DevOps Tools: A Quick Glossary

- VinothKumar P

This document covers almost all tools which are used in DevOps culture.
Some of the tools are useful when it comes with legacy code / Projects, Most
of them are open source.

This glossary lists tools in the following categories:

 IaaS / PaaS
 Application Deployment
 Application Servers
 Behavior-Driven Development Testing
 Code Inspection / Code Quality
 Configuration Management
 Containerization Tools
 Continuous Integration & Deployment
 Databases
 Linux OS Installation
 Logging
 Monitoring, Alerting, and Trending
 Network (also see Software Defined Networking)
 OS
 Process Supervisors
 Queues, Caches, etc.
 Security
 Software Defined
 Test and Build
 Test Automation
 Version Control / Branch Management
 Virtualization Platforms
 Web Servers
 Workflow Management, Agile Project Management

I have created an infographic career map for DevOps and highlighted few of
the important tools which are in market and used by majority of DevOps
engineers.

Topic / flagship Tool

Other Tools
 /in/pvinothkumar/ DevOps Tools: A Quick Glossary

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IaaS / PaaS
 Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Long the market leader in cloud services,
Amazon continues to dominate the commodity cloud computing providers.
Performance was high in 2014 with few outages, and Amazon adds new
services all the time.
 Azure – Microsoft’s public cloud. Azure can work well for those on the
Microsoft stack, but was also plagued by notable outages and customer
communication challenges in 2014.
 Cloud Foundry – Open source PaaS provider, Cloud Foundry was originally
devised by a team at Google, and is now a joint venture between EMC, GE,
and VMWare.

 Eucalytpus – Another private, open source alternative to the big public clouds
like AWS and Rackspace, Eucalyptus sits quietly in the background, offering
non-proprietary PaaS services while they wait for the market demand to
swing towards a free/open-source model.
 OpenStack – Widely considered to be the main enterprise open-source
response to for-profit cloud providers, Openstack has received heavy
sponsorship by many big blue-chip companies, but has also met with adoption
challenges amid complaints of heavy maintenance needs and design-by-
committee syndrome.
 Rackspace – Long a dominant provider of physical infrastructure, it’s no
surprise that Rackspace quickly entered the world of cloud infrastructure.

Application Deployment
 Capistrano - is an open source tool for running scripts on multiple servers,
mainly used for deploying web applications.
 Microsoft Team Foundation Server – TFS provides a full-spectrum tool
environment for building and releasing projects and applications. Built to
support agile practices.

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Application Servers
 WildFly (formerly JBoss) – Developed by Red Hat, JBoss was formerly known
as JBoss AS but is now called “WildFly.” It is available as an open-source
product but Red Hat also offers a paid enterprise version. WildFly provides
a nice range of application server features.
 Tomcat - Open-source web server and servlet container developed by
Apache. Tomcat implements several Java EE specifications including Java
Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Java EL, and WebSocket, and provides a "pure
Java" HTTP web server environment for Java code to run in.
 Jetty – is a pure Java-based HTTP (Web) server and Java Servlet container.
While Web Servers are usually associated with serving documents to people,
Jetty is now often used for machine to machine communications, usually
within larger software frameworks. Jetty is developed as a free and open
source project as part of the Eclipse Foundation.

 Glassfish – GlassFish is an open-source application server project started by

Sun Microsystems for the Java EE platform and now sponsored by Oracle
Corporation. It is the reference implementation of Java EE, supporting
Enterprise JavaBeans, JPA, JavaServer Faces, JMS, RMI, JavaServer Pages,
servlets, etc. This allows developers to create enterprise applications that are
portable and scalable, and that integrate with legacy technologies. Optional
components can also be installed for additional services.
 Websphere – IBM application and integration middleware products. It is
considered enterprise
software. Websphere is used by end-users to create applications and
integrate applications with other applications.
 Weblogic – Java EE application server currently developed by Oracle
Corporation. Oracle
acquired WebLogic Server when it purchased BEA Systems in 2008.

