10 Useful Tools for DevOps Engineers

Here’s an overview of ten tools that can be used by DevOps practitioners.

DevOps is a culture and its implementation helps us to manage the application life cycle effectively by using automation. DevOps has three pillars:

• People
• Processes
• Tools

Tools play a critical part in DevOps or culture transformation initiatives. However, people and processes help to maintain uniformity and sustainability across business units or projects in an organisation. DevOps enables faster time to market with high quality products.

I have used a few tools and believe they will be very important in the implementation of DevOps and DevSecOps practices in 2023 and beyond. Let’s take a brief look at what they offer.

1. GitLab

GitLab is the DevOps platform that provides features for different phases of software development, from planning to production. It helps to plan, develop, secure, and operate software in a single application. Its features include cache and artifact management.

GitLab is one of the most futuristic and forward-looking tools for the implementation of DevOps practices.

2. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open source tool that provides integration with the existing tools used in application life cycle management to automate all activities — build, test, and deploy. It is almost a synonym for DevOps, and is one of the easiest to learn. It has a huge community for support. We can easily install Jenkins in the Kubernetes cluster and utilise multiple cloud services to make it highly available.

Jenkins provides a simple way to create a pipeline that includes continuous integration and continuous delivery. It can be used creatively for managing entire life cycle management activities easily. Plugin based architecture helps us to use the existing tools in the pipeline and hence too many changes in culture can be avoided in one go.

3. SonarQube

SonarQube helps to clear bugs, vulnerabilities and code smell in the code. SonarQube 9.8 brings new rules across JavaScript, Kotlin, C++, and Python. It supports more than 20 programming languages for static code analysis (SCA).

It is much easier to integrate SCA using SonarQube in Pipeline as Code. It helps to transform the culture of an organisation from manual to automated code reviews with quality gates and quality profiles.

4. Docker

A Docker container image is a standalone package that contains all the dependencies required for running an application. This open source lightweight tool helps to create, deploy, and manage containers on a different host operating system using resource isolation features, such as cgroups and Linux kernels. Docker Desktop is a very helpful application for beginners and advanced users of MacOS, Linux, and Windows machines for building and sharing containerised applications and microservices. It can be used for free as part of a Docker Personal subscription.

A container can package application code, libraries, and configurations. The container engine is installed on the host OS.

Docker and Kubernetes have changed the game as Infrastructure as Code and Pipeline as Code have become a norm in recent times.

5. Trivy

Trivy is an open source yet simple and comprehensive vulnerability/misconfiguration scanner for containers and other artifacts. It can scan targets such as container image, file system, Git repository (remote), virtual machine image, Kubernetes, and AWS.
In my experience, it is easy to integrate Trivy scanning in Pipeline as Code and make sure that images are secure.

6. Terraform

Terraform is an open source ‘Infrastructure as Code’ tool, created by HashiCorp, which helps us to create immutable infrastructure to avoid the problem of configuration drift. This platform-agnostic declarative coding tool helps developers use a high-level configuration language to manage infrastructure.

Terraform supports different cloud providers and different services provided by cloud providers, as listed below:

Terraform Cloud is HashiCorp’s managed service offering that helps you with infrastructure automation.

In my experience, this is yet another tool that has changed the game.

7. Kubernetes

Kubernetes or k8s is an open source, extensible, and portable container orchestration platform founded by Google. It provides declarative configuration and automation for deployment automation. It has become one of the most popular tools in DevOps practices implementation with its features related to deployment, management, and scaling applications in Kubernetes clusters. It works as a booster in managing resources effectively.

We can create a Kubernetes cluster in an on-premise environment as well as different cloud deployment models such as private and public clouds. Public cloud provides managed services for Kubernetes. Google Cloud Platform has Google Kubernetes Engine, AWS has Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS), while Azure has Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for managing Kubernetes cluster in a cloud environment.

Some major removals, deprecations and changes in version 1.26 are:

• Based on inclusive naming initiative, the –prune-whitelist flag has been replaced with –prune-allowlist
• Dynamic kubelet configuration has been removed from the API server
• Deprecations for kube-apiserver command line argument –master-service-namespace
• Deprecations for kubectl run command line arguments such as –cascade, –filename, –force, –grace-period, and so on
• The v1beta1 flow control API group and the v2beta2 HorizontalPodAutoscaler API have been removed

8. Lens

Lens Desktop is an exciting platform for working with Kubernetes. It is a distribution of the OpenLens repository with specific customisations, and is free of charge. For more details, you can visit https://k8slens.dev/pricing.html.

Lens is extremely useful for all those who are managing infrastructure, as it gives a 360 degree view of all the resources available in a cluster along with description and logs. You can also view YAML files for deployments, services, pods, secrets, and so on.

9. OWASP ZAP

In software security testing, we assess and verify a system against security risks and vulnerabilities. System security testing can be categorised as per the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) in the following way:

• Vulnerability assessment, where scanning and analysing of security risks are performed
• Penetration testing, where simulated malicious attackers attack the system and analyse it
• Code review, where review and analysis of the system takes place to find vulnerabilities.

OWASP’s Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is a flexible, extensible and open source penetration testing tool, also known as a ‘man-in-the-middle proxy’. ZAP can intercept and inspect messages sent between browser and web applications, and perform other operations as well.

Automated pen testing is an important part of the CI/CD pipeline. Pen tests have stages such as explore, attack and report. OWASP ZAP fills the important gap of verifying applications and protecting them from multiple security threats.

10. Grafana

Grafana is available as a fully managed tool with Grafana Cloud, or you can run the enterprise version on your infrastructure with self-managed options. You can visit publicly available dashboards from https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/ and import them in your Grafana instance to visualise data quickly.

In my experience, Grafana is one of the most useful tools while using Kubernetes on-premise or cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure or GCP. It supports Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It is easy to install, configure, and manage Grafana and monitoring metrics keeping Prometheus as a data source.