DevOps tools are a great way to streamline the development process, and selecting the right tools for your team can improve your overall workflow. Open source DevOps tools are especially helpful because they are created and driven by collaboration. Having visibility into the code behind a product gives your team greater flexibility than if you were tethered to a private vendor.

When we created Probo, there weren’t many open source DevOps tools available that could solve an internal problem of ours. We needed to be able to test projects in real time, rather than at the end of a development sprint.

Fortunately, there are now many open source DevOps tools available that should be added to your DevOps toolchain.

Here are some of our favorite open source DevOps tools.

GitHub

GitHub isn’t new, it’s been on the scene for about a decade, making it one of the most recognizable tools on this list.

It allows you to host and review code, manage projects, and build software. GitHub is known for its ability to easily merge feature branches, as well as its forking abilities.

We use GitHub internally, and it’s one of three tools that integrate with Probo (the others are GitLab and Bitbucket).

Open Source Puppet

Open Source Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to enable and deploy changes quicker at scale.

We use Puppet to set-up multiple servers. These servers are connected to a master server that holds the configurations for all of the servers under its control.

What’s really useful is that when you want to make changes to multiple servers or spin up a new server, you only have to update the configuration on the master server. The master server will then push the changes out to all of the other servers either manually or on a timed schedule.

We consider Puppet to be one of the most useful pieces of open source software that we use for our business.

Docker

Docker is another configuration management tool that has revolutionized the development world with its container system.

Docker containers isolate applications into self-contained packages. These containers include everything you need to run an application, which means you can run them regardless of the machine or platform.

Docker is highly regarded by the DevOps community, especially when it’s coupled with other DevOps tools.

We like Docker so much that we built Probo on it!

Jenkins

Jenkins is an open source automation tool that allows you to automate various stages of your development process.

Automation tools are key for software development because teams are able to run automated tests, or other repetitious tasks, that would otherwise take a very long time to do manually.

One of the biggest benefits of Jenkins is its ability to integrate with other DevOps tools. For example, Jenkins integrates with both Puppet and Docker.

Like Jenkins, Probo is a continuous integration tool. Probo focuses on team collaboration, and we agree that automated testing is important, but we also think a human QA process is a necessary part of software development.

The four open source DevOps tools mentioned above are some of the most popular on the market, but they only scratch the surface of what’s available for your team.

Finding the right tools for you takes time and experimentation, but this list is a good place to start.

Do you have any must-use tools to add to this list? Let us know in the comments below.