Creating software products without DevOps and DevOps tools is nearly impossible today. Unless you are a huge fan of buggy code and chaotic version deployments.

Development Operations professionals, combine IT, QA, infrastructure, and even some development tasks in their work. Devops are increasingly important members of any R&D department aiming to efficiently produce and deploy software products. 

DevOps are tasked with speeding up release times and for improving the quality of code as well as the effectiveness of developers, ops, security, and testers. But what is it that makes DevOps so important, and what is it they do, exactly?

What is DevOps?

DevOps, the term and the approach, are the melding of ‘development’ and ‘operations.’ It involves the integration of processes and methodologies, the acquisition and deployment of new tools, and a cultural nexus of a sort.

This “nexus” role of DevOps professionals is to encourage and facilitate collaboration between the stakeholders along the software development lifecycle. It is considered a critical aspect of the success and cost-effectiveness of a software development journey. 

Among the practices common to a DevOps organization are collaborative development, and continuous testing, release, deployment, monitoring, feedback, and optimization.

Adopting DevOps as part of the product development cycle is something more organizations can benefit from. Examples include:

• Reduced time to market by 50%
• Reduced risk through the incorporation of security into the software lifecycle
• Software that is more stable and secure with reduced failure rates of new releases
• Increased deployment frequency
• Accelerated mean time to recovery in the event of crashes 
• Reduced lead time between fixes

So it’s no surprise to see that in one recent survey, the impact of DevOps is one of significance: 

• It is the second most practiced development methodology (after Agile/Scrum)
• 59% of respondents can now deploy even multiple times a day
• 66% report a greater ability to innovate

DevOps is about people, processes and technology. It is often referred to as a movement and a culture and as such, requires organizations to  have in their arsenal the tools that enable all these benefits.

In this post, we will present the top 49 DevOps tools to make your software development life cycle more efficient in 2021.

Top 49 DevOps tools for 2021

Below we provide a comprehensive list of tools covering the following categories:

• CI/CD, configuration, and management
• Monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Building
• Testing and debugging
• Security and error detection
• Collaboration
• Containers, virtualization, and cloud tools
• Source-control management (SCM)
• Cloud computing

It’s worth noting that you probably won’t need to install all of them. Rather, you can pick and choose the ones you believe will bring the most value with the least effort and costs involved.

That said, it’s worth going over the list to familiarize yourself with the makers and shakers of DevOps tools in 2021. You never know when you might need to quickly (and efficiently) integrate one or more of them into your development lifecycle.

CI/CD, Configuration & Management

1. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source CI/CD server with a huge selection of plugins. Jenkins enables users to automate the different stages of their software delivery pipeline. 

Widely used and constantly evolving, Jenkins is often the go-to automation tool for continuously delivering software.

2. Ansible

Ansible is an open-source IT configuration management, deployment, and orchestration tool by Red Hat. It is designed to deliver productivity gains to a broad range of automation challenges. 

It is famed for its ease of use, yet powerful performance in automating complex multi-tier IT application environments. 

For DevOps, Ansible integrates test-driven application design to deliver a stable environment and enable smooth orchestration for both development and operations.

3. Sonatype

Sonatype’s Nexus platform delivers integrated open-source governance and software supply chain automation. 

It combines in-depth component intelligence with real-time remediation guidance, enabling DevOps teams and developers to automatically integrate security throughout the modern development pipeline and to scale through open-source governance.

4. Chef

Chef is a configuration management tool that is used to automate infrastructure provisioning. 

In DevOps, it is used to streamline server configuration and for deploying and managing servers and applications both on-prem and in the cloud, having the capability of integration with any cloud technology.

5. Puppet

Puppet is an open-source software configuration management and deployment tool. It goes beyond automating system administration by changing workflows and enabling DevOps teams to collaborate more effectively. 

Among its benefits is enabling programmers to write, test, and launch applications without having to wait for operations staff to deliver the needed resources.

6. Bamboo

Bamboo is a continuous integration and continuous deployment server that brings together automated builds, tests, and releases into a single workflow, integrating with other DevOps products such as JIRA, Bitbucket, Stash, Hipchat, and Confluence.

It enables DevOps teams to create multi-stage build plans, set up triggers to start builds upon commits, and to assign agents to critical builds and deployments.

7. Incredibuild

Incredibuild is a suite of grid computing software designed to accelerate computationally intensive tasks by distributing them over the network. Among these are the DevOps tasks of source code compiling, building, testing, and others. 

It enables DevOps teams to simultaneously distribute processes across idle CPUs on the local network or in the cloud, while transparently emulating the local environment on remote machines. Presently, Incredibuild supports C++ pipelines only.

Monitoring, Alerting, and Incident Response

8. Exigence

Exigence offers a SaaS platform for automated major incident management and orchestration.

Exigence enables incident responders to profoundly improve incident resolution capabilities and processes, empowering them with complete command and control and oversight of major incidents. You can currently try out Exigence for free by requesting a demo..

9. New Relic

New Relic is a web application performance service designed to work in real time with live web apps. It provides flexible, dynamic server monitoring and empowers DevOps operation teams to make intelligent decisions about complex systems.