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Behavior-Driven Development Testing

 Cucumber – Testing tool. Written in Ruby. Performs automated acceptance
tests in a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) style.

Code Inspection / Code Quality

 Code Climate – Automated code review tool. Runs standard tests on code
without actually executing it. It can uncover security vulnerabilities,
potential bugs, repetition of existing code, and unnecessarily complex
programming, in Ruby and JavaScript.
 Sonar Qube – Formerly Sonar, SonarQube offers IT and application
teams the ability to automate important QA work with its uncanny ability to
quickly find quality issues in code that make continuous improvement
dramatically easier.
 Sonargraph - Monitors conformance of code to intended architecture, also
computes a wide range of software metrics.
 Visual Studio Team System – Bundled with TFS, Microsoft’s new Visual
Studio suite is built for continuous integration, continuous improvement,
and DevOps.

Configuration Management
 Ansible – A somewhat new kid on the block in the world of configuration
automation, Ansible is gaining popularity due to its easy, intuitive usage
and its powerful enterprise solutions.
 CFEngine – An early but powerful open source tool, CFEngine provides
automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale systems and
unified management of servers, desktops, embedded networked
devices, mobile smartphones, and tablets with an operating system-
independent interface to Unix-like host configuration. It requires some
expert knowledge to deal with peculiarities of different operating

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systems, but has the power to perform maintenance actions across

multiple hosts.
 Chef – The popular and powerful config toolset uses “recipes” to
configuration models,
automate resources, and automate setup of cloud or physical
infrastructure.
 Puppet / MCollective – One of the godfather organizations of DevOps,
Puppet Labs has provided visionary leadership and sponsorship to the
DevOps movement and its champions.
 RANCID – Used for managing network configurations, the “Really Awesome
New Cisco confIg Differ (RANCID)” is a network management application
released under a BSD-style license.
SaltStack – Salt or SaltStack is a Python-based open source configuration
management and remote execution application. Supporting an IaaS
approach to deployment and cloud management, it competes primarily
with Puppet, Chef, and Ansible

Containerization Tools
 Docker – Docker made waves in the DevOps community right away, with its
easy-to-use near- universal ability to containerize and deploy applications
across any environment or OS with only a tiny Linux kernel to get it started.
 LXC – Linux Containers (LXC) is a well-known containerization toolset that
uses OS virtualization. It can be used in conjunction with Docker, and relies on
Linux kernel cgroups functionality that was released in version 2.6.24
 Solaris Containers – An implementation of operating system-level
virtualization technology for x86 and SPARC systems, first released publicly in
February 2004 in build 51 beta of Solaris 10

Continuous Integration & Deployment

 Jenkins – The leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with
Java, it provides 985 plugins to support building and testing virtually any

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project.
 Team Foundation Server – Microsoft’s development platform for Agile
projects and deployment.

Databases
 Cassandra  Oracle
 MongoDB  Percona
Server
 MS SQL  Postgre
SQL
 MySQL  HBase
 OpenLDAP

Linux OS Installation
 Cobbler – Linux provisioning server that facilitates and automates the
network-based system installation of multiple computer operating systems
from a central point using services such as DHCP, TFTP, and DNS.[
 Fai – FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) is a non-interactive system to install,
customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on
computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small
networks to large infrastructures and clusters.
 Kickstart – Red Hat’s Kickstart installation is used primarily, but not
exclusively, by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to
automatically perform unattended operating system installation and
configuration. Red Hat publishes Cobbler as a tool to automate the Kickstart
configuration process.

Logging
 PaperTrail – Lets you track changes to your models' data. It's good for
auditing or versioning. You can see how a model looked at any stage in its

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lifecycle, revert it to any version, and even undelete it after it's been
destroyed.

 Logstash – Tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs,
parse them, and store them for later use (i.e. searching).
 Loggly – Loggly provides enterprise-class cloud-based solutions for log
management, allowing users to solve operational problems faster.
 Splunk – Captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable
repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards
and visualizations.
 SumoLogic – Cloud-based log management and analytics service that
leverages machine- generated big data to deliver real-time IT insights.
Features an elastic petabyte scale platform that collects, manages, and
analyzes enterprise log data, reducing millions of log lines into operational
and security insights in real time.

