Popular Tools Supporting YAML Data Format

Introduction

YAML stands for YAML Ain't Markup Language (It rhymes with "camel"). 

It is a very simple text-based, human-readable language for exchanging data between people and computers. YAML is not a programming language. It is mostly used for storing configuration information and is human-readable. YAML files store data and they do not include commands and instructions. YAML is a data serialization language similar to XML or JSON. However, it is much more human-readable and concise.

YAML is extensively used in configuration files, log files, object persistence, caching, and messaging (sending information across various software components or applications). It is important to understand this format because any changes to these files can cause your application to not work correctly.

Popular Tools Using YAML

Below are some of the tools which are extensively leveraging YAML data format.

1. CircleCI — CircleCI is a modern Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) tool for the cloud which can be used for automating builds, tests, and deployment of software. CircleCI uses a YAML file called config.yml to store its configuration. If you are planning to learn or use CircleCI in your project, the concepts covered in this course are very important as you would be working on a YAML file to configure CircleCI.

2. Travis CI — Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted at GitHub and Bitbucket. Travis CI uses a YAML file named .travis.yml to store its configuration in your repository. The concepts covered in this course are very important as your project will only build with Travis CI if it contains a valid configuration.

3. Azure DevOps — A service to continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform and cloud. You define pipelines, which are stages of your CI/CD process using YAML. Azure DevOps also provides other options like a visual designer for defining build and release pipelines. However, using YAML provides you additional flexibility as you can manage these pipelines like any other source file and version control it.

4. Jenkins X — Jenkins X is an open-source tool for CI/CD automation for cloud-native applications on Kubernetes. YAML plays an important role in Jenkins X. The Jenkins X cluster configuration process creates a YAML based pipeline configuration file called jenkins-x.yml.

5. Spring Boot — Spring Boot is an open-source Java-based framework used to create microservices. Understanding YAML is very important if you are developing using Spring Boot. It uses a YAML file called application.yml to store its configuration properties.

6. Docker — Docker is a set of platforms used as a service (PaaS) for products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Multi-container applications in Docker are defined using a tool called Compose, which uses a YAML file named docker-compose.yml to configure the application’s services. 
7. Chef Automate — Chef Automate is an enterprise platform that allows developers, operations, and security engineers to collaborate effortlessly on delivering application & infrastructure changes at the speed of business. It uses a YAML resource block to declare the configuration data to be tested.
8. Ansible — Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. Ansible uses YAML for expressing Ansible playbooks because it is very easy for humans to understand, read and write when compared to other data formats like XML and JSON.
9. Kubernetes — Kubernetes (commonly stylized as k8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. Kubernetes resources, such as pods, services, and deployments are created through a declarative way using the YAML files.
10. Swagger — A simple yet powerful tool for RESTful API documentation and design. It is part of the open tools initiative and is backed by Microsoft, Google, PayPal, and IBM. Using `YAML`, you can create a Swagger instance of your API. Swagger consumes specifications in the YAML format as input and generates HTML documentation of the API.
11. AWS Cloud Formation — it lets you model a collection of AWS and third-party resources and enables its fast and consistent provisioning and management throughout their lifecycles, by treating it as infrastructure as code.

and many more...

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