New Relic offers DevOps teams multiple benefits such as reliability through capacity, SLA, and SLI monitoring, as well as through data health, gameday testing, and more.

10. Lightrun

Lightrun provides a continuous debugging and observability platform for production applications. It enables developers to securely add logs, performance metrics, and traces to production, as well as staging of live apps, on-demand.

11. SignalFX

SignalFX arms DevOps teams with real-time cloud monitoring and observability for infrastructure, microservices, and applications. It collects and analyzes metrics and traces across every component in the cloud environment.

12. AppDynamics

AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco, is an application performance monitoring solution that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide DevOps teams real-time visibility and insight into their IT environments. 

It offers automated anomaly detection, rapid root-cause analysis, and a unified view of the application ecosystem, including private and public clouds. 

13. Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source system for monitoring services and providing alerts. It collects data and metrics from different services and stores them according to a unique identifier—the metric name—and a time stamp.

Prometheus contributes to the DevOps system by monitoring cloud-native applications and infrastructure, and by watching over hundreds of microservices. 

14. Raygun

Raygun is an error monitoring and crash reporting platform. It enables DevOps teams to diagnose performance issues and track them back to the exact line of code, function, or API call. 

15. Catchpoint

The Catchpoint digital experience monitoring platform provides visibility into the user experience from anywhere.

With real-time intelligence into applications and services, it enables DevOps teams to proactively detect, identify, and validate user and application reachability, availability, performance, and reliability, across an increasingly complex digital delivery chain, as well as to fix issues faster when needed.

16. VictorOps

VictorOps (by Splunk) offers a a unified platform for centralizing the flow of information throughout an IT incident’s lifecycle, providing real-time alerting, collaboration, and documentation. It enables DevOps observability and collaboration for building, deploying, and operating software.

17. PagerDuty

PagerDuty offers a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments. It enables DevOps teams to eliminate release blockers, fix issues faster, eliminate bottlenecks with self-service environments and tooling for automation, and ship better code.

18. Anodot

Anodot brings machine learning and real-time streaming data so users can identify, report, and visualize business incidents as they occur.

It enables DevOps teams to quickly and effectively manage crises and uncover business opportunities, providing access to real-time analytics that use machine learning to correlate incidents and to best understand the root cause.

Building

19. Maven

Maven is an automation and management tool that was developed by Apache Software Foundation. It is used mainly for Java applications and lets developers to create projects using Project Object Models and plugins for more efficient software development.

20. Gradle

Gradle is an open-source build automation system, which is popular in Java, Groovy, and Scala ecosystems.

Gradle makes it easy for DevOps teams to build common types of projects, such as Java libraries, enabling them to add a layer of conventions and prebuilt functionality through plugins.  

Testing & Debugging

21. Selenium

Selenium is one of the most popular browser automation tools. It is used extensively by testing teams and is noted for being one of the most effective ways to implement Web UI testing in DevOps.

22. Gremlin

Gremlin offers a testing platform with an extensive library of attacks, providing DevOps engineers the framework for safely, securely, and easily simulating real outages.

23. TestComplete

TestComplete is a software test automation tool that automates UI tests for all applications on desktops, web, and mobile. It enables engineers to ensure the quality of their application without sacrificing speed or agility.

24. SoapUI Pro

SoapUI Pro is an API testing tool that is used for testing mission critical web services, helpig DevOps engineers enhance testing productivity.

25. LoadRunner

LoadRunner is an application load testing tool from Micro Focus, acquired by HP. It measures system behavior and performance under load can simulate thousands of users concurrently using application software, recording and later analyzing the performance of key components of the application.

It enables testers with greater testing efficiency and productivity while empowering engineers to take more responsibility for testing as part of the integrated set of DevOps processes.

27. Tabnine

Tabnine is an all-language autocompleter that uses deep learning to help developers write code faster. 

It works for all programming languages using machine learning models that enable developers to boost productivity and save time.

Security & Error Detection

28. SpectralOps

SpectralOps monitors for and prevents data breaches caused by leaked keys, credentials, or code misconfigurations. Like other solutions on this list, Spectral is "ShiftLeft" cybersecurity solution, which focuses on securing the development lifecycle itself.

28. Snyk

Snyk is a security solution that helps developers use open source to stay secure. It continuously and proactively finds and fixes vulnerabilities and license violations in dependencies pulled from npm, Maven, RubyGems, PyPI and more, as well as in Docker images.

29. Phantom

Phantom, which is now part of Splunk, is a security orchestration and automation platform. It integrates existing security technologies, enabling users to automate tasks, orchestrate workflows, and support a broad range of SOC (security operations center) functions, including event and case management, collaboration, and reporting.

30. Argon (Part of Aqua Security)

Argon protects the entire software development lifecycle from cyber attacks. Modern software development provides an ever evolving and complex landscape of tools, microservices, and providers. These microservices allow software development to scale quickly but also mean that Devops teams are required to rely on a growing number of bacl box dependencies. Monitoring them for data leaks can be challenging and this is where Argon steps in.

