A Healthy DevOps Toolchain

Written by: Electric Bee
2 min read

DevOps toolchains, often comprised of existing or acquired software tools, are critical for rapid, reliable and efficient application delivery. Having an integrative, holistic approach to tooling fosters team interaction. These tools working together provides a dramatic improvement to the application lifecycle.
There are a variety of tools that may be in current use, and there will always be emerging technologies that can be introduced to improve the effectiveness of the lifecycle. It’s critical to design a toolchain that is adaptable to accommodate both changes in team preference, application architecture, quality processes and other technology shifts. Just like the FDA suggests certain food groups to maintain a healthy mind and body, DevOps teams that want to maintain a healthy pipeline are well-advised to include the right choice of tools as part of their balanced DevOps diet.
What makes a healthy pipeline? There are any number of different types of tools that can be added. In general, these tools fall into several high-level categories, including:

  • Program and project planning

  • Ideation and requirements analysis

  • Source code management and repositories

  • Source code scanning for quality and security

  • Build automation and continuous integration

  • Test automation and quality assurance

  • Deployment automation

  • Release orchestration

  • Configuration management and provisioning

  • Application and infrastructure monitoring and performance

  • …and more!

What we’ve found is that when teams include these classes of tools in their release pipelines they gain improved visibility and control as well as substantial improvements in collaboration and release cadence.

Our friends at DZONE have helped us curate a fantastic list of industry experts to join us for our next episode of C9D9 (July 17th ) as we dive into some of the challenges and benefits involved in curating and maintaining a healthy DevOps toolchain. We'll have guests from several prominent leaders in DevOps, including:

  • Lee Atchison, New Relic (Monitoring)

  • Ian Buchanan, Atlassian (Planning and Collaboration)

  • Mark Miller, Sonatype (Artifact scanning and management)

  • Prashant Mohan, SmartBear (Test automation)

  • Cynthia Rich, GitHub (Source code control and collaboration)

  • Tom Smith, DZone.com (Research Analyst)

Learn More!


Hey London! Expand Your DevOps Know-How!

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Come “up” your DevOps game with practical workshops designed to help you apply DevOps principles in a way that fits your organization’s objectives, unique challenges, and your role in the transformation.
Learn more about it, and find links to sign up here!

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