Tools Gold! Sifting Through the Pool of DevOps Tools

Have you had a chance to check out the DevOps Shop video series? The first four installments in the series are out now. Let me tell you about it.

The videos are an educational outreach initiative driven by the DevOps Group Hub on the Cisco Community. Our goal is to create an impactful set of community-inspired content that everyone can benefit from. DevOps is an area which is relevant to many people within the tech sphere of influence and Cisco Developer Relations and DevNet believe it’s important we help build a DevOps community based on learning, sharing, and growth.

Our goal is to present relatable, real-world DevOps content that the developer, ops, and networking community can benefit from. Specific job roles that benefit include DevOps Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Software Developers, Network Engineers, Platform Engineers, Cloud Engineers, Systems Engineers and Administrators, and the list goes on.

Here are short overviews and links to the first four videos in the ongoing series. And please, join us in the DevOps Group Hub on the Cisco Community. We welcome your comments, questions, and participation.

Video #4 — Tools Gold: Sifting Through the Pool of DevOps Tools

When deciding which DevOps tools to work with, it is essentials the tools integrate well together or can be chained together. It’s not always clear at face value whether tools are integrable, and this can cause wasted time and headaches trying different combinations of tools. To alleviate that, I did some research on just what tools from the Sifting Through the Pool of DevOps Tools video work well together and this actually informed which tools I decided to include in the video.

In this video you’ll learn that the best way to start and succeed in your DevOps journey is to pick one reliable tool from each area of DevOps and learn how to use it well. I highlight my top tool pick from each of these categories:

Container Orchestration: Kubernetes
Container Management: Docker
Configuration Management: Ansible
Monitoring: Prometheus
Continuous Integration: Jenkins
Build Tool: Maven
Testing: Selenium
Version Control: Git
Collaboration: Webex

These tools are the most mature in their respective category. Not only do they integrate well together, but they are often more reliable and secure. Learning these tools will make learning other tools in those areas much easier in the future.

The DevOps Tools Integration-Compatability Matrix mentioned in the video.

Watch video #4 here — https://youtu.be/8N69jEH2P9o

Video #3 — Linter Wonderland + AI Assistant for Developers

Linting is a simple, yet effective, way to test and clean up your code during the build phase of continuous integration. If you are currently skipping linting, you could be living in a ‘linter winter’ which could be making your code, at best – inefficient, and at worst – a security liability.

In this video, you will see tried, tested and true ‘lint hints’ and how automation can make linting a relatively painless process. You’ll also learn about various Python linters, and how the benefits of linting for security and automation should have you ‘sprinting for linting’.

Last, but not least, we will introduce and demonstrate Tabnine, the powerful AI assistant for developers you can use in your IDE, on your laptop, on a server behind your firewall, or in the cloud. Tabnine is powered by machine learning models pre-trained on open-source code with permissive licenses and it features whole and full-function code completion. Privacy is paramount with Tabnine, so you code will remain private…and it offers a FREE plan too!

Watch video #3 here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f0GQuu2Bo4

Video #2 — Nine Easy-to-Use Python Modules for DevOps

Python is arguably the most important programming language for DevOps. It enables automation, can adapt to many use cases, and comes with a vast amount of built-in modules. In this video, Alexander Stevenson presents and demos nine of the best and most user-friendly Python modules, with code examples and resources for further learning and practice.

Requests
os
sys
re
Fabric
subprocess
Platform
Beautiful
Soup
smptplib

Watch video #2 here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26OuRcjZFXo

Video #1 – Intro to Cisco Modeling Labs for DevOps

Learn the basics of how to use Cisco Modeling Labs to automate your network for DevOps! In this video we utilize a free CML sandbox from Cisco DevNet to interact with a CML simulation through an API and through a pre-built Python library called VIRL2 Client. We’ll show you how easy it is to get started turning your infrastructure into code.