Open-source – DevopsCurry

How important is Open-Source for Devops Success ?

Saurabh Gupta — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 11:34:06 +0000

How OpenSource technologies support Devops Success

DevOps and Open Source

Devops ; It was nearly a decade back in around 2009, that the term DevOps was coined by Belgian consultant, project manager and agile practitioner Patrick Debois, as a portmanteau of Developer & Operations . It slowly transitioned as a successor to the Agile methodology and ensured improvement to the Application Lifecycle Management process.

You can consider DevOps as a strategy or principle that every company should implement within their delivery pipeline.

To implement DevOps, you should have the right tools and processes at your disposal to make it work efficiently. There are a variety of open-source DevOps tools that help in streamlining the development and deployment process. These open-source tools are built with enhanced collaboration that improves performance and allows you to handle different market needs.

Why does DevOps need Open-source support?

Well, many companies have adopted the DevOps approach for effective and faster delivery. Most companies do not think of implementing open source software within their organization to enhance the DevOps approach. Also, companies restrain their developers from contributing to open source libraries, so they miss a huge opportunity for success. Below are a few reasons why a company should focus on the open-source community.

Open-source is low-cost :Open-source means it is available freely or at a lower cost than other closed-source systems.

Based on open standards :with open-source, you can find each tool, source code, and related troubleshooting documents easily. If you are still using traditional proprietary software, it will be difficult for your organization to evolve.

Open-source is customizable
Open-source offers customizability where you can use tools and products that are way more efficient and light-weight than other available closed-source options. You can freely choose your framework and easily migrate and automate processes with open-source tools and frameworks.

The open-source community is expanding: the open-source community is now expanding, with millions of contributors and developers writing open code and development. Now companies are even supporting its exposure to their DevOps process. By joining open-source, you will become part of the most dynamic group that provides a better solution for every problem.

DevOps Success aligns with Open-source

There is no doubt that opting for open-source as a part of your DevOps process is beneficial to your organization. But if you are still using highly-proprietary and old traditional IT solutions, you may not achieve the success you are working for. Open source has opened the gate for DevOps to work efficiently. Below are the reasons why DevOps success aligns with the Open-source system, tools, and practices.

DevOps groups should go for open-source because the tools and techniques available in the open-source community are either off the shelf or built at some other organization. This will eventually save you time and cost of developing the required tools at your end.
If you avail open-source, then you can choose any of the open-source frameworks to work on. You can easily migrate your project from one framework to another without any proprietary lock-in or vendor secrets. It allows your software delivery agile, which is essential in the DevOps process.
DevOps mainly focuses on the visibility of the project or application progress within the team members. If you add the open-source within the DevOps process, it ensures the visibility is maintained even to the code level of all the tools you use.
Suppose we get any problem during continuous delivery. In that case, there is no time that you contact proprietary vendors to resolve the issue as proprietary tools require expertise to look into the troubleshooting process. But if you go with open-source, you can resolve the issue by yourself as most of the problems are documented publicly for reference.
With closed systems, you cannot leverage various tools you are using by integrating them and making the system entirely automated. But with an open-source system, integration and automation are pretty efficient and straightforward.

Some Popular Open-source DevOps tools

You can accelerate an existing system by using open-source tools within your DevOps. Below is the list of the open-source DevOps tools.

Ansible
This tool offers software-related services like application deployment, configuration, etc. It allows you to automate IT tasks. You can easily integrate it with other DevOps tools. You can find its free version on GitHub, where Red Hat offers three different paid versions of Ansible.

Watir
It is a web application based open-source testing tool. This tool is the most flexible and reliable Ruby library tool that allows you to automate web browsers. It enables you to communicate with web browsers while performing various web functions.

Supergiant
A supergiant is an open-source tool for container management that is built on top of Kubernetes. It enables Kubernetes deployment on multiple clouds within no time. Also, it helps in streamlining the production deployment. It helps in lowering the hardware costs due to the packing algorithm of the Supergiant.

Nagios
This open-source tool provides a solution to infrastructure monitoring. This tool has a well-established base in the monitoring area and is highly efficient due to the broad community creating plugins for its support. You can choose this tool over others if you want to represent your result in various visual forms.

SaltStack
SaltStack is an enterprise paid version of Salt, which is highly flexible and intelligent open-source software for event-driven orchestration, remote execution, and configuration automation. This tool orchestrates the significant movement of the code into production and ensures optimal application delivery. It allows you to deploy and configure dynamic applications.

