Infrastructure automation is an integral part of the DevOps process. It helps teams to manage their workload more efficiently and quickly deploy software. DevOps tools for infrastructure automation provide the automation needed to streamline processes and reduce manual intervention.
With the right tools, DevOps teams can reduce costs and increase their efficiency and velocity. They also gain much-needed control and visibility over their applications and operations.
This article will go over the factors to consider when choosing DevOps infrastructure automation tools. It will also categorically (DevOps practices) list the 25 best DevOps automation tools for infrastructure automation with their key features.
There are several important factors you should consider when choosing a tool for automating your DevOps infrastructure:
- Compatibility with your infrastructure: Choosing a tool that is compatible with your current infrastructure and can be easily integrated into your existing workflow is crucial.
- Features and functionality: Consider the features and functionality of the tool and whether it meets the needs of your team and your organization.
- Ease of use: Choose a tool with a user-friendly interface, as this will make it easier for your team to adopt and use it effectively.
- Scalability: Choose a tool that can scale with your organization as it grows and evolves.
- Integration with other tools: Consider whether the tool integrates well with other tools and platforms that your team is already using.
- Support and documentation: Look for a tool with good documentation and a strong support network. These will be helpful when you encounter issues or need help using the tool.
- Cost: Consider the cost of the tool and whether it is within your budget.
Finally, you need to know the available options. Below is a comprehensive list of the most popular DevOps automation tools with their key features to help you decide based on the above factors.
Read more: What is infrastructure automation?
As stated earlier, this article will categorize the infrastructure automation tools in DevOps practices. The following are the DevOps practices:
- Infrastructure as code (IaC)
- Configuration management
- Continuous integration and delivery
- Container orchestration and image management
- Monitoring and logging
The list of the top DevOps automation tools includes:
Tools in this category are platforms that define, provision, and manage infrastructure using code, and may include orchestration and governance layers to support automation, collaboration, and policy control in DevOps workflows.
Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration and DevOps automation platform designed to manage infrastructure provisioning workflows. To help modern teams manage their IaC, Spacelift provides an easy-to-use interface that works with cloud-agnostic IaC tools like Terraform, Terraform and Pulumi, cloud-specific IaC features like AWS CloudFormation, as well as Ansible and Kubernetes.
Aside from the easy-to-use interface, Spacelift offers a perfect blend of regular CI’s versatility and methodological rigor of a specialized, security-conscious infrastructure tool that caters to the unusual execution model and highly stateful nature of IaC tools.
Spacelift is also a solution for organizations with difficulty managing multi-cloud deployment and adding flexibility to infrastructure provisioning. It offers automated workflows and integrates provisioning logs into your Version Control System (VCS) interface for increased transparency.
Unlike some of Spacelift’s alternatives, which have some level of integration with Git providers, Spacelift is truly GitOps native. Thanks to its push policies, Spacelift fully supports arbitrary Git flows, including massive monorepos, and gives you ultimate visibility through your Git provider APIs (e.g. GitHub’s Checks and Deployments APIs).
Key features of Spacelift
- Stack dependencies: Build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that can combine Terraform with Kubernetes, Ansible, and other infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as OpenTofu, Pulumi, and CloudFormation.
- Drift detection and automatic reconciliation: Spacelift can detect drift in infrastructure, which is when the actual state of infrastructure differs from the desired state defined in code, and automatically reconcile the drift to bring the infrastructure back in line with the desired state.
- Precise guardrails that you control: Spacelift implements the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework to introduce guardrails as policies to avoid unintentional changes to your workflow.
- Collaboration and sharing: Spacelift allows teams to collaborate on and share infrastructure code, facilitating code review, testing, and reuse of code.
- Auditing and compliance: Spacelift provides detailed auditing and compliance capabilities, which can help users track infrastructure changes and ensure that infrastructure stays in compliance with organizational policies and regulations.
- Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints
Price/license: Free tier available; paid subscription for additional features
Official documentation: https://docs.spacelift.io/
Use case example: How to improve your infrastructure orchestration with Spacelift
Do you plan to implement DevOps in your organization? Or maybe you are seeking ways to improve your processes? Book a demo with our engineering team to discuss your options in more detail.
Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows users to define, provision, and automate infrastructure resources on any cloud using a high-level configuration language called Terraform Language.
It supports a wide range of resource types, including low-level components like storage, networking, and compute instances, and high-level components like DNS entries and SaaS features. Terraform can also be used to provision Kubernetes resources, Helm Charts, and even Spacelift resources.
When using Terraform, you write declarative configuration files describing your infrastructure’s desired state. Terraform then compares the current state of the infrastructure to the desired state and creates or modifies resources as needed to achieve the desired configuration.
To learn how to use this tool, check out our Getting Started with Terraform tutorial.
Key features of Terraform
- Platform-agnostic: It is not limited to one platform or operating system
- Multi-cloud support: Terraform can manage resources on multiple cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
- Terraform can provision an immutable infrastructure: Most infrastructure provisioning tools create mutable infrastructure, which makes it possible to upgrade, but prone to infrastructure drift. With the immutable approach, upon upgrade, the current configuration is replaced with a new one that factors in the changes, and then the infrastructure is reprovisioned
- Terraform has great documentation with huge community support
Price/license: Source-available under HashiCorp BSL 1.1; CLI is free to use under BUSL terms; Terraform Cloud/Enterprise is subscription-based
Official documentation: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/docs
Use case example: Managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) With Terraform
OpenTofu is a community-driven, open source fork of Terraform, stewarded by the Linux Foundation, used to define and provision infrastructure as code.
It emerged after HashiCorp changed Terraform’s license to BSL in 2023. OpenTofu remains MPL 2.0 and targets drop-in compatibility so that existing HCL configurations, providers, and modules continue to work. It tracks Terraform’s workflow, adds features such as client-side state encryption and provider-defined functions, and ships regular releases in the 1.8.x line.
In practice, teams often replace the Terraform binary with OpenTofu in CI, keep their state backends and pipelines unchanged, and migrate incrementally if needed.
Key features of OpenTofu
- Works with Terraform: Use your existing Terraform modules and providers without rewriting code.
- Open community leadership: Managed by the Linux Foundation for transparent, vendor-neutral decisions.
- Built-in security: Encrypts state files so sensitive data stays protected without extra tools.
- Flexible workflows: Offers features like early variable evaluation and selective resource exclusion, providing greater flexibility and control over infrastructure deployments.
- Large ecosystem: With access to over 3,900 providers and 23,600 modules, OpenTofu enables comprehensive infrastructure management across various platforms.
Price/license: MPL 2.0 open source
Official documentation: https://opentofu.org/docs/
Use case example: OpenTofu at Scale: 4 Strategies & Scaling Best Practices
Pulumi is an open-source IaC platform that lets you define and manage cloud resources in general-purpose languages such as TypeScript or JavaScript, Python, Go, and C#.
Unlike purely declarative tools, you write infrastructure with real code, so you get type checking, loops, conditionals, and modular reuse. This enables you to pull in existing libraries, share packages, and test infrastructure with the same tooling you use for application code.
The result is more expressive automation for complex workflows and a smoother path to integrating infra changes into CI, reviews, and version control.
Key features of Pulumi
- Advanced debugging: Pulumi allows developers to debug and troubleshoot infrastructure using standard programming techniques, such as breakpoints and stepping through code
- Secure by default: Pulumi follows best practices for security and compliance, allowing users to define their infrastructure’s custom policies
- Previews and drift detection: Pulumi preview shows proposed changes, drift flags out-of-band edits.
- Multi-cloud and Kubernetes: One workflow for AWS, Azure, GCP, and K8s with consistent constructs
Price/license: Engine/CLI Apache 2.0 open source (free); Pulumi Cloud has free & paid tiers (usage-based)
Official documentation: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/
Use case example: How to Integrate Pulumi with GitHub Actions
These tools use provider-native schemas, give first-party coverage of new services, and integrate tightly with each cloud’s policy, IAM, and change tracking.
AWS CloudFormation is an IaC tool that helps you model and set up your AWS resources so you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your running applications.
CloudFormation allows you to use a template to provision and manage AWS resources safely and predictably. The template is a JSON or YAML file that defines the resources and their properties, and CloudFormation uses it to create and configure the resources in your AWS account.
