage code using real programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go and .NET languages. It means you don’t have to learn a domain-specific language just to manage your infrastructure. Pulumi helps you to build reusable cloud infrastructure platforms. It offers SDK that comes with a consistent interface to work with 50+ cloud service providers
Pulumi allows you to define cloud resources more expressively and efficiently using variables and loops instead of just copy-pasting code. You can also use any node library. It automatically checks for errors. Being designed with cloud-native computing in mind, the tool allows you to easily manage containers and serverless architecture to quickly build and deploy apps on a variety of IT environments.
When it comes to structuring large projects, SaaS DevOps tools like Pulumi structure them as multiple micro-projects or a single monolithic project. As such, it becomes difficult to deserialize stack references when trying to map multiple resources via higher-level Pulumi extensions. Compared to big names like Terraform or CloudFormation, Pulumi documentation and community support is limited.
Bash scripting allows developers to write commands as inputs and execute a specific task. You can write the script once and reuse it again. The length of a Bash script may vary from a few lines to thousands of lines. Using Bash shell scripts, you can automatically provision and manage environments, deploy resources, perform test suites etc. You can use them in CI/CD pipelines and inside virtual machines as well.
It is a popular tool for writing shell scripts and is included in all Unix-like operating systems, enabling you to write portable POSIX scripts. Bash scripting is one of the top 10 most popular technologies and offers the highest salaries as well, as reported by Stack Overflow.
There are several reasons to use Bash as a part of your SaaS DevOps tools in automation instead of PHP or JSP. It allows developers to derive maximum output from a bare-minimum machine. When you don’t have access to PHP, you can use Bash to retrieve the system info in JSON format and display it as a webpage as well. It works as a time series based data exporter. Bash allows you to write commands using simple grammar making it easy to learn and use. It also supports basic concepts of programming. It natively supports process execution.
Bash scripts perform slower when compared with other programming languages owing to the lack of a standard API wherein you have to spawn processes to process data. Being a command language, Bash considers everything you write as a command. When the automation logic grows bigger, it becomes a challenge to manage Bash scripts for automation tasks.
Python scripting is a good alternative to Bash scripting. Python is one of the most popular programming languages used by developers across the globe. One of the main reasons for this popularity is that it is developer-friendly. There are hundreds of built-in libraries that help developers to quickly and easily write code and deploy products faster. Most of the Unix-like operating systems come preinstalled with a Python interpreter allowing developers to write portable automation scripts.
For instance, Boto is a Python package that allows you to write scripts for automating AWS tasks such as starting/stopping EC2 instances and managing resources via APIs. Boto3 is the latest Boto version that now supports more than 50 Amazon services spanning storage, compute, network, billing, application, database etc.
Python is not a command language which means you cannot directly execute shell scripts as commands. It does not natively support process execution as Bash does. However, you can use the subprocess module to spawn processes and connect to the input/output and error pipelines to receive the return codes.
Python scripts are not readable and the syntax is slightly complex when compared to Bash scripts. However, you can simplify Python scripts using tools like Shellpy. Python execution is slow compared to other scripting languages. When dependent libraries are involved, it gets much slower.
Docker is the most popular containerization solution available in the market. It offers a robust and comprehensive containerization ecosystem that lets you manage the entire application deployment lifecycle with ease. Docker is flexible, modular, collaborative, highly portable, scalable and enables you to create consistent and isolated environments.
With automatic rollbacks and repeatability, it offers a cost-effective way of deploying apps faster and better. While finalizing SaaS DevOps tools for automation, Docker should always be an automatic inclusion.
Kubernetes is the leader in the container orchestration segment. It works with almost every container runtime, is flexible and highly portable. It is battle-tested and proven technology. It supports multi-cloud deployments while increasing developer productivity.
CloudFormation is a powerful infrastructure automation tool offered by AWS. It seamlessly integrates with AWS services enabling you to easily connect and collaborate all your development and infrastructure management tasks.
Suppose you use non-AWS environments such as Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cloud environments. In that case, Terraform is an excellent option to automate infrastructure management tasks. It best suits multi-cloud deployments as well.
Python is a popular programming language and is best suited for creating portable automation scripts. You can write shell scripts and use APIs to connect to infrastructure resources and manage them with ease. It is open-source and cost-effective.
The advent of DevOps has revolutionized the software development segment. Gone are the days when the software was developed through a waterfall approach, wherein the code traveled through different stages of development linearly. DevOps brings cross-functional teams into the picture wherein development and operations teams along with the testing, security and business professionals come together to collaborate throughout the application life cycle.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) is an important component of the DevOps continuous delivery model. CI/CD is an innovative approach to delivering applications by incorporating automation into each stage of the application development lifecycle.