Chef
If you want to handle both traditional and cloud environments using a single tool, Chef is the right choice. This tool comes with the development kit that allows you to deploy and test the automation code locally before deploying it to production.

Docker
Docker offers portability due to its containerization technology that transforms IT environments. It packages libraries, tools, runtime everything required for an application to run irrespective of the deployment location.

Git
This open-source tool helps to maintain the source code and to host open-source projects. Git stands out of other tools due to its ability to handle merging and branching. This tool is used by many developers and has become popular in recent years. It offers plugins to integrate it with Jenkins for supporting deployment and integration.

Puppet
With Puppet, you can follow a standard way of managing and delivering software. Puppet enhances audibility, reliability, and agility. It offers continuous automation and delivery during complete SDLC. With the introduction of various new features, it allows you to handle dynamic systems with great ease.

Hudson
Hudson is an open-source tool that allows you to monitor and manage continuous testing and integration. Main features include source code management, code analysis, testing frameworks, and providing real-time failure notifications. You will also get several plugins that are an add-on to its capability.

These tools will help to bridge the gap between the development and production environment. You can choose any tool that suits your business requirement.

The post How important is Open-Source for Devops Success ? appeared first on DevopsCurry.

DevOps Tools: What is APM and Best APM Tools in 2023 !

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 13:49:41 +0000

Understanding what is APM ? Best APM Tools in 2021

Application Performance Management refers to monitoring and managing the performance and availability of applications. As applications have evolved over the years from stand-alone to cloud-based applications, we need to manage them accordingly. So we need to understand why APM is important for any business in either the short or long run. First, you need to understand what aspects of the application you want to measure and how you are going to implement those changes to the application environment.

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application performance management is the process or the method that allows you to determine the performance and the user experience of an application. APM helps in monitoring the speed of the transaction occurring at both the user-end and the system. It allows you to detect potential bottlenecks and service interruptions.

Some APM features-

You can easily find out the root cause of the problem and get to its solution.
It provides a set of tools or software that helps in measuring an application’s performance, reliability to maintain an optimal level of an application.
APM uses approaches like real-user monitoring, root cause analysis, and load testing.
It makes use of WPM or web performance monitoring that checks for the application’s uptime and speed.

APM is an approach that considers every aspect of a software application to understand its nature and to continuously improve it to provide a better user experience. Today, APM is not only limited to the DevOps team and system admin but has become more available to all.

You can also read our previous posts on Continuous Monitoring and Open Source Monitoring tools:

Why do you need APM tools?

There are many valid reasons that a company should adopt APM as an approach in their working. It not only speeds up the development lifecycle but also useful at every stage and team members throughout the application development.

It allows developers to collaborate more effectively with the operations team to ensure quality work including troubleshooting and monitoring the work progress.
It helps testers to improve their testing quality to identify the critical bottlenecks and to perform load testing on different components of the application.
It helps business leaders to monitor web transactions to ensure better productivity.
If there is an issue with the ongoing site like loading times, unnecessary interruptions can also be solved with the use of the right tools irrespective of the infrastructure and device you are using to access the web page.
It helps in performing an audit of the application code.
It provides you with detailed insights into what features are being mostly used by your customers.
APM helps you in understanding the application dependencies and uncover the related problems that occurred.
It helps in building up developers’ and other team’s confidence in the software they are building.
It helps in understanding the impact of the code change on the different components of the application and how user experience is changing.
It offers you excellent error tracking, reporting, and alerting to ensure the better performance of an application.
It also allows you to check the performance of your application on the server if the site is taking too much time to load and other errors to be encountered.
It helps in improving a company’s revenue and profit by providing a better user experience.
It helps in reducing costs by repeating the improvement work and thus reduces operational costs.

Top 10 Open-source APM tools

Below are the top 10 APM tools that you can choose for your organization as per your business requirement. Choosing the right tool can be cumbersome, so better understand the working and advantages of the tools that will suit your requirement.

Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking APM is one of the most commonly used tools and is available from GitHub. It is best suitable for teams that are working with microservices, cloud-native, and container-based architectures. It was used for tracing applications and later on, it has evolved as an APM tool with great features.

It helps in detecting the critical endpoints of an application.
It comes with multiple language support.
It helps in optimizing the application performance.
It consumes minimal resources and reduces operational costs.
It allows you to trace distributed systems and analyze topology.
It has a customized dashboard with several user-friendly features.

Pinpoint

It is another open-source APM tool from GitHub. This APM tool is best suitable for large-scale distributed systems. It is written in Java and PHP that allows the developers to monitor Java code. It’s tracking technology enables you to do an extensive analysis of the system and its components.

