Hey everyone, this is by far my most read article, and given the changing landscape of DevOps tools, I thought nearly three years later and heading into 2023 it was worth a refresh! For those of you who read the original article, I have updated it with a few small changes to my categorization of tools list since last time and added new key players to most of those categories (along with a few I missed the first time). There are so many test tools across all the various tech stacks and DevOps stacks, that I can’t possibly put them all in here, but this time I tried to add some tools used in different worlds (JavaScript, Kubernetes, Java, front end, etc). Before getting to the updated article, here is a summary of some key trends we have seen across our 30+ projects and from our friends at Rhythmic Technologies in the industry.
Last week a few of my very senior colleagues and myself were remarking about how many new DevOps tools are emerging and how it’s getting harder and harder every day to keep track of them and where they fit into the world. I asked several of them where these tools, Ansible, Terraform, Salt, Chef, Bamboo, CloudFormation, fit in. Why would I use one vs. the other? Are they even the same thing? Am I missing a major player? I got back the same blank stares/questions that I had. So, I thought I would do some research, read, and try to make sense of it for all of us so we could classify products into categories or uses to which we are all familiar.