Monitoring, Alerting, and Trending

 New Relic – New Relic offers one of the world’s most popular suites of SaaS
monitoring and alerting tools for applications. It’s available as a subscription,
on-premise, or hybrid solution.
 Nagios – Nagios is a highly-regarded open source toolset for monitoring
systems, networks, and infrastructure. It alerts users to problems and
sends another alert when they are resolved.
 Icinga – Originally built as a form of Nagios, Icinga strives to fix what some
felt were shortcomings in the original tool.
 iPerf – Tool for active measurements of the maximum achievable
bandwidth on IP networks.
 Graphite – Graphite is a free open source tool for monitoring and graphing
real-time data on the performance of a system.
 Ganglia – Ganglia is a monitoring and performance tool built for use with
distributed systems, clusters, and other high-performance computing
infrastructures. It is scalable and powerful.
 Cacti – An open-source, web-based network monitoring and graphing tool

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designed as a front- end application for the open-source, industry-

standard data logging tool RRDtool.
 PagerDuty – PagerDuty is an operations performance platform delivering
visibility and actionable intelligence across the lifecycle of an incident. It is
designed as an incident management toolset.

 Sensu – Sensu is a large open-source project that is designed to deliver

powerful, scalable and comprehensive monitoring, visibility, and notification.
Also available in an enterprise package for paid users.

Network (also see Software Defined Networking)

 llldp – Implementation of Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) allowing
identification and discovery of network devices, identity, capabilities, and
neighbors.
 Multihost SSH Wrapper - Mussh is a shell script that allows you to execute a
command or script over ssh on multiple hosts with one command. When
possible mussh will use ssh-agent and RSA/DSA keys to minimize the need
to enter your password more than once.

OS
 Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian) – Without Linux there might
not be any DevOps.
 Mac OS X – Sometimes you have to think different.
 Unix (Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, etc.) – When plain old Linux just isn’t good
enough.
 Windows – They say it’s a Windows world.

Process Supervisors
 Blue Pill - Simple process monitoring tool written in Ruby.
 god – Ruby process manager.
 Monit – Free, open source process supervision tool for Unix and Linux. With
Monit, system status can be viewed directly from the command line, or via the

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native HTTP(S) web server.

 runit – init scheme for Unix-like operating systems that initializes, supervises,
and ends processes throughout the operating system.
 systemd – Suite of system management daemons, libraries, and utilities
designed as a central management and configuration platform for the Linux
computer operating system.
 Supervisor – A process control system, Supervisor is a client/server system
that allows users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-
like operating systems.

 Upstart – Event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which handles

starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown
and supervising them while the system is running.

Queues, Caches, etc.

 ActiveMQ – Open source Apache message broker written in Java together
with a full Java Message Service (JMS) client, with Enterprise Features. Used
in enterprise service bus implementations such as Apache ServiceMix and
Mule.
 memcache – High-performance, distributed memory object caching system,
primarily intended for fast access to cached results of datastore queries.
 RabbitMQ – Open source message broker software that implements the
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). Written in Erlang and built on
the Open Telecom Platform framework for clustering and failover.
 squid – Proxy server and web cache daemon with a wide variety of uses, from
speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests; to caching web, DNS
and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network
resources; to aiding security by filtering traffic.
 varnish – HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites as
well as heavily consumed APIs.

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Security
 Snorby Threat Stack – Ruby on rails web application for network security
monitoring that interfaces with popular intrusion detection systems
(Snort, Suricata and Sagan). Designed around simplicity, organization and
power. The project goal is to create a free, open source and highly
competitive application for network monitoring for both private and
enterprise use.
 Tripwire – Portland-based security tools company co-founded by DevOps
evangelist and Phoenix Project author Gene Kim. The original open source
Tripwire is a free security and data integrity tool useful for monitoring and
alerting on specific file change(s) on a range of systems.
 Snort – Free, open source network intrusion prevention system (NIPS) and
network intrusion detection system (NIDS) created by Martin Roesch.

