DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry for their recommendation on a key technology required for DevOps. Part 2 of the list covers automation and continuous integration.

Start with 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 1

9. AUTOMATION

DevOps relies, technologically, on automation and socially, on collaboration. You can't empower development and operations to collaborate and move faster until the manual scripting and configuration tasks are automated. So automation truly is the tooling foundation of DevOps. In short, automation supports a workflow that provides speed, scale and consistency – the end-state anyone practicing DevOps is trying to achieve.
Lucas A. Welch
Director of Communications, Chef

The single most important tool for DevOps success is an automation tool that is capable of supporting a variety of technologies. Our customer base needs a complete big data stack automation tool that speeds the creation of big data clusters for hard-to-system-engineer, distributed processing applications. With this type of tool developers can gain access to a Hadoop cluster almost immediately – as opposed to the weeks or months it might take through conventional channels. This allows developers and data scientists to experiment and innovate rapidly.
Brad Kolarov
Managing Partner, B23

The true must-have tool to enable DevOps is a culture of collaboration. Without trusted and transparent interaction between Development and Operations, you can't enable DevOps. Concurrent with a shift in culture is the need for automated tooling at all levels: build, test, deploy, monitor and remediate.
Bill Berutti
President of the Cloud, Data Center and Performance Businesses at BMC Software

10. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

A continuous integration tool is vital to enabling DevOps. With the help of other tools, they form the automation backbone that consolidates developers’ code submissions, packages and tests releases, and deploys releases into production.
Krishnan Badrinarayanan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Riverbed

Tools alone will not drive DevOps transformations; however, if I had to pick one critical tool to DevOps, I would say it is the CI Server. If the service delivery pipeline is the blood of DevOps, then the CI Server is the heart.
John Willis
Director of Ecosystem Development, Docker

Continuous integration is the best way to tie your development, testing and deployment into a single end-to-end process that “just works”, allowing Development and Ops to focus on what they do best and deliver quality code to your users faster
Matt Solnit
CTO, SOASTA

11. BUILD AUTOMATION

Silicon Valley software teams increasingly look to Build Automation as the key to developer productivity – because it empowers developers to define the behavior of all the other downstream DevOps toolchain.
Miko Matsumura
CMO, Gradle

12. AUTOMATED CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

In my opinion, integration testing is the most important phase of software development. This makes automated configuration management a must-have in the DevOps toolbox. The growth of containers and microservices makes it all the more critical to track components and ensure that the right version of components are being tested.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors

Read Gabe Lowy's latest blog on DEVOPSdigest: The DevOps Payoff

13. SELENIUM GRID

One must-have tool to enable DevOps is a Selenium (or Appium) grid to support automated unit and functional tests that run whenever a new code is checked in via the CI server. Ideally, this grid is on a 3rd-party cloud service so that the DevOps team does not have to deal with maintaining an image library of the latest browser, OS, and device combinations, or the delays associated with false positives that may be introduced as the result of a testing infrastructure unreliability.
Lubos Parobek
VP of Products, Sauce Labs

Read 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 3, covering continuous delivery.