We can do many things to make our work lives more manageable. The challenge is that we don’t always have the right tools to accomplish our goals. The same goes for DevOps engineers who want to automate their workflows. Many tools are available, but not all are made equal. This post will discuss how you can use DevOps tools to automate your workflow and save time and energy.
Contents
1. Docker
Docker is a tool for packaging applications in a standard unit for software development. It allows you to take an application and all its dependencies from development through testing and production without changing a single line of code. The container is an isolated, reusable, portable, and disposable runtime instance.
To give you an example: the Docker registry by JFrog is one of the most popular tools on DevOps that allows you to store your Docker images in the cloud so that other developers can pull them down and rebuild them as needed.
2. Packer
Packer is a tool for creating machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. It can package applications with dependencies and their associated configuration files. Packer will create the image in an automated fashion and make it so that it can be run on any other machine without any particular configuration.
Packer’s workflow is easy to understand: you write a simple JSON or YAML file that describes your application, enter some basic information about how you want the image built (number of resources, cloud provider), and then let Packer take care of everything else!
3. Terraform
Terraform is like a programming language for infrastructure. It allows you to describe your infrastructure in code, and then enables you to deploy and manage that infrastructure across multiple cloud providers. Using Terraform, you can provision servers, networking gear, and even complete data center topologies.
For a DevOps engineer, this tool is a must-have. It allows you to create, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to provision any cloud provider and on-premise servers with minimal configuration. This tool supports many popular providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, and DigitalOcean.
4. Ansible/Chef/Puppet
These tools are used to manage software and systems configurations. They can be used to automate workflows and deployments in DevOps environments.
Ansible is a configuration management tool that helps automate software deployments, configuration management, and application orchestration. It uses SSH to connect computers, which means it’s not limited by the traditional constraints of being executed on the same machine as the target server.
Ansible works with existing tools such as Git or SVN for version control for your infrastructure code—which makes it easy for you to use existing tools you’re already familiar with.
Chef is another open-source configuration management tool like Ansible; both were created by Opscode(now known as Chef Software). However, its approach differs from Ansible’s in how it manages servers: rather than focusing on discrete steps (e.g., installing packages), Chef focuses on high-level “recipes” or “cookbooks” that define sets of actions needed to bring a system into compliance with its desired state.
This approach offers more flexibility but requires more effort when writing those recipes yourself. Chef is written in Ruby and leverages some of the language’s features, such as its support for regular expressions.
5. Nagios/Zabbix
Nagios and Zabbix are monitoring tools, but they’re also much more. Nagios is a monitoring solution that monitors server infrastructure. Zabbix is an open-source monitoring program that can be used to monitor everything from server infrastructure to application servers. Both tools can help you automate your workflow by informing you when something goes wrong so that you can take corrective action before it becomes too difficult or expensive to fix.
6. Bash
Bash is a shell and command language. It’s one of the most popular Unix shells, and many Linux-based operating systems use it. The name “Bash” comes from the Bourne Again Shell, created and written by Stephen Bourne at AT&T Bell Labs in 1988.
Bash is a Unix shell: It allows you to interact with your computer using commands that you type into a terminal window or an SSH connection. These commands can be straightforward, like cd to change directories, or much more complex ones if you choose to learn how they work (for example, man ).
Conclusion
The tools listed above can be a massive help in automating your workflow. Whether you are looking for a way to manage your infrastructure or just want some automation around your code, these tools will help! Keep in mind that there are many more tools out there, so if any of these don’t fit into what you need, then look around and see if something else works better.