Software Defined Networking

 Floodlight – Apache licensed, Java-based enterprise-class OpenFlow
controller.
 Indigo – The open source project Indigo enables support for OpenFlow on
both physical and hypervisor switches. It is also the basis of Switch Light by
Big Switch Networks.
 OpenStack Networking "Neutron" – Part of the OpenStack project,
Neutron provides a "networking as a service" between interface devices like
NICs managed by OpenStack services like Nova. Though part of the core of
OpenStack, Neutron deserves special notice for its size and functionality as a
"NaaS" product.
 Open vSwitch – A multilayer software switch, support a wide range of
features including 802.1Q VLAN with trunk and access ports, NIC bonding
(with and without LACP upstream), NetFlow/sFlow, QoS, GRE, GRE over
IPSEC, VXLAN, and LISP tunneling, 802.1ag connectivity fault management,
OpenFlow, high-performance forwarding via the Linux kernel, and a
transactional configuration database.

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Test and Build

 Ant – Apache’s open-source software build automation tool is Java-centric
and replaced Apache’s previous Make Build tool.
 Gradle – Gradle builds on the concepts of Ant and Maven to provide
automation tools for build, testing, and deployment/publishing.
 Jenkins – Jenkins offers a simple but powerful web-based platform for
real-time deployment.
 Maven – Also an Apache project, Maven is another Java-centric build
automation tool, however unlike Ant it uses conventions, reducing work by
requiring only exceptions. Formerly part of the Jakarta project.
 Team Foundation Server (TFS) – TFS enables powerful unified environments
for developers, deployment and engineering teams to share a common
platform.

Test Automation
 Ranorex – Provides comprehensive test automation of your applications in
any environment and on any device. Powerful automated options for
verifying and building in quality.

 Rational Functional Tester - Rational Functional Tester is an automated

functional testing and regression testing tool.
 Watir - Open-source (BSD) family of ruby libraries for automating web
browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and maintain
and is simple and flexible.

Version Control / Branch Management

 Git – Git is a code repository tool that provides push/pull features that
encourage collaboration, re-use, and shared version control.
 GitHub – GitHub is a socially-driven code repository website with a ton of re-
usable code and excellent push/pull features for developers.

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 Team Foundation Server – For those on the Microsoft stack, TFS provides
many of the same features as Git and Github, and provides support for
integrating with both.

Virtualization Platforms
 KVM - (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a virtualization infrastructure for the
Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor.
 VMware – The biggest mainstream virtualization provider made a big mark
in cloud computing history when they made their basic virtualization tool
free around 2008.
 Vagrant – Creates/configures virtual development environments. Used as a
wrapper around virtualization software such as VirtualBox, KVM, VMware
and around configuration management software such as Ansible, Chef,
Salt or Puppet.
 VirtualBox – Virtualization software package for x86 and AMD64/Intel64-
based computers from Oracle.
 Xen - Hypervisor using a microkernel design, providing services that allow
multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer
hardware concurrently.

Web Servers
 Nginx – Free open source web server, with known strengths around load
balancing, static catch and reverse Proxy
 Apache – The web server’s web server.
 IIS – Internet Information Services (formerly Server) is a modular
product from Microsoft.

Workflow Management, Agile Project Management

 Kanbanize – Kanbanize offers paid options from starter to enterprise, and
offers 1,000 events for free as a trial, which is enough for a couple months
of work.

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 Kanban Tool – Another online tool for visually managing project work,
Kanban tool offers subscription options by number of users, rather than
based on events.
 Version One – One of the early Agile project management tools, VersionOne
continues to be a big player for enabling teams to manage their agile
projects.
 JIRA – JIRA is a popular tool for issue tracking and agile project
management support.
 Rally – Rally’s agile project management tools are designed to enable efficient
and successful agile practices in the enterprise environment.
 Team Foundation Server (Azure DevOps) – Microsoft designed TFS to be a
full-service collaboration platform for developing and deploying Agile
projects on the Microsoft stacks.

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