DevOps tools and automation of manual processes

This is a general question, but couldn't find a better place to ask. I'm a new DevOps member in a company, and I've been ask to "update" our DevOps technologies.

Generally speaking, in what areas do we need to provide tools, and what are some latest and advanced technologies/tools to do that?

For instance, we need container management (e.g. docker, kubernetes), log analysis (e.g. ELK Stack), Application monitoring (e.g. JMX), Weblogic, database management, Jenkins, etc.?

What else, and what tools? Which processes are probably needed to be automated? It can be anything. I just need some advice.

Alright... you're not going to implement every tool or automation at the same time, as some of them have quite deep impact on your development processes (and I daresay, development culture). Take a step-by-step approach; research each individual tool. Figure out what it actually does, what it is useful for. Play around with them, install them locally, go through tutorials, and see what they do, or whip up a quick VM somewhere (AWS, etc.) if you need more than one.

Then, take a look at the work your team/company is doing right now. What are the manual process you wish to automate? Ideas should spring up pretty quickly.

A nice, simple(-ish), bog-standard stack to start out with:

• Vagrant to automate setting up VMs for your developers, or test environments.

• Ansible to automate configuration management (relatively lightweight compared with Chef or Puppet)

• Gitlab or Jenkins as your automated CI/CD driver, mostly depending on taste

• Docker for your containers

• docker-compose, docker-swarm, Kubernetes, OpenShift to automate container deployment

• ELK or Splunk for your logging/monitoring, again depending on taste

Have fun!

StackExchange DevOps Q#5010, answer score: 5