Last Updated on February 27, 2024
If you’re ready to create better apps this year, you’ll need the right toolkit to make it happen. Developing an app requires bringing to together different teams including designers, developers, operations and even marketing teams. The right tools will help your team develop faster, create fewer errors, and ultimately deliver a better app to the end users. Your team will feel more connected and have better communication if they have a strategy and software systems that are designed to help you work more productively.
Having the right DevOps software, specifically, can speed up the development process and allow your organization to streamline workflows.
The right DevOps software will promote close collaboration between developers and information technology teams. This organization structure enables smarter and more efficient software creation.
In this article, we share a few of the tools that are helping software companies create amazing apps this year. We also discuss ways DevOps can make a difference for your business.
How DevOps Benefits Software Teams
Historically, it was easy for the various teams involved in software development to become siloed and isolated, holding back the process of bringing new software products to market. DevOps, however, is an organization structure that aims to break down walls between teams and facilitate faster and better app development.
Simply put, DevOps is the combined efforts of software developers and information technology operations to speed up how software is developed. Rather than operating as two separate teams that pass off work to each other, DevOps has the two teams work in parallel. With DevOps, the team can deliver fixes, updates and new product features faster and with fewer errors. When run correctly, DevOps organization allows for more frequent releases and increased speed of deployment. This expedited timeline allows businesses to move faster and capitalize on more opportunities.
Using the right software can facilitate communication between DevOps members. The right tools allow for all team members to work in parallel and understand when their role begins and ends and allows everyone to see where the app is in development.
1. Docker
The top container platform for software teams, Docker allows you to transport containers, isolate applications into different containers, and more. By isolating the development, the size and completeness of the container package becomes more manageable and allows team members to deploy to production environments in mere seconds.
Because Docker is open source it is widely used. Docker has been around for so long it integrates with other tools including Jenkins and Bamboo to name a few. When you use it with these other tools, you can improve your team workflows, speed up processes and work smoother as a team. Additionally, Docker helps manage control issues, configuration management and allows containers to be moved from one place to another.
2. JFrog Artifactory
JFrog is a universal repository manager used by 70 percent of the Fortune 100, so you know it is a valuable and trusted tool. The universal repository manager that works with any technology and programming language. It provides an automated solution that allows you to track artifacts through development and into production. Jfrog also integrates with tools like Helm repository to offer repository management for Helm charts.
This open source tool was created to speed up development cycles using binary repositories – creating a single place for teams to efficiently manage their artifacts. JFrog also integrates with existing ecosystems0 supporting end-to-end binary management. This tool will help teams focus on continuous improvement and faster software development.
3. Puppet
Puppet is an open source software configuration management and deployment tools vital to DevOps teams. Essentially, Puppet automates server setup, program installation and system manager, reducing the need for a DevOps team member to do this work manually. Puppet can define infrastructure code and enforce system configuration and is especially helpful for teams that manager multiple servers.
The unified platform allows empowers both developers and system admins by allowing programmers to write, test and launch applications without waiting for the operations team, saving time without sacrificing quality. Puppet works for teams of all sizes and includes more than 5,000 modules.
4. Jenkins
Jenkins is a popular tool to help break down that silos that often pop up between dev team members and operations teams. With Jenkins, you can manage and automate much of your software delivery pipeline and monitor task execution. No longer does one team member build the code, and then a separate team member waits manually run test and verify the code. Using Jenkins, teams can work in continuous integration, allowing developers to compile code from a shared repository and automating testing and integrations.
Jenkins not only shortens the development release cycle, but also created increased visibility so all engineers are aware of changes in the base code every single day. This popular tool is easy to use and can be up and running nearly instantly. Jenkins works with a variety of different operating systems and includes a large ecosystem of available plugins.
5. WhiteSource
WhiteSources is a free, open source security system that helps you find and quickly repair vulnerabilities in your code. The cloud-based solution helps DevOp teams audit code every time developers run a build. The software automatically identifies open source components and create reports on opensource licenses, security issues and vulnerabilities. These reports alert developers early on so they can prevent bad coded from becoming a larger issue.
WhiteSource works inside GitHub or an Azure DevOps development environment. Use WhiteSource alongside other DevOps systems to help with security troubleshooting.
6. Vagrant
If you’re looking for a tool to help with managing virtual machines, Vagrant brings together all of your building and management into one unified platform. This is a great tool to ensure your development team has the right environment available.
Tools to Work Faster And More Effective
The right tools can foster a DevOps culture and allow your team work more effective and faster. Working together will prevent errors and allows teams to capitalize on opportunities before competitors.
The world of DevOps continues to change and grow and over the next year we’ll likely see a lot more essential software tools for creating amazing apps in 2020. The best DevOps teams will continually keep an eye out for new tools and techniques that will facilitate communication and transparency.