Popular Python Libraries and Tools to Automate DevOps Processes
Programming is essential in the DevOps lifecycle and a versatile, efficient, and easy to learn language like Python is representative of everything DevOps stands for.
Some of the popular Python Libraries and Tools that are used for DevOps Automation in Python are:
All DevOps engineers would greatly benefit from learning Python since it can be used at every phase of the DevOps lifecycle. In addition to this several tools such as Ansible are coded purely in Python, and whenever any optimizations or add-ons need to be made to the functionality of the tool it’s best if it can be done in Python.
These factors, as well as the fact that Python can be used across various development and testing environments, make Python a very popular and productive language for Devops Team.
1. Pandas
The Pandas module is a highly useful module for data analysis and very popular among data analysts and data science engineers. The Pandas data frame is capable of efficiently handling large amounts of data and also allows users to gain insights and extract useful information from the data.
2. Selenium
Selenium is a very well-liked open-source Python library renowned for aiding developers design automated test cases which can be executed across different browsers through drivers.Testing the functionality of a button, or carrying out tasks such as filling out a form, navigating a web application, these are all tasks which can be done using sub-modules and drivers with Selenium.
3. Pytest
PyTest is a testing framework that enables users to write scalable and straightforward test cases. PyTest is well-liked because it has an easy to learn syntax, allows developers to parallely execute multiple tests, and because it is open-source.
4. Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup in Python is the most useful module for parsing XML and HTML data in order to obtain useful information. Filtering the HTML data by tags and gleaning statistics regarding the website are all easily accomplished by using the modules in the BeautifulSoup web scraping library. This library has several versatile uses that allow developers to navigate,manipulate, and extract data from applications efficiently.
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5. Jenkins
Jenkins is the oldest open source CI/CD automation server, and thus also has one of the largest user bases. Its main claim to fame is the over 1800 user-contributed plugins it has, and how versatile these plugins are. In addition to these plugins there is also a lot of documentation available, along with guides and helpful communities to provide support for new Jenkins users.
Jenkins may be used with Python and is compatible with most popular OS such as Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Lastly, Jenkins is self-hosted leading its users having greater control over customizing and tailoring their CI/CD pipelines according to their needs.
Read More: Jenkins Continuous Integration Tutorial
6. SciPy
The SciPy library is an open-source library used to solve mathematical and scientific problems in Python. This library is built on the Numpy library and therefore builds further on the features offered by Numpy, for example it is able to handle more complex linear algebra and has more features to solve such problems in comparison to Numpy. SciPy contains modules for linear algebra, statistics, image manipulation and processing, numerical integration, optimization, and other problem solving modules required to tackle scientific problems.
7. Behave
Behave is a BDD framework, a behavior driven development framework, which is integrated with automation frameworks such as Selenium. It essentially functions as a layer which defines certain behaviors to be followed in different scenarios when executing automation test cases.
8. Ansible
Ansible is a powerful automation tool that is particularly useful for system management duties. This tool offers straightforward yet effective automation for tasks a system administrator would need to perform on a regular basis. Some of its main functions are performing upgrades, configuration management, and carrying out application deployment. Ansible is written in python, and supplementary scripts can be written in python to extend its functionality.
9. BrowserStack Automate
BrowserStack Automate allows users to use a variety of frameworks and tools like Selenium. Python is compatible and can be used with this testing platform to write sophisticated test scripts.
It also offers parallel testing, allowing users to run tests in parallel to speed up test execution. Popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, Amazon AWS pipelines, Travis CI, and many others can be integrated with BrowserStack Automate.
The Ultimate Goal of DevOps is to provide faultless software under constrained timeframes. Doing manual and automated tests on actual browsers and devices is the only way to successfully complete this extensive software testing under real user conditions.
10. TensorFlow
TensorFlow is an open-source library which was created by Google. Its main functions are to handle deep learning and machine learning. It is additionally used for statistical and predictive analytics. This library is particularly popular among data scientists in order to design advanced problem-solving applications. The major uses of TensorFlow are for classification, clustering, and prediction. Some common applications of this library are optical character recognition, segmentation, text/image classification, and object detection.