Check out the comparison between AWS CloudFormation and Terraform.
Key features of CloudFormation
- Change sets: Previews the changes that will be made to your resources before you decide to apply them.
- Stack policies: Allows you to specify which actions can be performed on your resources, etc. This makes it easier to manage your resources and maintain the integrity of your AWS infrastructure.
- Drift detection: Detects resources that have changed outside of CloudFormation, so you can identify and remediate out-of-band modifications to keep stacks in sync.
Price/license: No additional charge for AWS resources; you pay only for the underlying AWS resources
Official documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
Use case example: AWS CloudFormation Drift Detection & Remediation Guide
AWS CDK is an open-source software development framework that defines cloud infrastructure in code and provides it through AWS CloudFormation.
You may ask, “Why use CDK when you can use CloudFormation directly?” Well, although powerful, CloudFormation has clear weaknesses – it has a challenging learning curve and lacks built-in logic capabilities.
AWS CDK lets developers define and manage their infrastructure based on an imperative approach using programming languages and provisioning through CloudFormation.
Price/license: Apache 2.0 open source
Official documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/
CDK or CloudFormation, which to use?
Though CDK solves some of CloudFormation’s weaknesses, it has its downsides. The following are two major factors to help you decide whether you utilize the CDK or CloudFormation:
- Your team’s experience level with AWS and CloudFormation: If your team is starting their AWS journey, CloudFormation is the way to go, as it is well-supported and well-documented, with lots of sample templates to get started with.
- Programming languages your team uses: CDK is currently only available in six programming languages (JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C#, Python, and Go (in Developer Preview)). If your team uses something else (e.g., Rust), this will be a challenge.
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is a management platform for Azure resources. It provides a consistent management layer you can access through the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, or the Azure Resource Manager REST API.
ARM templates allow you to define the infrastructure and configuration of your Azure resources. They also allow you to deploy resources in a repeatable and predictable manner, making it easy to automate the deployment.
Key features of ARM
- Resource groups: Allowing you to manage related resources as a single entity.
- Resource locks: Allowing you to prevent accidental deletion or modification of resources.
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Fine-grained, scope-based permissions for subscriptions, resource groups, and individual resources — assign built-in or custom roles to enforce least-privilege access.
Price/license: No separate charge for ARM itself; you pay for the resources you deploy/manage
Official documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/azure-resource-manager/
Read more: What is an Azure ARM Template? Overview, Tutorial & Examples
Google Cloud Deployment Manager is a tool that you can use to create, deploy, and manage Google Cloud resources in a declarative way.
With Deployment Manager, you can define your infrastructure as code in a configuration file and use that file to create and manage your resources. This allows you to automate these processes, making deploying and managing complex environments easier.
Note: Cloud Deployment Manager will reach the end of support on March 31, 2026. If you currently use it, migrate to Infrastructure Manager or another deployment tool by that date to avoid service disruption.
Key features of Google Cloud Deployment Manager
- Repeatability: Deployment Manager can create identical copies of your resources in different environments, such as production and staging. This makes it easier to test changes before deploying them to production.
- Collaboration: Deployment Manager allows multiple team members to work on the same configuration files, making it easier for teams to collaborate on infrastructure changes.
- Preview & change safety: You can run updates in preview mode to see exactly what will change before applying, then apply or cancel.
Price/license: No charge for the service; you pay for the GCP resources you create
Official documentation: https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs
Configuration management tools in DevOps automate the process of maintaining consistent software environments across servers.
Note: It is important to note that the tools below can function as IaC tools but are predominantly used for configuration management.
Ansible is an open-source software platform for configuring and managing computers. It is designed to help automate infrastructure management tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, and provisioning.
Ansible uses a simple syntax written in the YAML language, which makes it easy to understand and use. It uses a push-based model, where a central control machine pushes configuration changes to the managed hosts.
Ansible is often used with other tools, such as Terraform and Packer (you will learn more about it later on in this article), and is a popular choice for configuration management because of its simplicity and flexibility.
Take a look at the Ansible vs. Terraform comparison.