You can analyze the application topology and the network structure.
It helps in real-time monitoring of the applications.
It provides developers with code-level visibility in all processes.
You can install the APM agent without changing the code.

JavaMelody

This tool comes under Apache License 2.0 and monitors Java and Java EE applications in QA and production environments. It helps you to calculate the statistics based on the application’s deployment and its performance. JavaMelody can be easily integrated with Jenkins that is a plus point for developers. This tool collects application logs and interprets this data to get better visibility of any production issue.

It offers a massive amount of plugins and third-party integration.
It allows you to get customized PDF reports.
It provides you with real-time notifications and alerts.
It comes with a centralized monitoring system, database monitoring, and a real user monitoring facility.
It uses fewer CPU resources.

Stagemonitor

This tool is the best open-source suitable for Java server applications. It provides several tools and features that include testing, production, and performance monitoring of the applications.

It offers in-browser widgets for a better user experience.
It helps in the analysis of different requests with the help of the Kibana dashboard.
It allows you to monitor and gather cluster metrics.
It comes with the support of creating new plugins.

Site24X7

It is an APM tool that allows you to optimize an application’s performance in real-time. It provides you insight into your application behavior and ensures a digital experience for your customers.

It comes with AI technology that helps in identifying the sudden spikes in your application performance.
It helps you to understand how the applications will connect and communicate with other components.
You can use this tool to troubleshoot issues in a distributed architecture.
It helps you to monitor critical business transactions in real-time.
It is supported by platforms like- Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, etc.

Storage Resource Manager

This tool helps in managing the health and performance reports for your application. This tool comes with the support of multi-vendor storage devices.

This tool comes with automated storage capacity planning.
It allows you to detect a storage hotspot.

New Relic APM

This tool is SaaS-based and is suitable for browser and infrastructure monitoring.

It helps in tracking SQL queries that are making the application’s performance slow.
It helps in analyzing SQL queries with advanced alerts.
It allows you to provide code-level diagnostics and cross-application tracing.

Foglight

This is an APM tool that is used to monitor, manage, and optimize the database and virtual infrastructure’s performance. It helps in creating a customized APM solution for end-to-end management.

It allows you to monitor and diagnose the application server.
It allows you to monitor dashboards.
It helps you to monitor your middleware environment.

Compuware APM

This APM tool helps in monitoring complex applications with complete application insights.

It helps in reducing Monthly Licensing Charges.
It helps in monitoring user-experience and application performance in clouds.
It helps in reducing the number of frequently generated faults within the application.
It helps in identifying strategic tuning targets.

BMC software APM

This is an AI-powered APM tool that allows applications and business owners to support and manage their critical applications.

It helps in trending the normal performance of the application.
It allows you to define the priorities that are based on the severity of the impact on the application.
It helps in diagnosing the code-level implications and monitors the SQL queries to ensure better performance.

The post DevOps Tools: What is APM and Best APM Tools in 2023 ! appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Adopting Open-source in 2021 for Devops success

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 08:04:16 +0000

How DevOps can benefit from the Open source

Around 2009, the term DevOps introduced an approach that enhances the collaboration between developers and operations groups. It came as a successor to the Agile method and ensured improvement to the Application Lifecycle Management process. You can consider DevOps as a strategy or principle that every company should implement within their delivery pipeline.

Why do DevOps need Open-source?

Well, many companies across the globe have started adopting the DevOps approach for effective and faster delivery. However most companies still shy away from implementing open-source software within their organizations to enhance the DevOps approach. Also, companies restrain their developers from contributing to open source libraries, so they miss a huge opportunity for success.

We are sharing some key reasons why a company should focus on the Open-source adoption for Devops implementation.

Open-source is Free or low-cost

Open-source means it is available freely or at a lower cost than other closed-source systems.

Based on open standards

With open-source, you can find each tool, source code, and related troubleshooting documents easily. If you are still using traditional proprietary software, it will be difficult for your organization to evolve.

Open-source is self customizable

Open-source offers customizability where you can use tools and products that are way more efficient and light-weight than other available closed-source options. You can freely choose your framework and easily migrate and automate processes with open-source tools and frameworks.

The open-source community is expanding

The open-source community is now expanding, with millions of contributors and developers writing open code and development. Now companies are even supporting its exposure to their DevOps process. By joining open-source, you will become part of the most dynamic group that provides a better solution for every problem.

