10 Tools For Effective DevOps Collaboration
Collaboration for DevOps teams is crucial, but it doesn't happen automatically. Here are 10 tools that can help make it easier (or possible) for your teams to work together.
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DevOps takes tools and few are more important than the ones that let your development and operations teams collaborate. Whether your team is concentrated in one building or spread around the globe, it needs to be able to communicate effectively, share work, and keep up with schedules and tasks.
IT professionals have to collaborate -- a lot -- in their daily work. When you try to bring development and operations together, the collaboration complexity can go up exponentially. Fortunately, there have never been more tools available for teams to use or more aspects of collaboration covered by those tools. If anything, the danger to managers is suffering from too many options.
We're going to look at 10 tools that, individually, are used by a lot of the teams implementing DevOps in their organizations. These are notable, and some are new, but they are far from the only tools available.
We're staying away from the word "best." The reason there are so many tools is that there are so many ways of working together. It's almost certain that a "best" tool exists for your team.
It's just as certain that you'll have to figure out which tool is best based on your team, your culture, and your functions.
We'd love to hear about the tools that you and your team are using. Do you do everything with one tool, or do you have a complex suite of tools that makes everything work? If you're using a suite, is it all from a single vendor, or do you mix and match for best performance?
[Read 8 Ways To Fail At DevOps.]
This isn't a simple question for most teams but it can be one that has huge implications for your productivity and effectiveness.
The newest competitor in the collaboration space is Microsoft Teams, introduced on Nov. 2. It will be in preview until the first quarter of 2017, but if you're an Office 365 Enterprise customer, you can turn it on now.
Microsoft Teams is an addition to Office 365 Enterprise. If you're already a customer, then Teams is free. If not, then it's unavailable. The tie-in to Office 365 gives some hints about where the productivity wins in Teams might lie.
Teams has great integration with the applications that make up Office 365, and it easily integrates Skype for audio and visual calls. It's based in chat, but unlike some competitors (like Slack), it supports threaded conversations, so topics remain separate.
This tool comes to the DevOps party from the operational side, rather than the development side, but the sheer weight of Microsoft's support and product integration should make it a powerful competitor in the market.
For many teams, Slack has become the center of their collaborative world. Slack's group chat functionality and near-universal platform support make it the poster child for modern collaboration, whether in the development world or in social gatherings.
Slack's always-on group chat functions have replaced office email for many organizations. Its "freemium" business model has made it familiar to many users before they ever encounter it in a business setting. There are limitations. The lack of threaded comments is huge when your group may discuss many things at a time. But managers will be hard-pressed to find someone in the corporate IT space who isn't somewhat familiar with Slack and how it works.
Atlassian is a company that has a major footprint in the agile and DevOps worlds. Part of that footprint is HipChat. HipChat is similar to Teams and Slack in that it's built around chat, but it's a rather different product in other, crucial ways.
HipChat, like Slack, uses the "freemium" business model. When you move to the paid version, you add video chat, group screen-sharing, and other features to things like message tagging, full-chat searching, and file-sharing that come with the basic version. In addition, HipChat has integration with scores of development, storage, and other collaboration packages to make it part of an overall system.
In some important ways, modern online collaboration started with Basecamp. Many teams started using Basecamp a decade ago and never found a reason to leave.
Where the previous tools we saw use chat as the organizing concept, Basecamp is built around a project management model. While it has chat (called Campfire) and a threaded message board, it started with to-do and calendar functions. It weaves all of these (and more) into a unified collaboration system.
There's no freemium plan, but there is a free trial. Though it's not developer-specific, Basecamp is a system that's been around long enough to have many people with experience scattered through the industry.
If you're not familiar with Facebook, first, what planet are you reading this on? Let's just say that you are familiar with Facebook, as is anyone likely to be on your DevOps team. That familiarity is why Workplace by Facebook is an interesting up-and-coming collaboration tool in the DevOps world.
Workplace takes the Facebook user experience and adds enterprise functions like team and project groups, administrative support, and unlimited storage for team work assets. In an acknowledgment of the security concerns that many IT executives have about Facebook, Workplace integrates with a wide variety of authentication and directory platforms, including Okta, Active Directory, and Windows Azure AD.
