Why DevOps is not all about tools

Yes, tools are nothing. They are not that important a factor in changing the culture of any organization. The reason is very simple. No matter what technology we use, we will perform continuous integration, cloud provisioning, configuration management, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, and so on.

Categorywise, different tool sets can be used, but all perform similar operations. It is just the way that tool performs a certain operation that differs, else the outcome is the same. The following are some of the tools based on the categories:

Category	Tools
Build automation	Nant, MSBuild, Maven, Ant and Gradle
Repository	Git and SVN
Static code analysis	Sonar and PMD
Continuous integration	Jenkins, Atlassian Bamboo, and VSTS
Configuration management	Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Salt
Cloud platforms	AWS and Microsoft Azure
Cloud management tool	RightScale
Application deployment	Shell Scripts and Plugins
Functional testing	Selenium and Appium
Load testing	Apache Jmeter
Repositories	Artifactory, Nexus, and Fabric

Let's see how different tools can be useful in different stages for different operations. This may change based on the number of environments or the number of DevOps practices we follow in different organizations:

If we need to categorize tools based on different DevOps best practices, then we can categorize them based on open source and commercial categories. The following are just some examples:

Components	Open Source	IBM Urban Code	Electric-Cloud
Build tools	Ant or Maven or MS Build	Ant or Maven or MS Build	Ant or Maven or MS Build
Code repositories	Git or Subversion	Git or Atlassian Stash or Subversion or StarTeam	Git or Subversion or StarTeam
Code analysis tools	Sonar	Sonar	Sonar
Continuous integration	Jenkins	Jenkins or Atlassian Bamboo	Jenkins or ElectricAccelerator
Continuous delivery	Chef	Artifactory and IBM UrbanCode Deploy	ElectricFlow

In this book, we will try to focus on the open source category, as well as commercial tools. We will use Jenkins and Visual Studio Team Services for all the major automation and orchestration-related activities.