The 10 Coolest New DevOps Tools Of 2018

From container and infrastructure configuration management to continuous integration and delivery, CRN looks at 10 DevOps tools in 2018 that solution providers should know about.

Developing DevOps

Developers today have their pick of DevOps tools that bring to the table infrastructure configuration management, code repositories, release automation and management, continuous integration and delivery, and team collaboration.

The market was hot in 2018 as larger vendors looked to acquire startups with promising technology, as evidenced by Microsoft's GitHub purchase, as well as more partnerships and integrations between vendors and technologies. Artificial intelligence also made its presence known in the DevOps space, earning itself the title of AIOps, which is helping to make DevOps technologies even more useful to developers.

While there are plenty of providers and technologies in this space, CRN rounded up 10 of the coolest DevOps tools of the year.

Ansible

Ansible is a self-proclaimed "radically simple" IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration and many other IT needs.

In September, Ansible Tower version 3.3 was released and features more control, greater scalability, increased container support, and now the technology can run on Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform.

Bamboo

Bamboo, a continuous integration and deployment tool, can tie automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow for developers.

Atlassian, the Australian enterprise software company that developed Bamboo products for software developers, unveiled Bamboo 6.0 last year with new features including configuration as code, enhanced build control and build progress monitoring.

Docker

Docker, one of the most popular container management platforms in 2018, is also thought of as making containerization popular in the first place. Docker is used by developers to manage software parts as isolated, self-sufficient containers, which can be deployed and run in any environment.

Docker runs on Linux or Windows and integrates with other well-known DevOps tools, such as Jenkins and Bamboo.

Envoy

Originally built by ride sharing company Lyft to scale its platform, the technology today is being nurtured by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and is being used by some of the largest internet companies.

The service mesh offers a universal data plane for applications designed with service-oriented architectures. It connects micro-services by providing discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking, monitoring and logging.

GitHub

GitHub, a San Francisco-based startup, offers a very widely used global platform that more than 28 million developers use to share code, work together, and manage open-source projects.

Microsoft announced its plans to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in June, and the acquisition closed in October. In November, GitHub Desktop 1.5 was released, which includes several new features, such as merge conflict resolution.

GitLab

GibLab is a web-based Git repository that offers DevOps functionality across the application life cycle. The open-source and enterprise versions provide a software development platform with built-in version control, issue tracking, code review and CI/CD functionality.

GitLab version 11.4 was released in October. The latest version includes a host of new features that give users the ability to create and manage feature flags, searchable file tree of changes and code owner suggestions, among others.

Istio

Istio, similar to Kubernetes, is an offering developed by Google, as well as partners such as IBM, Cisco, Pivotal and Red Hat. In fact, the open-source service mesh was considered one of the hottest open-source projects this year by developers.

Istio offers traffic management, policy enforcement and telemetry collection. The service mesh is a component of Google Cloud Platform, and the production-ready version of the offering was released in July.

Jenkins

Jenkins is a free open-source tool that was created by developers for developers. The tool is a continuous integration server that developers can use for testing and reporting changes in real time, which can help identify issues in lines of code and automate testing.

The Jenkins community has put up impressive growth during 2018. The community added about 24 percent more new projects year over year.

Kubernetes

Also known to many developers as their container orchestration tool of choice, open-source, cloud-native Kubernetes can automate deployment, scale and manage containerized applications.

Kubernetes was originally developed by Google engineers in 2015, but because of its popularity, tech giants such as Cisco and Amazon Web Services have developed their own offerings to support Kubernetes environments.

Puppet

Puppet is one of the most reached-for DevOps tools on the market today. The company offers both open- source and paid DevOps tools to automate common IT operations tasks.

Puppet said that over the past year it has expanded its global footprint with new offices in Singapore, Tokyo, and Timișoara, Romania, accelerated the pace of product innovation, and forged deeper relationships with its partners and customers. Puppet has more than 40,000 customers, including 75 of the Fortune 100.