DevOps roles are in high demand, and they yield a high salary, therefore employers want to ensure they’re hiring people with the highest level of education/training. Plus, it’s important to be knowledgeable on the most popular stack of tools as they’re essential to implement DevOps successfully. And so, it’s important to hone your ability and knowledge of a few of the hard skills involved in DevOps to increase the likelihood of being hired by top companies. It’s difficult to know which tools and skills to immediately focus on and which are essential or most required right now, but in order to fine-tune your research, here’s a curated list of some of the most current in-demand DevOps tools.
The main principle of DevOps is to streamline the processes of automation of software and development such as build, test, incident detection and response, release, and others which harvest the most efficient time to market. As well as create high-quality products and reduced failures and rollbacks/pullbacks of software features. So here are the main tools that companies are focusing on to enhance the efficiency of this process.
Jenkins – CI/CD
Jenkins is a well-known integration tool and open-source Java-based automation CI server. It is supported by multiple operating systems such as macOS, Windows, and other Unix OSs. It can also be deployed on cloud-based platforms.
Jenkins stands out from the crowd as an automation server because it is designed for both internal and plugin extensions and has an easy-to-use system framework. It’ll help you easily monitor the execution of repeated actions carried out during web projects and safely build, deploy and automate it. Plus allow you to gain quick access to the output so you can identify any imminent issues as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Jenkins is a vital skill as most companies using DevOps use it to help free them from mundane processes of sending code manually - it also easily integrates with your existing tools. It can be used both for continuous integration (CI) and to power your continuous delivery (CD). And as if it couldn’t get any better, built by developers for developers, means that it will continue to innovate and improve!
Puppet - Configuration Management
Puppet helps you manage and automate the configuration of servers. It allows you to determine the preferable state of a system in your infrastructure that you want to control. It delivers a server orchestration so that you have an overview of the architecture of your: software, machines, and their configurations in the data centre.
The most notable benefits of deploying Puppet are automation and consistency. Puppet allows you to homogeneously control hundreds or thousands of servers in your infrastructure which is very difficult to manage manually. Because of this Puppet saves you time and money. Troubleshooting problems with servers is a time-consuming and manually intensive process. When using configuration management, you can validate the Puppet applied to the desired state. Once applied it will help you identify why your model has failed and what was incomplete, the whole process saving you valuable time. Also, when troubleshooting you can add the missing part to your model and ensure that it doesn’t occur again.
Docker – Containerisation
Docker is a container platform that allows developers to build, test, and ship applications in resource-independent environments. It allows you to separate your applications from your infrastructure so you can deliver software quickly.
The more efficient a tool is in dropping costs while raising profits and the better the tool is, particularly in larger companies that require a steady generated revenue over the long term. Docker can aid in facilitating this business requirement by reducing infrastructure resources- it ensures that the same application is run with fewer resources. “Docker adopters quintuple the average number of running containers they have in production between their first and tenth month of usage.”
Another benefit to using Docker is its portability; once you’ve tested your containerised application, you can deploy it to any other system where Docker is running plus your application will perform exactly as it did when you tested it. Also, containers have much smaller footprints than their alternative virtual machines and are faster and quicker to create. All of which make your development process much more agile and responsive.
Git - Version Control
Git is the most popular of the version control system tools thanks to its full range of functionalities. It is used to track changes in the source code making it easier for multiple developers to work together on non-linear development. Generally used for source code management in software development, it is divided into three stages: working directory, to modify files in your working directory; staging area, staging the files, and adding snapshots of them to your staging area; Git directory, create a commit that stores the snapshots permanently to a Git directory. You can also check out any existing version, make changes to it and stage them and commit.
Version control in general allows developers to keep track of adjustments and updates in their codes so that in case of an incident, it is easy to return to previous versions of code. Git is great as it creates a higher efficiency in your web projects. There are multiple advantages to using the tool: it is easy to implement as it’s compatible with most protocols including HTTP, SSH, and FTP and offers multi-branch development for local branches for the same commit, this way you can merge, create, and remove these branches as infrastructures grow. It also features storage tools such as GitHub and GitLab cloud-hosted code repository services and BitBucket the source code hosting service, specifically designed for enterprise-range version control.
Kubernetes - Containerisation
Kubernetes is an automation orchestration platform that allows developers to run containerised workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configurations and automation, across Kubernetes clusters referring to a group of nodes. Containers are great for time-pressed developers, as it bundles and runs your applications rather than having to perform a manual process. A system handling it requires less effort and ensures that there is no downtime. And so, it can help organisations save on their ecosystem management, ensuring scalability across multiple environments. It decreases and simplifies the development, release, and deployment process. “Once organisations understand the benefits of containers and Kubernetes for DevOps, application development, and delivery, it opens up so many possibilities from modernising traditional applications, to hybrid- and multi-cloud implementations and the development of new, cloud-native applications with speed and agility,” says Ashesh Badani, SVP and General Manager for Cloud Platforms at Red Hat.
