DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry for their recommendation on a key technology required for DevOps. Part 3 of the list covers continuous delivery.

Start with 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 1

Start with 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 2

14. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY (CD)

It is extremely important for DevOps teams to build a Continuous Delivery Pipeline in which they have complete confidence to help them deliver quality software efficiently and faster.
Ashish Kuthiala
Senior Director, Strategy & Marketing, DevOps, Hewlett Packard Enterprise(link is external)

Read Ashish Kuthiala's blog: DevOps Must-Have Tool - Continuous Delivery

It is often initially overlooked, but DevOps won’t scale and will always be just a collection of disconnected processes without a robust (Continuous Delivery) pipeline orchestration tool. Whatever languages your technology is written in, whatever architectures you prefer, what platform or runtime type you have: you need to define, execute and track how your application gets from your source code repo and into production, and in a way that allows you to figure out where the bottlenecks are and what you need to do to eliminate them.
Andrew Phillips
VP of DevOps Strategy, XebiaLabs(link is external)

Continuous delivery (CD) is a DevOps enabler which provides the repeatability and reliability to rapidly deliver software and infrastructure from development to operations with the confidence it meets requirements and is stable, safe, and secure. In CD this is achieved through aggressive automation of the activities required to build, validate, test and deploy the software and infrastructure. A DevOps automation engine should have the following attributes: integration with a large range of development and delivery tools, extensibility to adopt emerging tools and technology, the ability to scale across multiple teams and work groups and handle the resulting load and finally the ability to report and have traceability across development and delivery activities. Without an automation tool organizations end up with point-to-point integrations, manual hand-offs, maintenance overhead, and delivery pipelines absent the repeatability and reliability and required for DevOps.
Brian Dawson
DevOps Practitioner, CloudBees(link is external)

15. ARTIFACT REPOSITORY

DevOps requires a universal artifact repository. Automatically deploying and resolving the artifacts in the CI/CD process is a basic requirement for DevOps. DevOps, being one of the main drivers of "hardware as a software" revolution, dramatically increases the quantity of binary artifacts we deal with every day. Managing this "haystack of binaries" with an artifact repository is the only way to find the "needle" – the artifact that complies with requirements and passed QA, for example, or to trace an artifact back to its source. The ability of your artifact repository to attach metadata to artifacts and to query this metadata is essential. DevOps requires automation, and there is no automation without a comprehensive REST API and a full fledged query language.
Baruch Sadogursky
Developer Advocate, JFrog(link is external)

Read Baruch Sadogursky's latest blog on DEVOPSdigest: The Latest Trends in Developer Productivity

16. REST API

Successful DevOps drives automation and economics to a new level by capturing, understanding and independently achieving application or user intent. The must-have instrument for this interactive automation is an intent-based RESTful API, that makes DevOps is declarative, scale-invariant and composable, and decouples application provisioning from physical infrastructure management.
Ashok Rajagopalan
Head of Product Management, Datera(link is external)

17. SOURCE CODE MANAGEMENT

As the mission-critical heartbeat supporting web/mobile transactional applications, mainframes cannot be overlooked in modern development. In spite of its strengths, mainframe users need tools that advance the platform to keep pace with DevOps. One example is source code management (SCM) systems, which now help DevOps teams achieve unprecedented speed on the mainframe, through new capabilities like concurrent development on single systems; integration with continuous delivery and integrating work across both mainframe and non-mainframe code bases.
Christopher O'Malley
President and CEO, Compuware(link is external)

18. RELEASE AUTOMATION

DevOps professionals on IT Central Station have recently written over 30 product reviews of release automation tools. Reviewers talk about how the best-in-class release automation tools help them achieve zero-touch deployment and support continuous deployment.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station(link is external)

Read Russell Rothstein's latest blog on DEVOPSdigest: DevOps RoundUp from Real Users of CA, HPE and IBM

The absolute must have tool for Devops success is release automation. Agile and DevOps are joined at the hip, agile knocks down the barriers that traditionally slow down development. DevOps automates agile approaches and lets code move quickly from development to production including testing, integration and deployment but in the jungle of the tool chain and different application technology stacks without the need to orchestrate across the tool chain and automate within the tool chain Devops will fail.
Ron Gidron
ARA Evangelist, Automic Software(link is external)

19. CONTAINERS

Container tools are essential enablers for DevOps, enabling application portability between development and production environments. Containers also allow developers to implement DevOps automation using container features. Everything that you can get from PaaS tools, you can get for free with containers and at a much lower cost in terms of complexity and vendor limitations.
Joan Wrabetz
CTO, QualiSystems(link is external)

Read Joan Wrabetz's blog: More Must-Have DevOps Tools

20. MICRO SERVICES

While not a requirement in order to implement DevOps, using Micro services can really improve the feasibility of DevOps automation. Micro services are designed to be self-contained and separately modifiable. This makes them easy to push from development to deployment without a large amount of integration testing.
Joan Wrabetz
CTO, QualiSystems(link is external)

Read 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 4, covering QA and testing.