Like Basecamp, Favro is built around a project management model. Unlike Basecamp, you can get basic Favro functionality for free. If you want its more powerful features, you're going to need to subscribe.
Favro uses a simple agile workflow user interface to organize projects, tasks, and schedules. It's made for agile teams, so if you're already using the language of agile, you'll be familiar with the labels Favro applies to its divisions. Favro can integrate features from applications like Slack, GitHub, and Dropbox. That integration ability makes it far more powerful -- and requires moving to the paid subscription model.
Yammer was Slack before Slack. It began life as an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger (remember that?) and grew until it captured the attention of, and was captured by, Microsoft in an acquisition.
Today, Yammer is still a popular choice for companies and groups that want to have a chat-based collaboration system that's inside the corporate walls (though external collaboration can be implemented) and secured by corporate authentication and privacy policies.
It's not yet clear how Yammer will be affected by Teams, but if you're looking for enterprise-class chat collaboration today, Yammer is still a very strong option.
Unlike the previous tools on this list, Trello isn't based on a chat or project management model. It's built on a to-do list. Long popular with individual users, many DevOps teams have found that the shared lists, cards, and groups available in Trello make it a good basis for collaborating.
Trello's system of managing to-do items as they move from one stage of completion to another makes it a very easy fit within an agile development environment. Application integration and app development, called "power ups" in Trello-speak, allow teams to build code-repository, trouble-ticket, and time-tracking functions into their Trello projects. Trello is free for individuals. Advanced team functions and app integrations require a paid subscription.
If you want to share schedules or chat with team members, then you're going to look at one of the other tools in this article. If you want to share digital work products (like code or UI mockups), there's a reasonable chance that you'll use Git or its publicly available hosted version, GitHub. This hosted version of an open source repository is home to thousands of open source projects and freelance designer resumes. It's also the most widely known way for dev teams to share code.
GitHub isn't the only code repository. There are a couple of other options, like Atlassian Bitbucket, that are well known and widely used. But GitHub is the 800-pound gorilla of repositories. It is free for those who don't mind sharing their work with the entire world. If you want to have private repositories with managed permissions, you'll need a paid subscription. For a higher-level subscription, you can bring the functionality of GitHub inside your corporate firewalls, with all the security that implies.
We've looked at collaboration tools based around chat, projects, to-do lists, and code repositories. Now, to coin a phrase, for something completely different. Sooner or later, you're going to want to move files around as part of your collaboration efforts. When you do, you're going to want something like Cyberduck.
Cyberduck started its life as an FTP client for Windows and Mac OS. Now it allows you to connect with, browse files on, and transfer files among almost any sort of server, cloud, or service on which you have permission to do so. It knows OpenStack, WebDAV, Amazon S3, and much more. It is as simple to set up as any such client I've ever seen. It's also free, though you can (and should) make a donation to the development team if you decide to use it for your DevOps team.
Full disclosure: I've used Cyberduck for years and find it an invaluable tool for managing all sorts of code and collaboration projects. It's on pretty much every machine I use.
So, those are 10 tools that could help you keep your DevOps efforts humming along. Were you already familiar with all of them? Do you already use any of them? Let me know what you think -- I'll be waiting in the comment tool for the article.
We've looked at collaboration tools based around chat, projects, to-do lists, and code repositories. Now, to coin a phrase, for something completely different. Sooner or later, you're going to want to move files around as part of your collaboration efforts. When you do, you're going to want something like Cyberduck.
Cyberduck started its life as an FTP client for Windows and Mac OS. Now it allows you to connect with, browse files on, and transfer files among almost any sort of server, cloud, or service on which you have permission to do so. It knows OpenStack, WebDAV, Amazon S3, and much more. It is as simple to set up as any such client I've ever seen. It's also free, though you can (and should) make a donation to the development team if you decide to use it for your DevOps team.
Full disclosure: I've used Cyberduck for years and find it an invaluable tool for managing all sorts of code and collaboration projects. It's on pretty much every machine I use.
So, those are 10 tools that could help you keep your DevOps efforts humming along. Were you already familiar with all of them? Do you already use any of them? Let me know what you think -- I'll be waiting in the comment tool for the article.
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