Welcome!

Java Authors: Nitin Bandugula, Liz McMillan, Jason Bloomberg, Pat Romanski, AppDynamics Blog

Related Topics: Open Source, Java, Big Data Journal, DevOps Journal

Open Source: Article

Top DevOps Tools We Love By @Dynatrace | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

A collection of tools that foster collaboration among Product Management, Development, IT Operations & Technical Support teams

The word DevOps is a portmanteau of "development" and "operations". However, anyone who knows "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, et al., will agree that its radius is much wider than what the term suggests: it's a melting pot that combines principles from Agile Software Development and Lean Manufacturing with the aim to reduce friction and improve collaboration by honing a culture of communication, respect and trust across Product Management, Development, Testing, IT Operations, Information Security, Marketing, Sales and Technical Support departments, as well as to continuously improve organizational performance. Aside from the social, DevOps also has a technological side to it: tooling. Picking the right tools that support or even fully automate software development, testing and delivery processes empower everyone involved in getting things done more effectively and efficiently, lessen the risk of the human factor, reduce waste and allow for a vastly improved time to market.

"The DevOps movement is built around a group of people who believe that the application of a combination of appropriate technology and attitude can revolutionize the world of software development and delivery."
Stephen Nelson-Smith, founding member of the DevOps movement in What Is This DevOps Thing, Anyway?

In this post, I will present to you a collection of tools that we enjoy using at Dynatrace for our internal processes because they foster collaboration among our Product Management, Development, IT Operations and Technical Support teams, allow us to build more quality into our products, and support us in establishing better feedback loops.

Development
GitHub
GitHub is arguably the best tool for sharing and collaborating on code. On our Dynatrace GitHub Organization, we provide close to 60 Dynatrace Plugins to the public and have just recently added scripts to automatically deploy our products with Ansible, see below.

Virtual Machines
Vagrant, Packer and VeeWee
Vagrant is a software for configuring and running virtualized environments on top of desktop virtualization software such as VirtualBox, KVM or VMware, but can also be extended to run environments on various cloud providers. Vagrant offers integration with configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef or Puppet, and spinning up a virtual machine is as simple as saying `vagrant up` on the command line.

We use Packer to automatically create base images for Vagrant for a wide variety of Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Packer is inspired by, and meanwhile replaces, VeeWee, a tool created by DevOps movement founder Patrick Debois. However, VeeWee still comes in handy since it provides an impressive library of base image templates that can easily be converted to Packer configurations using the VeeWee-to-Packer conversion tool by Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Packer and Vagrant.

In combination with a configuration management tool, VeeWee, Packer and Vagrant allow our Technical Support teams to literally select an operating system and a Dynatrace version from a drop-down list and recreate customer-like environments quickly and automatically for targeted resolution of customer issues. It also allows us to create tailor-made demo environments that we use for product enablement or presentations. You can refer to Dynatrace/Dynatrace-CDDemo-DeployTool for a figuration of this stack that creates demo environments that show Dynatrace's capabilities in Continuous Delivery deployment pipelines.

Configuration Management
Ansible, Chef and Puppet
Ansible, Chef and Puppet are amongst the most prominent configuration management and deployment automation tools. While we believe that each one of these tools has its particular strengths and weaknesses, we also think that Ansible's in-order execution of tasks, its extensive and easily extensible modules library, plugin system, as well as its agentless architecture that allows for the orchestration of zero-downtime releases make it the best pick for orchestrating the provisioning of instances inside our Dynatrace SaaS offering. Our deployment automation scripts for Ansible are hosted on our Dynatrace GitHub Organization and on Ansible Galaxy. Puppet modules and Chef cookbooks are undergoing review and will be released next.

For more DevOps tools, click here for the full article.

More Stories By Martin Etmajer

Martin Etmajer has several years of experience as a Software Architect as well as in monitoring and managing performance in highly available cluster environments. In his current role as a Technology Strategist at the Compuware APM Center of Excellence, he contributes to the strategic development of Compuware’s dynaTrace APM solution, where he focuses on performance monitoring in Cloud technologies and along the Continuous Delivery deployment pipeline. Reach him at @metmajer