Key features of Ansible
- Agentless architecture: Ansible does not require any software to be installed on the managed hosts. This means you can use Ansible to manage systems without installing additional software.
- Very large community: A vibrant open-source ecosystem of users, contributors, roles, and collections speeds up troubleshooting and reuse
- Flexibility: Ansible includes a wide range of built-in modules for everyday tasks and also supports the use of custom modules. This allows you to automate almost any task and gives you the flexibility to customize your automation to fit your specific needs.
- Idempotency: Tasks converge systems to the desired state safely and repeatably.
- Human-readable YAML: Playbooks are easy to read, review, and version-control.
Price/license: GPLv3 open source (free); Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is subscription-based
Official documentation: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/
Use case example: Using Ansible in CI/CD Workflows: Guide & Examples
Chef is an automation platform that helps you manage and scale infrastructure. It provides a set of tools and a domain-specific language (DSL) based on the Ruby programming language for writing “Recipes” that define the configuration and management of systems.
Unlike Ansible, Chef uses a pull-based model. Nodes periodically pull their configuration information from a central server rather than having the configuration pushed to them. This allows for greater flexibility and scalability, as nodes can be added or removed from the system without the need for manual configuration.
Chef consists of three main components: the workstation, the server, and the nodes. The workstation is the system that allows you to author recipes and administer your infrastructure. The server stores the cookbooks (multiple recipes in a collection). The nodes are the systems you are configuring.
Key features of Chef
- Scalability: Chef is designed to work with large, complex infrastructures and can easily handle thousands of nodes.
- Policy-based management: Chef uses policies to define how servers and infrastructure should be configured, which makes it easy to ensure compliance and consistency across your entire infrastructure.
Price/license: Chef Infra/Client are open source (Apache 2.0); Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is subscription-based
Official documentation: https://docs.chef.io/
Like Chef, Puppet is a configuration management tool built in Ruby. You write configuration code for Puppet using its DSL and wrapped in modules. While Chef is more developer-centric, Puppet was developed with system administrators in mind.
Puppet uses the client-server model. The server is called a puppet master. The puppet master stores the manifests (code containing resources and desired states) for clients. The clients are called Puppet nodes, and a Puppet agent is run to connect to the Puppet master. Then, the manifest assigned to the node is downloaded to apply the configuration if needed.
Read more: Puppet vs Ansible: Key Differences Explained
Key features of Puppet
- Centralized management: Puppet allows administrators to manage configurations and policies centrally, making it easier to enforce compliance and consistency across the infrastructure.
- Modularity: Puppet’s modular architecture allows you to break your infrastructure into smaller, manageable components, making it easier to manage and scale.
- Role-based access control: Puppet allows for role-based access control, which enables different teams and users to access the infrastructure at different levels.
Price/license: Open source Puppet Apache 2.0; Puppet Enterprise is subscription-based
Official documentation: https://puppet.com/docs/
These tools integrate with version control systems, run automated tests, trigger builds, and deploy to staging or production based on defined pipelines.
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that helps developers build, test, and deploy their software projects. It is widely used in the software development industry to automate various tasks, including building and testing code, releasing software updates, and deploying applications to production environments.
Jenkins is designed to be highly extensible and flexible, with many plugins available that allow users to customize its functionality. It provides a web-based interface for creating and configuring build jobs, essentially automated processes that perform tasks based on event triggers.
Learn more: Jenkins Tutorial for Beginners – Step-by-Step Pipeline
Key features of Jenkins
- Distributed builds: Jenkins can run jobs in parallel across multiple agents (on-prem or cloud) to speed up pipelines and scale horizontally using labels and dynamic node provisioning.
- Extensive API: Jenkins has a comprehensive API that allows for programmatic access to Jenkins functionality, making it possible to integrate Jenkins with other tools and scripts.
- Pipeline as code: You define CI/CD as versioned Jenkinsfiles (declarative or scripted), with stages, parallel steps, and shared libraries for reuse.
- Vast plugin ecosystem: You can extend Jenkins with plugins for SCM, containers, clouds, test reporting, and notifications, that are managed via the built-in Plugin Manager.
