Gone are the days when deployments were done through hands. i.e., manually pushed to a physical server somewhere in a building; your companies used to own. The software engineering world has witnessed a long way since then. In today’s competitive world, DevOps play a crucial role. Right from the time, where releases take place, in months, to weeks and from week to days. DevOps play a pivotal role. DevOps helps us to release the product in the market as soon as possible. And also help us to release the features at regular intervals and reduce human errors.
The idea started to gain momentum after it initially began as a practice to bring more efficiency in software infrastructure management as it’s crucial to be on the lookout for the tools, to enhance the effectiveness as well as productivity. Here’s the curated list of the most reliable and useful DevOps, as we know there isn’t enough time to dig deep for the top-rated DevOps tools, so, Let’s have a look.
What is DevOps?
Its a culture wherein the active collaboration between development, operations, organizations, and business teams is achieved. DevOps helps businesses and organizations by providing value to the end-user as well as value to all the team members. Additionally, the aim behind using DevOps is that it improves the capability to offer high-quality products and services, and mainly, it automates all the processes starting from developing to the delivery phase of the applications.
The integration of development and operations has bought a new perspective on software development. It is a set of practices that truly combines software development, and information technology operations aim to shorten the system development life cycle and offer continuous standard quality software.
Why Should .NET Developers Invest in DevOps Automation Tooling?
The task is not up to building a project and coding, but it’s essential to do it continuously. DevOps are rewarding pursuits, regardless of the technology stack. The .NET Core is open-source and was conceived and built for DevOps. In case you are using the cloud, you can use Microsoft Azure or AWS, for example. But if you are self-hosting, you may do it on server or data center within your building or company’s control. But in both the situation, automation is the key to handle new features, fixing bugs or changes in the database, advantageous for quality control, and increases the speed to the market.
The .NET Core CLI and Roslyn API make the entire delivery process open-source and easily adaptable. Automation covers the large part of the DevOps. Whereas with data comparison scripts and code quality analytics, many businesses and organizations can have a significant impact on their daily and routine tasks, as they would have continuous integration and deployment.
What are DevOps tools?
Here you’ll find the most excellent tools that are going to help you deploy your code and getting it integrated with your repository.
1. Azure DevOps
After working with the customers and developers from all over the world, it is clear that Azure DevOps is very crucial for a team’s success.
The Azure DevOps provides the fully-integrated features, to be used by the development teams for their projects. Azure pipelines work seamlessly with Kubernetes, also works for serverless options. Additionally, Azure can also function for complex virtual machines, even for instant deployed web apps. Hence, Azure DevOps is an all-in-one option that helps .NET developers as the tool makes their life streamlined. With the Azure DevOps tool, the teams can seamlessly plan their work, track the progress, manage the backlogs as well as sprint plan.
This DevOps tool has a rich UI, and the team can always hassle-free manage products from ideas to execution. The latest option, from Microsoft, is fully integrated, Azure DevOps, offering, Azure pipelines. Lots of team options to use here.
Azure Pipelines
The pipelines are cloud-hosted, which means developers don’t have to install or download anything. These pipelines are used to automatically build and test a code project, and make available to new users. The pipeline can work with any language and project. This also combines continuous integration and continuous deployment, consistently test and develop and deliver to the required target. Additionally, we can use any language with the pipeline, for instance, Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP, etc.
KUDU
At times, it happens that developers don’t want a fancy startup for their project. They need continuous integration for Azure-hosted web applications. Kudu is the engine behind different features in Azure web applications. One more advantage it provides to its developers is that it can run outside the Azure as well. Kudu monitors, Github check-ins, automatically rebuild your code and deploy it whenever there’s any change takes place. Moreover, kudu is free of cost.
2. Jenkins
The server, built-in Java, offers tons of plugins. Jenkins, the most popular open-source CI/CD tool available today, is a support system of many programming languages and applications. Moreover, the tool doesn’t need any introduction to the .NET developers.
With its MSBuild plugin, using Jenkins as a build server is the simplest thing, .NET developers can use for their delivering orchestrations. Apart from this, it enables the developers to track the failure of the deployment easily. Additionally, the tool is easy to understand. Commonly, we can say, the tool can automate the software development process and supports continuous integration and delivery.
MSBuild Plugin
A free Microsoft build platform, and typically used in conjunction with Visual studio. The plugin enables its users to run MSBuild project files. The MSBuild Plugin contains all the essential features offered by the MSBuild tool and allows extra functionality, to make the test more configurable as per the requirements. To use the plugin, you need to specify the location, directory, of MSBuild.exe on the Jenkins configuration page.
3. Octopus Deploy
Octopus Deploy is an automated deployment and also a management server. The tool is designed to make the deployment of .NET applications easiest possible.
Since you already have a source control system, and a build server, Octopus doesn’t replace these but turbocharge them. Octopus takes care of deploying, as well as promoting releases between environments, automating deployments, and automating the tasks that keep the software running.
Octopus Server
The product is preferred for many reasons, like for deployment and continuous integration cycle. They have plugins for team city, for Jenkins, Azure, etc. You can easily install your own, self-hosted instance of the Octopus Deploy server, or you can also make use of the Octopus cloud.
4. Redgate SQL Toolbelt
The RedGate SQL toolbelt is the industry-standard products for SQL, for deployment, backup, and monitoring. A significant number of SQL server professionals rely upon the SQL toolbelt, as the RedGate SQL tool belt is reliable and easy to use. In other words, we can say the RedGate SQL toolbelt is one of the headache reducing toolbelt in the market for SQL. The RedGate contains all the tools that help the developers to deal with the data scenarios that come up at the time of software projects. It can quickly help you reduce database troubleshooting down to a matter of hours. Below mentioned are the options, which could enable you to get back to your code quicker, with the assistance of data automation and analysis tooling.
SQL Change Automation
The SQL change automation extends your application development processes resulting in the automation of your database delivery. With the help of this tool, you can get your database scheduled live and quickly.
SQL compare
SQL comparison enables you to compare SQL schemas from databases, backups, scripts, and more control. Additionally, it allows users to create custom pre and post-processing scripts to automate and schedule database synchronizations. Also, it deploys a database directly from source control.
SQL Data Compare
Data compare is a software that performs simple but in an optimal manner. It enables the comparison between the tables of different databases on different environments, or clone databases, and even on the same environments and server. In other words, it allows simple and easy comparison of database data. With just a click of a button, differences can be copied or synced from one database to another. It has a very simple, easy to learn interface.
5. SonarSource
SonarSource offers code quality, and security products to detect maintainability, reliability, and vulnerability issues on 20 programming languages. That also includes Java, C#, Javascript, C/C++. At times, it can be challenging to select what good or wrong code can be used for team projects. Here, SonarSource provides a suite of products, with the help of which we can decide whats the team code should look like. SonarSource can run on the self-hosted server, for code quality analysis, and protects from risks. Lastly, SonarSource enables the teams and organizations of all sizes to deliver better, more secure software.
SonarC#
SonarSource delivers what is probably, the best static code analyzer one can find in the market for C#. Kept by Microsoft Roslyn front-end, it makes the use of the advanced techniques to analyze code, find bugs, and security vulnerabilities. The tool is based on the following principles, depth, speed, and accuracy. Moreover, Source C# has good coverage of all established quality standards. It helps you focus on essential topics and lets you avoid the low hanging fruit.
To Conclude
These are just the top 5 tools that several .NET developers use to manage the increasing requirements for shipping code accurately and quickly. Using these tools, you can easily automate the development and delivery lifecycle of your project and choose the best means according to your project requirements.
