DevOps Toolkit Super Trio

I have being making some research in understanding the tools that would get me doing my job efficiently and effectively without getting overwhelmed with all the tons of tools within the DevOps ecosystem. And frankly I don’t know why the Information Technology Domain is always inundated with variations of the same thing. Before I come up with the right tools for me I take a peep into the technologies and do a lot of reading to see what experts - active practitioners - are using, not what bloggers are saying about the variations of the tool.

Some tools are popular than other tools that actually does the job efficiently and effectively. While others are very popular and also does the job efficiently and effectively.

I earlier highlighted what DevOps is and what its brings to the table for every software company, start-ups especially. Kamranahmedse Developer's Road Map earlier shared shows a tumultuous DevOps path. This is the path where Rich Dad Poor Dad proverbial phrase: “you have to know a little about a lot” applies. It is such a complicated maze road map that it could discourage one who probably read off a blog how interesting and high salary rewarding it could be. Well it sure bags those points. But I doubt if the entry was easy for practising DevOps Engineer.

Now while there is so much to know, I have come up with the three strong technologies one should master to enjoy their DevOps role. They are AWS, Terraform, and Saltstack for Cloud Resources, Infrastructure Orchestration, and Infrastructure Configuration Management respectively. With these three you can comfortable deploy a user facing app - lets pretend Jenkins is not a part of the work-flow for now.

Amazon Web Service offers tons of services that would come to the rescue for your project and an excellent one year free access to play with almost all the services. If you have doubt of their competency in the cloud domain just to mention Gartner nominated her the cloud leader more than three times in a row. I am not sure you should have any such doubt about their excellence in this field. Please check out for yourself I am not an AWS staff least you think am already selling to you. Second is the almighty Terraform. Okay a brief intro please terraform is a one of the product of the awesome HashiCorp Company - you never heard of them already? Mehn! you sure are missing. HashiCorp is the brain behind vagrant an awesome tool for virtualization which I had some test of during my exploration of the pen testing domain. Terraform, declarative programming language designed, is excellent at orchestrating infrastructures using HashiCorps Configuration Language(HCL). Its syntax is clean and very intuitive. More so you have all the awesome benefits a declarative language brings which I think is suitable for such task as Infrastructure provisioning which is subject to change as need arises. Finally SaltStack, a configuration management tool. Although you may write a bash script and use Terraform’s own unique file() function to include it to the user_data variable of an EC2 instance, I just think every tool should focus on what they are best suited for. Saltstack is also declarative programming language designed and the winning point is that it is written in python. I understand you can do your own personal magic which I am yet to confirm as I just got a book “Mastering SaltStack by Joseph Hall” hoping it convinces me further not like am not already convinced. So why did I personally choose these stack? Well, I have a knack for writing clean, readable and maintainable code and I guess am attracted to entities like Hashicorps and SaltStack who do same you can’t blame me. Besides I am just glued to anything python - readability counts.

So overall while you need to include bash, ssh, git, winscp, and others for a complete DevOps toolkit you can bet that these trio are your solid edge.

Welcome to Transcendence!!!