DevOps has been around us for over a decade and continuously transforming itself to enable organizations with new development features and functionalities. Plus, the latest DevOps versions are transforming infrastructure and making the DevOps team adopt them, as the advancement in technology is still driving changes. DevOps is a software development methodology providing continuous product development, testing, and release operations with agile practices.

It integrates the development, operation, and QA team(s) with the Continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and helps organizations to automate their standardized tasks and processes. With the DevOps pipeline (also known as the toolchains), developers’ team(s) can utilize it to automate the development and test-related tasks to provide complete visibility on the software development life cycle. This article contains information about DevOps features and functionality and covers the 5 popular open-source CI//CD tools that can be the best fit according to the technology trends of the year 2021. Here, DevOps can be expected to evolve in a few ways in the year 2021 and beyond.

AI and Data Science:

The Existing DevOps processes can be improved with the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. DevOps team can use AI capabilities to identify the inefficiencies in pipelines, optimize development testing, and evaluate the changes on demand. With AI and data science, the analysis of different data about customers, environments, markets, etc., is made simple and can be applied to enhance the system’s productivity and generate high revenues.

Serverless Architecture:

Today, Serverless platforms, including AWS Lambda, Fargate, Azure Functions, and many others are getting their popularity with advancements. These platforms allow DevOps developers to focus on their code regardless of host operating systems or any other disturbing or concerning variables. Moreover, serverless architecture provides an incomparable amount of scalability, productivity, and user experience.

Cloud-Native:

The adoption of cloud services has increased the adoption of cloud-native applications. Plus, containers and microservices that were only used to build cloud applications are now also being used for many pipelines and environments’ deployment. In order to meet the demands for building an efficient cloud-native application, DevOps strategies are advisable to process agile and automated developments. With the continuous changes in cloud-native technologies, DevOps will continue to grow to refine its cloud-native development.

Dev SecOps:

While developing applications using an automated CI/CD pipeline approach, security considerations should be followed at each development stage, especially in a complex microservices architecture. The DevSecOps in transition not only changes the culture of DevOps but also adds a new technology stack to the existing one. Hence, organizations should implement cloud and application security tools in the development lifecycle to achieve visibility using automated security controls of complex cloud platforms.

Which CI/CD tools Should We use for DevOps in 2021?

Since there are several CI/CD tools available in the market, the DevOps team might struggle to pick the right one as per their needs. Hopefully, the following list of “5 popular CI/CD tools for DevOps in 2021 and beyond” can help them at some level:

Argo CD:

Argo CD is an open-source CI/CD tool widely used for Kubernetes development. Nowadays, it is under observation at the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). It uses Git repositories that enable developers to store the current Kubernetes applications status, monitor applications, and resync the application clusters at the desired state according to the Git configuration. This tool lets DevOps developers store several assumed Kubernetes application states by using tags, branches, or Git commits for pinning manifest versions. While the application is under development, this tool provides flexible Kubernetes configuration management.

Circle CI:

Circle CI is an open-source CI/CD tool containing various features for caching, resource configuration, security, job orchestration, debugging, and dashboard reports. By using Circle CI, developers can integrate their applications with tools like Slack, Heroku, GitHub, and Docker. It contains three different variants, and one of them is free to be used with machines, like Windows, Linux, or Mac.

GitHub Actions:

GitHub Actions is a newly launched open-source tool used to automate workflows. It enables DevOps engineers to create, test, and deploy application code directly from GitHub. Also, it lets developers set the automation of workflows as per GitHub events, such as issue or push creation. It supports almost all the most used programming languages and features for matrix workflows known as hosted runners for major OSs, providing live log reviews and built-in secret storage. Once users login into the GitHub Actions gets 2000 minutes per month for free at first. But in case of excessive usage, they need to buy extra time in minutes or bulk. This tool can also be used in the user’s YAML files.

Go CD:

Go CD is an open-source CI/CD pipeline development tool but typically a CI server allowing the DevOps team to operate complex workflows. Its flexibility enables developers to build a complete CD pipeline with secure and automated production environments. It uses the IaaC approach to manage and reuse the same pipelines for multiple projects. The pipeline made with Go CD can be represented by YAML or JSON templates. Go CD can run pipelines parallelly with configurable dependencies. And with its value stream mapping, DevOps developers can review or track the entire workflow from development to deployment. Go CD is an extremely flexible CI/CD tool that allows developers to use their own customized plugins and tools.

Jenkins X:

Recently, Jenkins has got a new version known as Jenkins X, which contains the capabilities of Kubernetes and Docker workflows. Its pre-built pipeline features offer integrated Git Ops support, feedback integration, and automatically generated preview environments. Jenkins X is compatible with any machine, like Windows, Linux, or Mac. Plus, it is integrated with Knative, Prow, Helm, Skaffold, and Tekton.

Conclusion:

Whenever the DevOps team is building or working with CI/CD pipelines, they need tools to automate their workflows. DevOps environments are designed for fluid workloads, which are also considered dynamic. CI/CD pipeline tool(s) allows developers to gain high visibility and productivity through automated processes such as alerts and data-driven decisions.