Continuous integration enables developers to deploy software faster and better as you continuously deliver code to production while automatically fixing bugs and errors. CI servers can automatically run thousands of builds in quick time. Developers are automatically alerted when there is when the code is broken so that they can immediately fix it. It enables the quality team to spend less time on fixing bugs and more time on improving the quality.
Continuous delivery enables the operations teams to automatically deploy software without spending several days preparing the environment. Releases are frequently done and the feedback loop is accelerated which means organizations don’t have to worry about making changes to the code. While improvements could be done faster, the quality can be improved without breaking the environment.
With continuous deployment, the software is automatically deployed. When there is a change in the code, the deployment pipeline gets triggered. It means fewer risks when making a release. Similarly, customers can enjoy quality software owing to this continuous effort of improvement. While there is a cost factor in maintaining the CI server, there are other cost-effective options available in the form of open-source tools.
When it comes to business value, organizations can shorten the release cycle, gain faster time to market and deliver what the customers want. They can also monitor changes and proactively make changes to the product. It improves operational efficiency and increases revenues. The real-time visibility into the entire development process provides a better control over the infrastructure.
Here are some of the popular SaaS DevOps tools for CI/CD tasks:
Jenkins is a popular continuous integration tool that is offered as an open-source. It was called Hudson earlier. Hudson was written by Kosuke Kawaguchi in Java programming language and was released in 2005 when he was working in Sun Microsystems. Oracle acquired Hudson in 2011 and decided to trademark the name Hudson to release it as a commercial version.
This decision did not go down well with the Hudson community. Eventually, the tool was forked as Oracle Hudson. The original tool was renamed as Jenkins. Both versions continued for some time. The Oracle Hudson version became absolute in 2017.
Jenkins enables organizations to automate the build, test and deployment process. It uses a server-based system and Apache Tomcat runs the servlet containers. Jenkins supports all version control tools such as Git, Mercurial, Subversion (SVN), etc. Jenkins allows you to execute Apache Maven, shell scripts and Windows commands.
While there are thousands of Jenkins plugins available, they are contributed by 3rd parties which means the quality might not be consistent. Some of them are not maintained now. So, you should be careful while integrating and customizing plugins to ensure that consistent performance is delivered. Moreover, there are several redundant plugins.
As such, it requires your time and effort in choosing the right plugin for your CI/CD automation needs. Secondly, the Jenkins interface is not user-friendly and intuitive. As it runs on a server, you should monitor activities. You need expertise and knowledge to integrate it with other SaaS DevOps tools for automation.
CircleCI is a cloud-based continuous integration tool that was developed in 2011 by CircleCI, a San Francisco-based IT company. The tool offers power, flexibility and greater control to manage CI CD pipelines. It integrates with GitHub and bitbucket and every time you make a code change, it automatically triggers the CircleCI pipeline and automatic testing is done in a virtual machine or a container.
It means you can test every commit. When the build fails, the concerned team is automatically alerted. It comes with slack integration for alert notifications. Builds that successfully pass the test are automatically deployed to the corresponding environments.
CircleCI is language-agnostic and platform-agnostic. It supports all programming languages including JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby. .NET, C++. and Linux, Windows and Mac OS environments. You can create tasks using a YAML configuration file. All tasks can be written in a single YAML file. It offers expanded caching which brings speeds to the pipeline processes. It enables faster code deployment and also allows complicated pipelines to be easily managed.
Using SSH, you can quickly identify issues and solve problems. It uses LDAP user management and VM isolation to provide better security. It also offers an insights dashboard to monitor and manage all the tasks that are happening in the environment. CircleCI is a popular CI server used by 30,000 organizations where 1 million tasks are managed by the tool per day.
Compute costs are low but the cost per user is a bit high. The search feature can be improved. Customization options are limited. Documentation and tutorials are not adequate compared to other tools. The configuration is easy but it gets complicated when the files become larger as you write all code in a single file.
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that is quickly gaining popularity in the DevOps automation tools segment. This tool helps organizations automate all stages of the CI/CD pipeline and deliver quality applications while easily managing infrastructure updates. By automating the build, test and deployment phases, you can rapidly deliver features and updates to your customers.
It easily integrates with 3rd party version control systems such as GitHub, Bitbucket, GitHub Enterprise and other AWS services such as Amazon S3 AWS, Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation etc.
