How to Build Your DevOps Pipeline (Tools and More)
DevOps pipeline tools can help you build a success pipeline. Here we explain what are the tools that you should use.
You can follow along or jump ahead to the section that interests you the most.
➡️ Accelerate Your DevOps Pipeline
Back to topWhat Is a DevOps Pipeline?
A DevOps pipeline is a set of processes to compile, build, and deploy code to production.
Building a successful pipeline is critical to your overall DevOps success. But what does it take?
Here we give an overview of the people and tools you'll need as you build out your DevOps pipeline.
Back to topHow Do I Create a DevOps Pipeline?
To truly succeed at DevOps, you have to embrace an entire culture. A culture that spans various departments in your organization — as well as the entire lifecycle of your software.
Having the proper tools in place paves the way to earning the right to say you do DevOps. But tools alone won’t magically turn you into a DevOps organization overnight. Having said that, the proper tools are essential to making DevOps work. The primary goal being that your software in development is ready to be deployed at all times.
You need to get your Ops team on board.
That’s because DevOps done right breaks down traditional organizational silos. But it also requires Ops to embrace the very thing they’re conditioned to disdain: change. And yes, breaking down communication barriers between developers, IT, testers, and business executives is difficult.
But if you succeed, you reap the benefits. Increased communication leads to better collaboration and creates added value for the customer — faster.
Back to top5 DevOps Pipeline Tools
There is no mythical behemoth that can take care of every single aspect of your DevOps pipeline. To fully support your nascent DevOps culture, you need a platform that supports multiple tools.
The DevOps platform presented below is battle-tested in development organizations that have 1,000s of users in industries ranging from finance to logistics.
Starting with business needs means you need a tool that can handle both requirements management and general project management. Perforce, for instance, offers a complete suite of enterprise DevOps tools that can support your needs.
When it comes to development, you'll be using a variety of tools.
Version Control Tools
Version control tools play an important role in the success of your DevOps pipeline. And the right version control tool — such as Perforce Helix Core — is pivotal to your success. It ensures that you can version code, digital assets, and binary files (and more) all in one spot. This enables teams to communicate and collaborate better — and deploy faster.
Plus, Helix Core integrates with other tools used in DevOps.
Continuous Integration Tools
Once you have a version control tool that can support DevOps, it’s time to consider what you’ll do as new code rolls in. That means it’s time for a little Continuous Integration. For that, one of the most popular tools is Jenkins.
CI brings together version control, CI tools like Jenkins, and other tools (like static analysis) for a smooth automated build process. More on CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins >>
Continuous Testing Tools
Continuous testing tools play an important role in the CI/CD pipeline. Using Continuous Testing tools — such as Perfecto — enables your team to test continuously throughout the DevOps pipeline. This enables you to find and fix bugs faster — and deploy continuously.
Continuous Deployment Tools
Production deployments and configuration management are taken care of by Ansible. Ansible is a simple IT automation engine. It automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and intra-service orchestration. For software containerization, our chosen tool is Docker.
📕 Related Resource: Learn more about Continuous Delivery vs. Deployment – What's the Difference?
Monitoring Tools
Finally, you can track the entire process with Zabbix, which is designed for real-time monitoring in the enterprise. It works even if you need millions of metrics from 1,000s of servers. You can also use Grafana to visually display metrics on clean, informative dashboards.
Back to topPhases of a DevOps Pipeline
Here's how these different DevOps pipeline tools fit together:
As you can see, business needs are the starting point for the DevOps model: understanding your customer's needs and planning work accordingly. Once you define an initial set of requirements, software development can start. Production then runs continuously: automated testing and deployment allows new versions to be released in short intervals. And the whole DevOps pipeline cycle is traceable to ensure that everything runs smoothly.
If — and when — needs change during development, they are easy to implement without starting over from scratch. The revised needs are communicated and documented in the requirements management tool. From there they get delivered to the development team so they can implement the change. Once again, automation does its thing to ensure that each new change works once integrated into the software and can be deployed fast.
Build a Successful DevOps Pipeline
DevOps fulfills the promise of Agile, bringing the same kind of Agility to more parts of the development and deployment process. With CI/CD pipelines, you can release often, the releases actually work, and your products meet customer needs. You'll even exceed expectations!
Cross-departmental cooperation ensures tools and processes streamline development instead of forming bottlenecks. With the right tools, you can enable automation and increase transparency throughout the duration of the project.
Learn more about how Perforce enterprise DevOps tools can help you.
Use Version Control For DevOps
Version control is one of the keys to DevOps success.
See for yourself how version control:
- Supports CI/CD.
- Improves developer productivity.
- Enables distributed teams to communicate and collaborate efficiently.
- Manages build artifacts (in the same repository as your source code, digital assets, and more).
- Helps you scale as your team (and files) grow.
You can get started with Helix Core, one of the best version control options for DevOps teams, today. It's always free for up to 5 users and 20 workspaces. Try it out now.