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


@ThingsExpo Stories
Can call centers hang up the phones for good? Intuitive Solutions did. WebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model. It also ensured scalability and better service for customers, including MUY! Companies, one of the country's largest franchise restaurant companies with 232 Pizza Hut locations. This is one example of WebRTC adoption today, but the potential is limitless when powered by IoT.
Technology is enabling a new approach to collecting and using data. This approach, commonly referred to as the "Internet of Things" (IoT), enables businesses to use real-time data from all sorts of things including machines, devices and sensors to make better decisions, improve customer service, and lower the risk in the creation of new revenue opportunities. In his General Session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Dave Wagstaff, Vice President and Chief Architect at BSQUARE Corporation, discuss the real benefits to focus on, how to understand the requirements of a successful solution, the flow of ...
There's no doubt that the Internet of Things is driving the next wave of innovation. Google has spent billions over the past few months vacuuming up companies that specialize in smart appliances and machine learning. Already, Philips light bulbs, Audi automobiles, and Samsung washers and dryers can communicate with and be controlled from mobile devices. To take advantage of the opportunities the Internet of Things brings to your business, you'll want to start preparing now.
The recent trends like cloud computing, social, mobile and Internet of Things are forcing enterprises to modernize in order to compete in the competitive globalized markets. However, enterprises are approaching newer technologies with a more silo-ed way, gaining only sub optimal benefits. The Modern Enterprise model is presented as a newer way to think of enterprise IT, which takes a more holistic approach to embracing modern technologies.
Since 2008 and for the first time in history, more than half of humans live in urban areas, urging cities to become “smart.” Today, cities can leverage the wide availability of smartphones combined with new technologies such as Beacons or NFC to connect their urban furniture and environment to create citizen-first services that improve transportation, way-finding and information delivery. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Laetitia Gazel-Anthoine, CEO of Connecthings, will focus on successful use cases.
The 16th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open until February 28, 2015. 16th International Cloud Expo, to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City brings together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC to one location. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!
Analytics is the foundation of smart data and now, with the ability to run Hadoop directly on smart storage systems like Cloudian HyperStore, enterprises will gain huge business advantages in terms of scalability, efficiency and cost savings as they move closer to realizing the potential of the Internet of Things. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Paul Turner, technology evangelist and CMO at Cloudian, Inc., will discuss the revolutionary notion that the storage world is transitioning from mere Big Data to smart data. He will argue that today’s hybrid cloud storage solutions, with commodity...
Cloud Expo 2014 TV commercials will feature @ThingsExpo, which was launched in June, 2014 at New York City's Javits Center as the largest 'Internet of Things' event in the world.
The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before – transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. IoE creates new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented opportunities to improve business and government operations, decision making and mission support capabilities. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Gary Hall, Chief Technology Officer, Federal Defense at Cisco Systems, will break down the core capabilities of IoT in multiple settings and expand upon IoE for bo...
SYS-CON Events announced today that On the Avenue Marketing Group, a sales and marketing firm that utilizes events to market and sell products to consumers, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. On the Avenue Marketing Group (OTA) is a sales and marketing firm that utilizes events to market and sell products to consumers. On behalf of our clients, we attend thousands of fairs, festivals, expos, concerts, conferences, and sporting events annually, helping them reach millions of individuals ...
In this Women in Technology Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing at Verizon Enterprise, Esmeralda Swartz, CMO at MetraTech; Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems; Seema Jethani, Director of Product Management at Basho Technologies; Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell Inc.; Anne Hungate, Senior Director of Software Quality at DIRECTV, discussed what path they took to find their spot within the technology industry and how do they see opportunities for other women in their area of expertise.
One of the biggest challenges when developing connected devices is identifying user value and delivering it through successful user experiences. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kuniavsky, Principal Scientist, Innovation Services at PARC, described an IoT-specific approach to user experience design that combines approaches from interaction design, industrial design and service design to create experiences that go beyond simple connected gadgets to create lasting, multi-device experiences grounded in people's real needs and desires.
Wearable devices have come of age. The primary applications of wearables so far have been "the Quantified Self" or the tracking of one's fitness and health status. We propose the evolution of wearables into social and emotional communication devices. Our BE(tm) sensor uses light to visualize the skin conductance response. Our sensors are very inexpensive and can be massively distributed to audiences or groups of any size, in order to gauge reactions to performances, video, or any kind of presentation. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Jocelyn Scheirer, CEO & Founder of Bionolux, will discuss ho...
The 3rd International Internet of @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo - to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY - announces that its Call for Papers is open until February 28, 2015. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the biggest idea since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago.
The Internet of Things promises to transform businesses (and lives), but navigating the business and technical path to success can be difficult to understand. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Sean Lorenz, Technical Product Manager for Xively at LogMeIn, demonstrated how to approach creating broadly successful connected customer solutions using real world business transformation studies including New England BioLabs and more.
The Domain Name Service (DNS) is one of the most important components in networking infrastructure, enabling users and services to access applications by translating URLs (names) into IP addresses (numbers). Because every icon and URL and all embedded content on a website requires a DNS lookup loading complex sites necessitates hundreds of DNS queries. In addition, as more internet-enabled ‘Things' get connected, people will rely on DNS to name and find their fridges, toasters and toilets. According to a recent IDG Research Services Survey this rate of traffic will only grow. What's driving t...
Cultural, regulatory, environmental, political and economic (CREPE) conditions over the past decade are creating cross-industry solution spaces that require processes and technologies from both the Internet of Things (IoT), and Data Management and Analytics (DMA). These solution spaces are evolving into Sensor Analytics Ecosystems (SAE) that represent significant new opportunities for organizations of all types. Public Utilities throughout the world, providing electricity, natural gas and water, are pursuing SmartGrid initiatives that represent one of the more mature examples of SAE. We have s...
“With easy-to-use SDKs for Atmel’s platforms, IoT developers can now reap the benefits of realtime communication, and bypass the security pitfalls and configuration complexities that put IoT deployments at risk,” said Todd Greene, founder & CEO of PubNub. PubNub will team with Atmel at CES 2015 to launch full SDK support for Atmel’s MCU, MPU, and Wireless SoC platforms. Atmel developers now have access to PubNub’s secure Publish/Subscribe messaging with guaranteed ¼ second latencies across PubNub’s 14 global points-of-presence. PubNub delivers secure communication through firewalls, proxy ser...
An entirely new security model is needed for the Internet of Things, or is it? Can we save some old and tested controls for this new and different environment? In his session at @ThingsExpo, New York's at the Javits Center, Davi Ottenheimer, EMC Senior Director of Trust, reviewed hands-on lessons with IoT devices and reveal a new risk balance you might not expect. Davi Ottenheimer, EMC Senior Director of Trust, has more than nineteen years' experience managing global security operations and assessments, including a decade of leading incident response and digital forensics. He is co-author of t...
The true value of the Internet of Things (IoT) lies not just in the data, but through the services that protect the data, perform the analysis and present findings in a usable way. With many IoT elements rooted in traditional IT components, Big Data and IoT isn’t just a play for enterprise. In fact, the IoT presents SMBs with the prospect of launching entirely new activities and exploring innovative areas. CompTIA research identifies several areas where IoT is expected to have the greatest impact.