No Vendor monopoly or Vendor lock-in

Since open-source tools are free from any proprietorship or licensing from any vendor, there is definitely no pressure of monopoly or being vendor locked-in. Whenever you feel to opt out of the open-source tool, you can move out without any restrictions.

Abundance of Talent pool

Since open source software and tools are free and easily available, the number of people with an expertise on popular open source solution is more as compared to licensed tools( because fo the cost involved). So when looking for available expert talent pool in the market for your Devops toolchain, you have higher chances of success with open-source solutions.

How DevOps success aligns with Open-source

DevOps groups should go for open-source because the tools and techniques available in the open-source community are either off the shelf or built at some other organization. This will eventually save you time and cost of developing the required tools at your end.
If you avail open-source, then you can choose any of the open-source frameworks to work on. You can easily migrate your project from one framework to another without any proprietary lock-in or vendor secrets. It allows your software delivery agile, which is essential in the DevOps process.
DevOps mainly focuses on the visibility of the project or application progress within the team members. If you add the open-source within the DevOps process, it ensures the visibility is maintained even to the code level of all the tools you use.
Suppose we get any problem during continuous delivery. In that case, there is no time that you contact proprietary vendors to resolve the issue as proprietary tools require expertise to look into the troubleshooting process. But if you go with open-source, you can resolve the issue by yourself as most of the problems are documented publicly for reference.
With closed systems, you cannot leverage various tools you are using by integrating them and making the system entirely automated. But with an open-source system, integration and automation are pretty efficient and straightforward.

Common Open-source DevOps tools

You can accelerate an existing system by using open-source tools within your DevOps. Below is the list of the open-source DevOps tools.

Ansible

This tool offers software-related services like application deployment, configuration, etc. It allows you to automate IT tasks. You can easily integrate it with other DevOps tools. You can find its free version on GitHub, where Red Hat offers three different paid versions of Ansible.

Watir

It is a web application based open-source testing tool. This tool is the most flexible and reliable Ruby library tool that allows you to automate web browsers. It enables you to communicate with web browsers while performing various web functions.

Supergiant

A supergiant is an open-source tool for container management that is built on top of Kubernetes. It enables Kubernetes deployment on multiple clouds within no time. Also, it helps in streamlining the production deployment. It helps in lowering the hardware costs due to the packing algorithm of the Supergiant.

Nagios

This open-source tool provides a solution to infrastructure monitoring. This tool has a well-established base in the monitoring area and is highly efficient due to the broad community creating plugins for its support. You can choose this tool over others if you want to represent your result in various visual forms.

SaltStack

SaltStack is an enterprise paid version of Salt, which is highly flexible and intelligent open-source software for event-driven orchestration, remote execution, and configuration automation. This tool orchestrates the significant movement of the code into production and ensures optimal application delivery. It allows you to deploy and configure dynamic applications.

Chef

If you want to handle both traditional and cloud environments using a single tool, Chef is the right choice. This tool comes with the development kit that allows you to deploy and test the automation code locally before deploying it to production.

Docker

Docker offers portability due to its containerization technology that transforms IT environments. It packages libraries, tools, runtime everything required for an application to run irrespective of the deployment location.

Git

This open-source tool helps to maintain the source code and to host open-source projects. Git stands out of other tools due to its ability to handle merging and branching. This tool is used by many developers and has become popular in recent years. It offers plugins to integrate it with Jenkins for supporting deployment and integration.

Bitbucket

Similar to GitHub, BitBucket is another tool that helps manage project code throughout the SDLC cycle. While the core functionality of BitBucket resembles that of GitHub, features such as easy integration with Jira and Trello, inbuilt CI/CD functionality tend to give this tool by Atlassian an edge.

Puppet

With Puppet, you can follow a standard way of managing and delivering software. Puppet enhances audibility, reliability, and agility. It offers continuous automation and delivery during complete SDLC. With the introduction of various new features, it allows you to handle dynamic systems with great ease.

Prometheus

It is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.It comes with a dimensional data model, flexible query language, efficient time series database and modern alerting approach

These tools will help to bridge the gap between the development and production environment. You can choose any tool that suits your business requirement.

Terraform

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that lets you safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure.Users define and provision data-center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.

Conclusion

Open source is slowly becoming integral to DevOps success, both as a source of innovative tools and also forming the culture that DevOps requires to succeed.If modern day enterprises are looking to build DevOps toolchain, they should consider open source DevOps tools in addition to commercial tools, we have already seen the benefits of using the open-source tools above.

The post Adopting Open-source in 2021 for Devops success appeared first on DevopsCurry.