What DevOps tools are there?

DevOps Tools Overview

Source: https://landscape.cncf.io/images/landscape.png

Here you can see a picture with almost all DevOps tools.

Feeling overwhelmed yet? Don’t worry, you’re not alone there.

First of all, “DevOps” is not a collection of tools – even if many requirement profiles or project descriptions portray it that way. Nevertheless, the right tooling is an essential component and success factor for a functioning DevOps culture.

And while the phrase “Use the right tool for the right job” is certainly true, the real challenge is finding the right tool to begin with.

Not convinced? Then feel free to look at the picture again 😉

If convinced – of course, the question remains which tools are the right ones?

To make it clearer that we know what we are talking about, here is a small excerpt from our “toolbox”.

If the text is too long for you – here you can jump directly to the next question 🙂

What DevOps tools does ATIX itself use in-house?

The Atlassian combination of Jira and Confluence is used for documentation. With Git and Gitlab, not only do our departments collaborate on code for customers and orcharhino, we also use it to manage our own “Infrastructure as Code”. Gitlab also takes on the role of CI/CD pipelines, which are used in the delivery of code: The automatic creation of an artifact from code is called Continous Integration. The subsequent step of delivering to a system is called Continuous Delivery (Deployment). After checking in code, tests and deployments are automatically started in Gitlab. All these automated steps run with the help of Docker and other OCI compatible container images.

An example is the orcharhino.com documentation: After changes in the source code, Gitlab automatically starts a pipeline that first lines the code, then compiles and finally deploys it to the target server for use:

https://orcharhino.com/orcharhino-5-6-new-documentation/

Similarly, we also build and test source code for orcharhino itself or other dedicated customer projects. We manage the necessary container images in the included Gitlab Container Registry. Automation processes within the CI/CD pipelines very often use the Ansible automation tool. Its slim design and low requirements make it ideal for such things.

We also use other automation tools such as Saltstack, Puppet or Terraform, but these have other strengths: For example, we use a combination of Terraform and Ansible to provide training environments for our training at the cloud provider Hetzner. We mostly use Puppet for standardization and monitoring of “classic” servers. Saltstack is the only tool that can also react to external events with predefined actions out of the box, so it brings a monitoring aspect with it. For monitoring, we mostly use Prometheus and Grafana, depending on the situation we also use Splunk or even Elasticsearch to manage our logging.

Last but not least, functional communication is of course also important, both on a synchronous and asynchronous level: Since we prefer to work with open source software, we use a self-hosted Rocketchat instance. For asynchronous communication, Gitlab is used again in addition to the classic email and the Jira/Confluence stack: The linking of tickets, issues and merge requests allows structured collaboration, even beyond team boundaries.

Is that all? Does ATIX have no idea about tool X or Y?

No – of course we have many other tools in our arsenal – e.g. Kubernetes and everything else that belongs to the huge container universe, the most important ones can be found here: https://atix.de/technologien/

Since mid-July 2021, for example, ATIX is also a KCSP (Kubernetes Certified Service Provider) and thus directly part of the CNCF (Cloud Native Compute Foundation) universe.

However, we do not believe that we can convince you of our competence at this point with even more text.

Instead, we’d rather talk to you directly – without bullshit – specifically about your
requirements, problems, or questions.

So the ATIX can really handle all the tools you see in the picture?

In all honesty – no. But anyone who says “yes” would be lying. The CNCF universe with its components is developing so dynamically, that we also constantly learn to keep up to date.

And how do we find the right tools for you?

Easy – we talk with you 😉

You explain to us what you currently have and where you want to go. We help you get there with our expertise and wealth of experience.

How do we do that exactly? Didn’t it say something about free earlier?

You enter your contact details in the form below – we’ll take care of the rest.

We will contact you and arrange an appointment with one or more of our consultants.

In this free – that’s right, no cost – 1h consultation we then discuss
about your DevOps related issues.

And if we can convince you, we are of course also happy for a
long-term cooperation 🙂.