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AWS CodePipeline architecture comprises three important components:
AWS CodePipeline comes with a pay-as-you-go subscription model. For instance, the AWS CodeBuild tool charges you for every minute of build time. On the contrary, Jenkins charges you for the usage of underlying hardware comprising the Jenkins master and EC2 clusters. So, it is important to monitor resource usage carefully. Secondly, while Jenkins offers a rich plugin ecosystem, AWS CodePipeline is still in the nascent stage. However, it allows you to integrate 3rd party plugins to customize UI and build processes. Docker image caching is not available.
Gitlab is a powerful Devops platform that brings product development, product security and operations onto a single platform. It is a web-based Git repository that allows organizations to easily create and manage open and private repositories while facilitating seamless collaboration between teams at every stage of the product lifecycle to deliver high-quality software faster. In addition, it enables you to set role-based user permissions once and manage permissions automatically. You can self-host your projects.
Gitlab Inc. is the company behind Gitlab. The project was developed by Sytse Sijbrandij and Dmytro Zaporozhets using Ruby and Go programming languages. The current technology stack involves Ruby on Rails, Go, and Vue.js programming languages. Gitlab is quite popular in the DevOps automation tools segment now with around 30 million users and 1 million active license users.
There are a few bugs that dampen the performance of the tool. While the UI is good, it gets complicated when you try to monitor and review certain processes. Customization of issue tracking can be improved.
Choosing the right technology stack is the key to fully leveraging CI/CD and DevOps automation methodologies. However, it depends on several factors such as the company’s business objectives, the technology stack in use, IT budgets, expertise levels, organization culture, existing infrastructure etc.
If you love AWS and if your infrastructure is AWS-heavy, the best option is to choose the AWS CodePipeline. It will enable you to manage the entire DevOps product lifecycle while being able to easily integrate other services, seamlessly collaborate with teams and optimize resources to the core. While IT management is simplified, costs are optimized.
Gitlab combined with Jenkins best suits the CI/CD needs of large enterprises. Gitlab offers a robust and comprehensive platform that helps them to manage the entire CI/CD pipeline from a single platform. It acts as a single source of truth for all CI/CD operations and efficiently handles complex enterprise development projects.
At the same time, Jenkins brings a rich plugin ecosystem that helps them to customize every CI/CD operation to suit their organizational needs. For instance, the IaC plugin allows administrators to manage the infrastructure with readable APIs without having deep knowledge of the tool. Jenkins X Cloud system is another plugin that lets you automate deployments of large IT environments.
CircleCI is a good choice for startups as it allows them to cost-effectively manage CI/CD tasks. They can take advantage of the free tier offerings and easily manage development operations. It easily integrates with other SaaS DevOps tools in automation.
Read the full blog on DevOps trends to complement your toolset for a successful DevOps strategy.
Wrapping up, integrating automation into IT infrastructure is crucial for streamlining processes and accelerating software development. Automation tools in DevOps, in conjunction with API-centric code and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodologies, play a shared role in achieving automation. That’s why it’s important to recognize that while IaC is a subset of SaaS DevOps tools, DevOps automation encompasses the entire software development lifecycle.
Selecting the right DevOps automation tools is essential to unlocking the full potential of the DevOps revolution. By embracing automation, organizations empower developers and administrators alike to deliver software products faster, with enhanced efficiency and precision. As technology evolves, the continuous refinement and adoption of DevOps automation tools will remain at the forefront of building robust, scalable, and efficient IT infrastructures.
While choosing DevOps automation tools for your organization, focus on tools that offer features such as collaboration and communication across teams, fully-featured APIs, versioning of configuration, more than one interface (CLI, browser-based, GUI), multi-cloud capabilities and extensibility.
As a DevOps best practice, automate everything. Right from code generation to deployment and monitoring of the infrastructure, incorporate automation wherever possible. Infrastructure automation, configuration management, CI/CD Pipelines, deployment automation, performance monitoring, Log management are some of the areas that can be automated.
To make the most out of DevOps, automate as much as possible. Secondly, integration across SaaS DevOps tools in automation and eliminating silos is recommended. Thirdly, take advantage of the cloud-native architecture. Fourthly, implement DevOps best practices. Finally, don’t forget to train and upskill your employees to leverage SaaS DevOps tools for automation fully.
DevOps lifecycle comprises different stages of DevOps workflow that include continuous software delivery, testing, deployment, monitoring, feedback, etc. Choosing the right DevOps strategy with the right toolset is the key to building quality software through this methodology.
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