10 Open Source DevOps Tools That You Must Try

Open Source DevOps Tools are making a great impact since they are low cost and has other advantages. DevOps engineers are always on a lookout for better and efficient tools to improve productivity. Open Source tools have many advantages and the Open Source community provides great support. These open source tools are powerful and flexible and hence they are in demand. If you are looking towards DevOps development and coding then you should start here.

Here is a list of some Open Source DevOps Tools that you must try. These tools will help you do all types of tasks. From automation to continuous deployment, configuration management, and monitoring. Take a look at these wide ranges of tools that will help you from coding to monitoring.

1. Redis

In layman’s terms, Redis is one of the best in memory cache. It is actually a data structure server which can be used as a regular database or a cache. Redis stores the data in the form of key value pairs. It also supports a wide variety of data structures including string, lists, maps, sets, sorted sets and spatial indexes.

Key Features:

• It supports data structures such as hyperloglogs and bitmaps
• Redis 3.2 onwards supports geospatial data through the implementation of geostack
• Provides high availability by using Redis Sentinel

Use Cases:

• Session Caching
• Full Page Cache
• Message queue applications

2. Icinga

Icinga is an Open Source DevOps tool for network monitoring application. It is said to be the stepchild of Nagios since Icinga is forked from Nagios itself. Icinga is developed to overcome the shortcomings of Nagios. The latest stable version of Icinga2 was released in 2014.

Key Features:

• Reporting module with improved SLA accuracy.
• Configuration and plugin compatibility with Nagios.
• Database connectors for PostgreSQL and Oracle.

Use Cases:

• A complete monitoring solution
• Visualisation and Reporting tool
• Notification and alerting service

3. Docker

Docker is one of the well known Open Source DevOps Tools which is widely used. It allows you to build, ship and deploy distributed applications anywhere. Docker allows you to deploy your application by packaging the application and its dependencies into a container.

Key Features:

• It is versatile hence it works with any stack
• Isolates your application into containers that removes dependency
• Eases configuration management and allows scaling
• Lightweight and significantly boosts performance

Use Cases:

• Tool for building and deploying agile applications

4. Jenkins

Jenkins is also a very well known Open Source DevOps tool for continuous integration and delivery. It is a standard for managing DevOps which allows you to deliver code as well as in the production of code. Although it is not fast and fancy, it is really easy to use.

Key Features:

• Provides an ecosystem of plugins and add-ons
• Provides protection from external threats and malicious builds
• Integrates with a large number of testing and deployment technologies

Use Cases:

• Build Code
• Create Docker containers
• Run multiple tests and push to production

5. Git

Git is a creation of Linus Torvalds. It is one of the best Open Source DevOps tools for version control system. It allows multiple users to collaborate on a single project by tracking changes and coordinating work. Git allows forking and pull request features and also has plugins to facilitate integration and deployment with Jenkins.

Key Features:

• Very fast and significantly improves performance
• Maintains data integrity hence data loss is rare
• Strong support for non-linear development
• Handling of large projects can be done with efficiency
• It has cryptographic authentication of history

Use Cases:

• Distributed Version control tool

6. ELK

Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana form the ELK stack. ELK stack is one of the most widely used Open Source DevOps tools for log analysis. It collects logs from various services spread over different servers and stores them in a centralized location. Since the logs are in a single location hence the processing and analysis becomes easy.

Key Features:

• It delivers actionable insights in real time
• Scalable, highly available and hence reliable
• It solves the problem of collecting logs from multiple locations
• Kibana allows drill down operations in real time hence in depth visualization is possible
• Provides alerts hence issues can easily reach authorities

Use cases:

• A complete log monitoring and visualization stack

7. Ganglia

Ganglia provides the DevOps with the ability to perform high performing cluster and grid monitoring capabilities. It comprises of two unique daemons, gmond and gmetad. Gmond runs on each cluster node that you want to monitor and answers requests. It transmits the information as XML files over TCP connection.

Key Features:

• Scalable and distributed hence highly available
• Can scale to handle up-to 2000 nodes
• Low per-node overheads hence achieves high concurrency

Use cases:

• Scalable and distributed monitoring tool
• View live or recorded statistics

8. Maven

Apache Maven is a build automation, project management, and comprehension tool. Apache Maven is mainly used for Java projects. The Yiddish translation of Maven is an accumulator of knowledge and it makes it easy for developers to create reports and checks.

Key Features:

• Provides developers with way to manage builds, documentation, reporting etc hence simplifies project build process
• Provides plugins and tools that interact with its declarative model
• Consistent usage across all projects
• Backward compatibility hence easy to port the multiple modules of a project into Maven 3 from older Maven versions

Use Cases:

• Build and deploy multiple projects together

9. Puppet

Puppet aims at making software powered builds and hence reduce hardware dependencies. It allows data orchestration by providing automation configuration hence helps in managing a large number of dynamic systems. 

Key Features:

• Since it is open source, custom libraries can be implemented
• It increases manageability and productivity

Use Cases:

• System configuration using software

10. Ansible

Ansible aims for simplicity and hence it is a simple configurations management tool. It is similar to Puppet and Chef but is less complex and hence widely used. Ansible is used to push changes and reconfigure machines.

Key Features:

• Can deploy to bare metal hosts and cloud environments
• Minimal and consistent

Use Cases:

• Deployment configuration

These tools are just a handful, there are numerous tools out there. These DevOps tools are open source hence you can easily learn and use them. What open source DevOps Tools are in your list? Let us know in the comments below!