In software development, developers and operation engineers were often treated as separate entities.

However, due to differences between the development and production environment, maintaining communication proved difficult. Consequently, companies often had to deal with increased production times, costs, and deployment failures. Imagine you are Shopify website designer and you have to deal with all the tasks without proper communication with rest of the team. Impossible.

The fix?

Enter DevOps, an increasingly popular approach that brings software development and operation teams together to improve communication, decrease production time, and ultimately reduce costs.

This is done by automating workflows, infrastructure and measuring application performance.

But this is only possible if you’ve got the right tools in your arsenal. So let’s take a look at the best of them.

1. Slack

First thing’s first: communication. And Slack might be your best bet.

That’s because Slack allows you to integrate with other popular DevOps tools, like Jenkins or GitHub, for example. Consequently, it will be easier for teams to identify and fix possible errors, builds, or general issues.

What’s more, third-party integration with Slack can provide additional functionality to the app, as you can receive alerts, subscribe to repositories, and take action from the platform using slash commands.

2. Git

We’ve talked with a few experts from a Chicago software development company, and we saw that Git played a significant role in their development process.

This is a distributed source code management (SCM) tool that manages large and small files, tracks the progress of your development project, and records changes.

Furthermore, Git allows you to save multiple versions of your source code, so you can return to older versions if necessary.

Besides, its Feature Branch Control function makes it possible for developers to work on specific features without meddling with the main codebase, meaning that there will be less room for error.

3. Docker

Docker is a containerization platform that allows developers to securely package, deploy and run applications regardless of the running environment.

Each application, including its source code, system config files, supporting files, etc., has its container. That said, you can access a container and execute the application in a remote environment without much of a headache.

4. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source CI/CD server that automates the build cycle of your software project. Developers can automatically run tests, get reports, and commit code into the repository with its Pipeline feature.

What’s more, with over 1800 plugins available, Jenkins can integrate with most DevOps tools, including Docker.

5. Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation engine that automates IT processes, like provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, etc.

Unlike similar tools, like Chef or Puppet, Ansible stands out due to its ease of use and simplicity.

This tool is also less resource-intensive, as no agents or daemons are running in the background.

6. Nagios

Nagios is an open-source monitoring tool that allows you to spot and fix any IT infrastructure issues before they hit other crucial processes.

With it, you can monitor network traffic and bandwidth for optimizing usage, plan infrastructure upgrades, solve issues automatically, send alerts to technical staff via email or SMS.

7. Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a cloud-based DevOps platform made by Microsoft. Azure provides you with a collection of tools dedicated to specific workflow stages.

For example, Azure Artifacts is used to deploy, manage, and create, Azure Boards will help you plan and manage your project, Azure Test Plans is a test management solution, etc.

In other words, you can use the Azure DevOps platform to manage the whole development cycle from one interface.