31. Sentry

Sentry is an open-source tool for application monitoring and error tracking. It helps software teams discover, triage, and prioritize errors and crashes in real-time, providing visibility across the entire stack and insights into errors that are affecting customers in production, giving developers the details they need to fix bugs. 

Collaboration

32. Jira

Jira is a powerful work management and issue tracking tool that enables DevOps teams to plan, track, and manage agile and software development projects. 

It is often noted for serving as the single source of truth for development information across the DevOps workflow.

33. Trello

Trello is visual collaboration platform that enables users to organize projects into boards. It gives DevOps teams a one-glance perspective of projects, informing them on what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process

34. Slack

Slack is business communication platform that includes many chat style features, including persistent chat rooms that are organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging.

It enables DevOps teams to communicate both as a group and in personal one-on-one discussions, through channels or privately via direct messaging.

It enables workflow simplification and enhanced clarity and productivity.

35. Mattermost

Mattermost is an open-source collaboration platform that offers an online chat service with real-time group, file sharing, webhooks, search, and integrations. 

It is positioned as the open-source alternative to Slack and Microsoft Teams and as the DevOps command center, for bringing people, developer tools, processes, and automation together, enabling teams to orchestrate workflows at every stage of the DevOps lifecycle.

36. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s business communication platform, which is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. 

It primarily competes with Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencing, document sharing, file storage, application integration, and more.

Teams is positioned as the dedicated hub that DevOps teams need to bring people, conversations, content, and tools from across Azure DevOps, GitHub, and Office together into one place.

37. Zoom

Zoom is a leading provider of a cloud-based video communications platform that is used worldwide for video and audio conferencing, chat, webinars, and content sharing, across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems. 

As such it enables DevOps teams to communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Containers, Virtualization, & Cloud Tools

38. OpenShift

OpenShift from Red Hat is a family of containerization software products that include the flagship offering, OpenShift Container Platform, an on-premise platform as a service (PaaS,) is built around Docker containers that are orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  

OpenShift helps DevOps teams develop and deploy applications to one or more hosts, which can be public facing web applications, or backend applications, including micro services or databases.

It enables efficient container orchestration and rapid container provisioning, deploying, scaling, and management, and accelerates application development, updates, and product distribution.

39. Docker

Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in containers.

It serves DevOps teams as an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications, benefitting both developers and system administrators, making it a part of many DevOps toolchains. 

Using Docker helps developers focus on writing code without worrying about the system that it’s ultimately running on. 

40. Kubernetes

Originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. 

As a reliable container cluster management tool, it delivers DevOps teams numerous advantages over other computing environments, including self-healing, fast container cluster management, faster performance, better redundancy, and improved uptime.

41. Vagrant

Vagrant is an open-source software product used for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments.

It offers an easy-to-use workflow and focuses on automation. As such it enables DevOps teams to lower development environment setup time, increases production parity, and more.

42. Kamatera

Kamatera is a global cloud services provider that offers a variety of cloud services, including hosting virtual private servers, cloud servers with web hosting panel, Wordpress and cPanels server hosting, cloud private network, cloud firewall, and managed cloud services. 

It is frequently listed among the top tools for DevOps, especially for software developers seeking easier cloud application deployment.

43. Terraform

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. It enables users to define and provision data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language, or optionally JSON. 

It is considered to be a very useful tool for DevOps teams for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently, making DevOps projects faster and more efficient to execute.

Source-Control Management (SCM)

44. GitHub

GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft, is a web-based code hosting and sharing service that uses Git (a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in any set of files). 

It offers the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git, plus its own features. 

As a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration, it enables DevOps teams and others to work better together on projects and from anywhere. 

It hosts over three million software repositories and is used by over 1.7 million developers worldwide. 

45. BitBucket

Bitbucket is a Git repository management solution that gives DevOps teams a central place to manage Git repositories, collaborate on source code, and receive guidance throughout the development flow. 

It gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test, and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. 

46. GitLab

GitLab is a web-based Git repository that provides free open and private repositories, issue-following capabilities, and wikis. 

It serves as a platform that enables DevOps professionals to perform every task in a project, from planning, to source code management, monitoring, and security.

Cloud Computing

47. AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is considered to be the most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform.

It offers compute power, database storage, content delivery, and more, enabling organizations to run web and application servers in the cloud.

For DevOps it provides services for building, storing, and deploying applications, as well as configuration management tools such as Chef.

48. Azure

Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform. It offers solutions such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Part of the Azure family is Azure DevOps, a Software as a service (SaaS) platform that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. 

The platform also integrates with the majority of the leading tools available today and is considered a great option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain.

49. Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers computing resources for deploying and operating applications on the web. 

Among GCP’s advantages that have been noted are better pricing, live migration of virtual machines, better performance, state of the art security, and redundant backups, among others.

In conclusion

As we can see there is a plethora of tools out there that can help you achieve DevOps nirvana.

Whether you’re looking to boost internal capabilities in CI/CD, monitoring and incident response, building, testing, security, or collaboration, there are great options out there.

So, there’s no time like the present. It’s time to get collaborative with development, accelerate release and deployment, improve major incident management, and free up time for innovation like only DevOps can.

Here’s looking to a great 2021!