6 Open Source DevOps Tools for the Private Cloud

DevOps is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It plays a significant role in improving operational processes in terms of maintainability, reliability, efficiency and security.  Here are some tools that helps in automate routine operations, system administration tasks, while minimizing human errors when setting up complex systems.

Chef

Chef is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration "recipes". Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company's servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace to automatically provision and configure new machines.

Puppet

Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool. It runs on many Unix-like systems as well as on Microsoft Windows and includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration.

Ansible

Ansible, a free-software platform for configuring and managing computers, combines multi-node software deployment, ad hoc task execution, and configuration management. It manages nodes (Linux nodes must have Python 2.4 or later installed on them, Windows nodes require PowerShell 3.0 or later) over SSH or over PowerShell. Modules work over JSON and standard output and can be written in any programming language.

SaltStack

SaltStack platform or Salt is a Python-based open source configuration management software and remote execution engine. Supporting the "Infrastructure as Code" approach to deployment and cloud management.

Cobbler

Cobbler is a Linux provisioning server that facilitates and automates the network-based system installation of multiple computers operating systems from a central point using services such as DHCP, TFTP, and DNS. It can be configured for PXE, reinstallations, and virtualized guests using Xen, KVM or VMware.

Ironic

OpenStack bare metal provisioning is also known as Ironic. It is an integrated OpenStack program which aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines, forked from the Nova bare metal driver. It is the best thought of as a bare metal hypervisor API and a set of plugins which interact with the bare metal hypervisors