5 DevOps Tools To Add to Your Stack in 2022

DevOps has fundamentally changed the way software is developed. It has further paved the way for creating faster, flexible, and more collaborative development and delivery processes. Thus, new and exciting DevOps tools emerge each year to improve existing workflows or introduce new functionality to the DevOps process. In this article, let’s have a look at five DevOps tools you can add to your tech stack in 2022.

Anthos

Modern workloads are becoming more complex than ever. Therefore, these workloads need to be distributed in different environments from the cloud, on-premise, and edge, depending on the requirement. Managing multiple different environments has become commonplace, with multi-cloud being a popular option to distribute workloads while maintaining flexibility. However, it will add increased management overhead to the DevOps process. Anthos aims to solve this issue by providing a unified platform to manage applications in on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud platforms.

Being a part of the Google Cloud, Anthos allows users to run GKE clusters and workloads across all supported environments. Thus, users can run multi-cloud clusters on AWS and Azure as well as directly on bare metal without a hypervisor, all managed by Anthos. Additionally, Anthos can be used to modernize workloads in VMs that can not be easily containerized.

Furthermore, this tool has features such as Anthos Config Management to enforce policies and Anthos Service Mesh to gain fine-grained control over network traffic. These features allow Anthos to enable modern security practices across your environments from on-premises to cloud and integrate security into each stage of the application development lifecycle. Anthos also supports GCP’s Knative offering Cloud Run to enable serverless workload deployments. It can also fully utilize pre-built Kubernetes applications from the Google Cloud Marketplace and deploy them directly in the cluster. This feature allows users to obtain common applications from a trusted source without creating and maintaining these applications themselves.

This unified control backed by Google Cloud provides enterprise-grade container orchestration with automated policy, security, and built-in monitoring. All these facts make Anthos one of the leading solutions to manage your workloads across different platforms.

Komodor

Kubernetes has become the de-facto container orchestration platform with its widespread industry adoption. However, troubleshooting Kubernetes environments is becoming increasingly complex with the growing complexity of workloads, cluster configurations, policies, and network controls. Komodor provides the ideal solution for the troubleshooting needs of Kubernetes. It is accomplished by tracking changes across the entire K8 stack, analyzing the effects of those changes, and then providing users with the proper context to troubleshoot K8s quickly.

This K8s-native troubleshooting tool enables users to gain complete control and visibility over their Kubernetes environments. For instance, Komodor provides visibility over each service with relevant deployment, config change, and alerts. It helps obtain a complete activity timeline that can be used to drill down the exact time and change relating to an error.

Additionally, Komodor facilitates the ability to understand service dependencies. As K8s can be a constantly changing environment, understanding the dependencies is the key to managing different services. A single failure on a dependent service can lead to a cascade of failures across the environment. Besides, it will be a nightmare to troubleshoot without proper visibility of the environment. Apart from understanding service dependencies, Komodor can gather data from an existing software stack like Jenkins, GitHub, Azure, AWS, etc.. to provide a comprehensive view of the entire environment. 

Komodor can also act as a monitoring solution to monitor failed deployments, unhealthy services, and K8s misconfigurations to reduce service disruptions. When it is coupled with the direct integration of Komodor with Slack, users can facilitate streamlined response workflows to deal with K8s errors leveraging Slackbot capabilities. The newly introduced Komodor Workflows feature takes the troubleshooting of Komodor to the next level by facilitating automated troubleshooting capabilities. It is done by detecting K8s issues, correlating information for other resources, running checks to pinpoint the issue, and finally providing instructions to remedy the issue.

Komodor can be a vital tool to ensure robust operations of your containerized environment as a fully-featured K8s troubleshooting solution.

Backstage

Software development is a collaborative process with different teams working on different components and utilizing various software, libraries, services, etc. As development needs grow, manually keeping track of everything can be a nearly impossible task. Backstage aims to address this issue by allowing users to create a developer portal with a centralized software catalog and manage all these different components there.

Moreover, Backstage brings together all the infrastructure tooling, services, and documents and facilitates a streamlined development environment. This tool consists of three primary components as follows:

Backstage Software Catalog

This is the core component of Backstage that provides a centralized system to track all the software in a development environment, as well as its ownership and metadata. It allows different teams to have a unified view of their software, services, websites, and libraries while tracking relations, dependencies, CI/CD integrations, APIs, etc.

