The 10-Minute Read to Understanding DevOps Tools: Update for 2023

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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.

• We have seen an explosion of tools around microservices, particularly in the Kubernetes space. Tools like Envoy provide layer 7 proxy, and Istio and Linkerd provide layer 7 service mesh. At this point I consider these tools more purely operational tools, so I have excluded them from my list, but this may change on the next update! 
• For well-run shops we have seen a lot of “less is more” lately. A lot of simpler pipelines, smaller test suites, less stages, less environments. A lot more Docker. Not necessarily a unified approach to Docker, but more of it!
• For mismanaged shops we have seen a significant growth of complexity, mostly around microservices; instead of DevOps being used to reduce and manage cloud spend, it seems to have the opposite effect in these shops.
• Simplified CI/CD approaches are on the rise, more GitHub actions and Bitbucket pipelines.
• Moving DevOps/IAC code into the repositories they support (yay!)
• Code coverage for infrastructure as code has gone up dramatically in the last 2 years. Low-level infrastructure (VPCs, related networking, security config, IAM) coverage remains low but it has improved a bunch.

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.

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