DevOps has been coined since 2009 is collaborating development and operations. DevOps opens up its wings from agile software development concepts. Furthermore, it applies the same principles to the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process. Interestingly, we can’t define DevOps as it is not merely rules and practices and more about philosophy and movements.

Not to mention, developers and operations teams are continuously finding new and better ways to work together to build more resilient CI/CD pipelines. This is all to improve the speed and efficiency to ship code, share responsibilities, and testing frameworks. In this context, you can’t ignore the contributions of useful tools and automation, especially open-source DevOps tools, which helps streamline the process of development and deployment.

Furthermore, DevOps is not a limited area and spans a broad range of skills and tasks related to software development and IT operations. For this, a large number of open-source DevOps tools are available in the market. In this blog, we will discuss 10 such open-source DevOps tools.

Related post – DevOps and Cloud: A Symbiotic relationship

Best Open-source DevOps tools

1. Ansible

This open-source DevOps tool provides software-related services like application deployment, configuration management, etc. Besides, it allows DevOps and IT teams to automate setups, restarts, updates, and other maintenance regarding application and infrastructure components. As a result, it saves a lot of time by eliminating human error. This is because you can avoid spending time on manual efforts and CI/CD pipelines. Also, Ansible connects to hundreds of other integral tools in CI/CD pipeline through its configuration management and IT orchestration, which leads to faster and more resilient applications and services development.

Key features

• It provides agentless architecture.
• It is simple and easy to use.
• It is powerful because of workflow orchestration.

Link – https://www.ansible.com/

2. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source DevOps tool and is an automation server that is written in Java. It is useful for projects that need automation, builds, and deployment. It is highly focused on building out robust deployment automation and on CI/CD pipeline. Though both Ansible and Jenkins are used for app deployments, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration management, Jenkins is more reliable for CI.

Key features

• It helps to distribute the work on multiple machines and platforms.
• It acts as a continuous delivery point for the projects.
• Supported by operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX.

Link – https://www.jenkins.io/

3. Docker

Containers virtualize the operating systems, and Dockers are the ones that use this concept. Docker can be used to package the application (for example, WAR file) along with the dependencies to be used for deploying in different environments. However, containers are not the right fit in every situation. Interestingly, in the DevOps scenario, you can’t ignore the use and implementation of microservices and containers. Furthermore, it depends on the existing architecture, which is highly responsible for Docker’s successful implementation.

Key features

• The special containerization technology makes it portable, which is quite often found in self-contained units.
• It packages everything that an application is required to run: libraries, tools, runtime, etc.

Link – https://www.docker.com/

4. Puppet

It is an open-source DevOps tool that ensures that all the configurations are applied everywhere. Basically, it is a configuration management tool that uses a declarative language. This language describes more like an asset description. However, developers or sysadmins are not allowed to intervene with how they can achieve a certain state.

Though this apparently seems a limitation for customizability, this offers more benefits toward reliability indeed. These limitations force DevOps and IT teams to design ideal configurations and also lay them out within constraints. As a result, this reduces the amount of control they have but often leads to greater reliability and simpler configurations.

Key features

• It can work for hybrid infrastructure and applications.
• It supports Windows, Linux, and UNIX operating systems.
• It provides Client-server architecture.

Link – https://puppet.com/

5. Chef

If you want to check the configuration, which is applied everywhere and automate the infrastructure, Chef is the ideal open-source DevOps tool. The tool uses an imperative language for configuration management, which allows greater customization. Also, DevOps and IT teams can program every aspect of their nodes using this tool. No doubt, Chef is the friendliest configuration management and CI/CD tool for developers. However, it is hard to handle for more traditional IT operations teams.

Key features

• It keeps your configuration policies remain flexible, testable, versionable, and readable.
• It helps to standardize and enforce the configurations.
• It automates the whole process and ensures that all systems are correctly configured.

Link – https://www.chef.io/

6. Git (GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket)

This open-source tool supports most of the version control features of check-in, branches, commits, merging, labels, push and pull to/from GitHub, etc. Git is a collection of popular source code control tools such as GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket; however, the overall value of Git as an open-source DevOps tool is undeniable. GitHub is considered one of the best places for developers to share and collaborate open-source projects around shared repositories.

The main difference between Git and other version control systems is how it tracks your filesystems and records any changes made to the system at a given time. Git is, no doubt, crucial for alignment between all development and IT teams that leads to more visibility into development pipelines and more communication across engineering teams.

Key features

• It is pretty easy to learn and maintain for teams initially looking at a tool to version control their artifacts. 

Link – https://github.com/

7. Splunk Cloud

Splunk is an open-source DevOps tool or software platform which converts machine data into valuable information. To perform its action, it gathers the data from different machines or websites, etc. Splunk Cloud is a premium log management, application monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring tool. Splunk can serve as a single source of truth for system health and performance by ingesting data from services and devices themselves and other monitoring tools.

This tool helps in the resolution of incidents if something goes wrong. It happens through powerful log search and filtration functionality, along with informative visualizations and dashboards of the tool. This is applicable both for on-premises architecture as well as cloud-native architecture.

Key features

• Splunk Enterprise helps to aggrege, analyze, and find answers from your own machine data.
• You can deploy and manage a service with the help of Splunk Cloud.
• Splunk Light provides features for small IT environments.

Link – https://www.splunk.com/en_us/software/splunk-cloud.html

8. Selenium

Selenium is a free open source DevOps tool specializing in automated functional testing tools to test web applications. You can install it as a Firefox browser plugin, and helps to record and playback test scenarios. This popular, powerful automated testing tool is ideal for DevOps-centric teams that leverage faster testing methods to improve QA without slowing down the development, deployment, and release lifecycles.

Additionally, the full suite offered by Selenium allows full-scale test automation across all aspects of a web application and its connected parts. Automated testing is essential to ensure developers and IT practitioners to save more time to focus on new code instead of running tests and manually fixing issues in the deployment backlog.

Key features

• It is very easy to learn.

Link – https://www.selenium.dev/

9. ELK Stack

The Elastic Stack—more commonly known as ELK Stack—combines Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene, while Logstash provides data processing and enrichment. Kibana offers log discovery and visualization.

Key features

• It Supports Server Platforms like All OS-x, Window, and Red hat.
• Basic Components Involved – Search and storage.
• Robust solution
• Variety of plugins
• Logstash allows you to create a customized log processing pipeline
• Incredible Kibana visualizations.

Link – https://www.elastic.co/what-is/elk-stack

10. SignalFx

SignalFx is acquired by Splunk and is a complete observability tool. SignalFx can ingest metrics, traces, and events from applications and infrastructure to help inform the user of not only their system’s health but also why the system is behaving a certain way once the user knows what’s wrong and why the team can fix issues faster and connect application and infrastructure monitoring with the needs of the business. SignalFx helps with debugging and post-incident reviews through service mapping, high cardinality analytics, and detailed visualizations and dashboards.

Link – https://www.splunk.com/en_us/investor-relations/acquisitions/signalfx.html

Final words

From the above discussion, we can say that the world is full of unique and outstanding open-source DevOps tools. These tools can help effectively bridge the gap between development and production environments. Which tool you should opt for that depends on your business needs and operations. Furthermore, these open-source DevOps tools play not only well individually but also together they play well.