Backstage Software Templates

Software templates allow users to create standardized templates with best practices that can be used to spin up different components directly through Backstage. Assume you need to create a new Spring Boot service. In that case, if a template is available within a few clicks, you can deploy a running spring boot service into your infrastructure and start developing on top of it. The best part is that it is automatically tracked via the Software Catalog.

Backstage TecDocs

This docs-like code solution enables users to create and maintain documentation across their environments. It allows users to create documentation using markdown and bundle it directly with the codebase.

In addition to the above components, Backstage has a growing ecosystem of third-party plugins such as Cost Insights and Allure Reports to extend its functionality and integrate with different services and platforms.

Crossplane

Infrastructure as Code is quickly becoming the de-facto option to manage infrastructure across your environments. Crossplane offers a unique solution for this need using a Kubernetes cluster as the control plane for infrastructure changes. Crossplane can be installed in any K8s cluster from local minikube installations to managed EKS, GKE, AKS, etc. It manages infrastructure via kubectl and uses a familiar YAML format to define infrastructure configurations. This tool can even be deployed on multi-cluster managers like Rancher and Anthos.

Crossplane provides declarative infrastructure management and can be used to unify application and infrastructure configurations. It is achieved by allowing these configurations to reside within the same K8s cluster reducing the complexity of development pipelines and toolchains. Resource controllers allow users to ensure that the desired state of resources is always maintained, and any config drifts are automatically corrected to match the desired state.

As Crossplane leverages common Kubernetes patterns, it can be easily extended by adding custom APIs and controllers as well as directly integrating policies, quotas, and permissions to infrastructure configurations. Since this tool is based on Kubernetes, it can also be easily integrated with CI/CD pipelines and used to facilitate GitOps via tools like ArgoCD or Flux without having to manually provision resources using kubectl.

The Universal Cloud API of Crossplane provides a consistent experience across different sets of vendors and platforms. It leads to a centralized vendor or platform-agnostic infrastructure management experience for users.

Datadog

Datadog is not a new tool, and it is a  well-established monitoring service provider. It provides monitoring capabilities across metrics, logs, and events for any monitoring requirement. This service has continuously evolved to offer new and exciting features that entice users to an all-in-one monitoring solution.

Moreover, Datadog seamlessly integrates with hundreds of services from Cloud and SaaS providers, automation tools to source control, and even other monitoring and instrumentation tools.  These wide-ranging integrations enable Datalog to offer a comprehensive monitoring experience throughout your DevOps tool stack. 

Some features that set Datadog apart from other platforms are:

• The ability to analyze and explore log data allows users to fulfill any troubleshooting or data exploration needs by searching, filtering and analyzing data. Additionally, automatic tagging and correlation features help to easily view log data in the proper context.
• Complete visualization of network and traffic flow of cloud-native environments facilitates better optimization and troubleshooting 
• User experience monitoring to get a user-centric view of the application
• The ability to add custom metrics, events, and metadata to further extend the data captured via Datadog
• Build a real-time interactive dashboard to visualize any metric, event, or logs
• Datadog Cloud SIEM to integrate security monitoring across your platforms with turn-key integrations from applications, containers, operating systems to cloud providers

Datadog can facilitate all foreseeable monitoring user-cases from infrastructure, security, network, synthetic, user, application performance monitoring to log management and even serverless workload monitoring. As a managed platform, you can ingest any amount of data from Datalog without worrying about performance degradation or infrastructure management. 

On top of that, Datadog enables users to set up actionable alerts with multiple conditions, integrate CI/CD integration to gain visibility of workflows, and track errors. It also provides incident management capabilities to facilitate real-time troubleshooting. All these features make DataDog a must-have tool for managing your complete application lifecycle.

Conclusion

Anthos, Backstage, Crossplane, Datadog, and Komodor are all designed to meet the needs of modern cloud-native DevOps processes. Each tool excels at a specific use case and can be integrated into any DevOps pipeline. For instance, Anthos for unified workload management across platforms, Backstage for streamlining development resources, Crossplane for K8s based platform-agnostic Infrastructure as Code experience, DataDog as a complete monitoring solution, and Komodor to keep your Kubernetes environments trouble-free.