The DevOps philosophy and practices combine development and operations to ensure the efficient production of reliable goods and provide high-value services to customers. For this, it is essential to establish coordination and collaboration between siloed work areas. These typically include areas like development, IT operations, quality control, and security. You can use free or paid DevOps tools in your production methods to improve your business agility.

Why should you use DevOps tools?

You might want to consider using DevOps tools for the following reasons:

There are planning tools

There are various DevOps planning tools such as Confluence, Jira, and Hipchat that you can use to implement essential changes during the software development process. By working with these planning tools, you can get detailed information about the people who buy your products and how they might use the product. You can learn about their needs and preferences and use this feedback to improve the product and develop original ideas for new products.

There are building tools

By having access to easy-to-use and efficient building tools, you will find it more convenient to compile codes, undertake collaboration in coding work, and test simultaneously. Consider getting building tools like Docker, Chef, and Puppet. These have third-party integration support, and you can check if they are compatible with the other tools you already have.

There are tools for automated testing

DevOp tools like Capture for Jira and BitBucket enable continuous testing of software applications as you build them or introduce new features. You also get a test report to help you to make improvements. That ensures you will not be surprised with errors and bugs when you are ready to deploy them. If the applications have any issues, you can find out about those at once and find the appropriate solutions to resolve them before continuing with the next steps in the software application development work. Additionally, by automating the testing process, you can speed up things.

There are deployment tools

Consider getting deployment tools like Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, TravisCI, Jira, Hipchat, and AWS to automate and test your deployments. Such tools facilitate the entire process of releasing new versions of software and software applications in the market. They allow you to access and monitor the status of the release in real-time. Additionally, the deployment DevOps tools have scripting abilities and can maintain the code in single repositories for better developmental convenience.

There are feedback tools

You can find out what your customers think of your software products by getting feedback from them. Feedback tools like Pendo, SurveyMonkey, and Jira Service Desk make this process easier. With them, customers can provide feedback on whether they found the software products useful and easy to use or if they encountered errors and bugs while using them. They can offer ideas and suggestions to add features and make changes to improve the products. By considering their feedback and making necessary product improvements, you can ensure customer satisfaction with your brand.

Free and paid DevOps tools: Which should you use?

When using DevOps tools, you do not necessarily need tools with extensive features. Tools that can meet and improve your developmental work requirements are generally enough. You can find these in free as well as paid versions. Consider using the free DevOps tools if you are working on a limited budget. However, it is essential to check the usage guidelines first and discover if the tools are available for free for a limited time or specific build identifiers and parameters.

Ideally, use the open source tools that the developers have made available for free without any restrictions and do not have a steep learning curve. Along with being freely available, open source DevOps tools benefit from the active backing of the open source community. Various developers volunteer to regularly update and improve them and ensure they are secure to use. They may also be willing to answer your questions and concerns about the tools.

If you decide on using open source Dev Ops tools, it is advisable to learn how to use them before incorporating them into your software development process. You must understand how to follow the best practices in using them from software development to deployment.