Open source and DevOps are two of the best technologies an enterprise can leverage to either sustain or accelerate its growth in today’s market. While open source gives a business powerful and cost-effective alternatives to pricey proprietary software (which is also why open source development services enjoy such demand today), DevOps facilitates efficient collaboration between the development and operations team of the company, resulting in more productive outcomes. 

With the increase in adoption of DevOps, companies started exploring optimal ways for DevOps automation. Fortunately, open source is a hero here as well. Enterprises that cannot invest much in paid tools can go for comparatively cheaper open source alternatives for DevOps automation. This is also practiced by many DevOps-driven companies providing open source eCommerce development services. Automating DevOps gives them even better results than the standard DevOps ecosystem by streamlining development and deployment processes.

The advantage of using open source tools for automation is that they offer more visibility into the source code, which makes it simpler to handle and adapt to changing market needs.  

Here are 4 great open source DevOps tools for automation.

1. Jenkins: Already popular as a useful DevOps tool for automation, Jenkins is a built-in GUI tool that facilitates quicker integration of project changes by identifying issues in a short time. In addition, Jenkins doesn’t require a lot of maintenance and offers hundreds of plugins to support development and testing. It also complements DevOps’ continuous integration and continuous testing aspects.
   
2. Docker: Originally an open source project, Docker needs no introduction today, as it’s been gaining momentum over the years and gradually replacing virtual machines with containers. With Docker, DevOps teams can build and deploy applications much faster regardless of shifts in environments. Docker essentially makes a DevOps ecosystem more flexible and productive. 
   
3. Chef: Chef is a popular configuration management tool that helps achieve speed, scale, and consistency. The cloud-based tool can simply complex tasks, and streamline various processes via automation. It has even found use in companies providing LAMP development services, where Chef is used to configure and deploy LAMP servers effectively. 
   
4. Ansible: Ansible is another good alternative to Chef, is also open source, and known for its simplicity. The entire application lifecycle can be automated in a much simpler fashion using Ansible. The configuration management tool also helps DevOps teams scale up automation which subsequently increases productivity.
   

Conclusion

The DevOps culture in itself is a great practice for modern-day enterprises to keep up with changing needs and evolving technologies. The tools are basically add-ons to maximize the effectiveness of a DevOps ecosystem by improving many key aspects. 

As automation is now seen as a great way for enterprises to streamline processes and free up its personnel to handle core tasks, tools became available for automation as well. The four tools mentioned above aren’t the only choices, and aren’t necessarily the best. It depends on the nature of the enterprise and its environments. Nevertheless, these tools can indeed change things for the better.