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DevOps Technology: The DevOps Toolchain

Original blog posted on August 27th

With so many DevOps tools on the market today, how do you choose which ones are right for your project or business? An easy way to keep track of your preferred tools is to map them to the different phases in the DevOps Loop.  

Tools to support DevOps processes have emerged like bunnies in springtime. There are Open Source tools, custom-built tools, vendor-supported tools, and even toolsets that predate DevOps and have been updated (or simply rebranded) to “DevOps”.

The market is so dynamic, broad, and complex that some fun concepts have been created to help bring some order to the chaos, including the Periodic Table of DevOps Tools by digital.ai. Of course, these approaches to illustrating DevOps tool sprawl cannot include all of the tools available as it would be impossible to maintain.  Try searching for “Top 10 DevOps Tools“. The results will include dozens of lists, with none showing the same mix of tools. This is because software has never been more accessible or offered such broad choice, driven in no small part by the Open Source movement. And with autonomy and choice being so central to the DevOps culture, there is an almost infinite combination of solutions in use across organizations and within teams.

It can seem overwhelming and confusing. DevOps teams and vendors have addressed this by finding a simple way to communicate their preferred tools – by mapping tools to the appropriate phase in the DevOps Loop. This blog series focuses on the infrastructure and operations perspective to DevOps (there are already many great resources that approach these concepts from the developer perspective). Therefore, I will spend more time on the infrastructure components of the lifecycle – Infrastructure as Code, delivery pipelines for infrastructure components, and configuration management.

 

With that in mind, here is a version of the DevOps Loop that shows how VMware Cloud Management solutions map to the product/service lifecycle phases:

 

vRealize DevOps Loop

 

Over the next couple of posts, I will refer back to DevOps: Principles and Outcomes as we walk through the ways in which VMware solutions – and vRealize Cloud Management in particular – provide the capabilities that support these principles as we apply them to traditional infrastructure and operations processes.

 

Other posts in this series

Find my previous posts on DevOps (as a part of our Cloud Insights series) below, and follow me on Twitter @mandystor