Price/license: MIT-licensed open source
Official documentation: https://www.jenkins.io/doc/
Use case example: How to Manage Workflows Terraform with Jenkins
GitHub Actions is a DevOps automation tool built into GitHub that enables developers to automate their software workflows directly from their repositories. It supports continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), testing, code scanning, and deployment processes, helping teams streamline development cycles and improve software quality.
GitHub Actions is configured through YAML files and is triggered by GitHub events such as code pushes, pull requests, or scheduled tasks. It offers native support for GitHub repositories and integrates with a wide range of third-party services through reusable actions from the GitHub Marketplace.
Key features of GitHub Actions
- Native GitHub integration: Automates workflows directly inside GitHub, reducing the need for external CI/CD platforms and making it easier to trigger jobs based on repository activity.
- Extensive Marketplace: Offers thousands of pre-built, reusable actions for tasks like building, testing, deploying, and integrating with cloud providers, making workflow setup faster and more modular.
- Matrix builds: Enables testing across multiple operating systems, environments, or dependency versions simultaneously, helping ensure broader compatibility and catching issues early.
Price/license: Free for public repositories; paid plans for private repositories
Official documentation: https://docs.github.com/actions
Use case example: How to Create and Manage GitHub Actions Workflows
GitLab CI/CD is a built-in CI/CD system available as part of GitLab, a popular DevOps platform for source code management, issue tracking, and automation. It allows developers to automate testing, building, and deployment pipelines directly within the same environment they use for managing their repositories.
Configured through .gitlab-ci.yml files stored in the repository, GitLab CI/CD automates workflows based on pipeline definitions. It offers flexibility through stages, jobs, runners, and environments, supporting a wide variety of DevOps practices from simple test pipelines to complex multi-environment deployments.
Key features of GitLab CI/CD
- Integrated DevOps lifecycle: GitLab CI/CD is fully integrated into GitLab, combining source control, issue tracking, CI/CD, and security features into a single platform, which simplifies toolchain management.
- Auto DevOps: GitLab offers an Auto DevOps feature that automatically detects project types and creates intelligent CI/CD pipelines, including automated testing, security scanning, and deployment without manual configuration.
- Flexible runner options: Pipelines can run on GitLab-hosted shared runners, or users can configure their own self-hosted runners for more control over execution environments and scaling.
Price/license: Free tier available; paid plans for enhanced features
Official documentation: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/
Use case example: How to manage Terraform state with GitLab
CircleCI is a CI/CD platform designed to automate the software development process by building, testing, and deploying applications at scale. It supports flexible configurations for a wide range of projects and integrates with many popular version control systems, including GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab.
CircleCI allows developers to define workflows in YAML configuration files and offers cloud-hosted infrastructure as well as the option to run pipelines on private, self-hosted servers. It emphasizes speed, parallelism, and advanced caching strategies to optimize build times and resource utilization.
Read more: CircleCI vs GitHub Actions: CI/CD Tools Comparison
Key features of CircleCI
- Highly configurable workflows: CircleCI provides granular control over pipeline execution with customizable workflows, enabling sequential, parallel, and fan-in/fan-out job architectures for complex automation needs.
- Resource classes and performance optimization: Developers can choose from a range of resource classes (CPU/RAM levels) per job, allowing optimization of build speed, cost, and performance depending on project requirements.
- Extensive caching and artifact management: CircleCI supports advanced caching strategies and artifact storage, helping significantly reduce build times by reusing dependencies and storing build outputs between pipeline runs.
Price/license: Free tier available; paid plans for enhanced features
Official documentation: https://circleci.com/docs/
Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform that helps teams automate the release and deployment of software applications. It is designed to make it easier for teams to manage and deploy applications across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
With the Spinnaker pipeline, you can deploy updates to both applications and infrastructure on demand. To deploy infrastructure updates, you can use a YAML manifest or specify new artefacts such as Docker Images, AMIs, or GitHub files. Additionally, you can use Terraform scripts to provision infrastructure on platforms like AWS and GCP.
Key features of Spinnaker
- Multi-cloud support: Support for multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes
- Canary deployments: For testing new releases in a small percentage of production before rolling them out to the whole system
- Rollbacks and roll forwards: For easy rollback in case of issues.
Price/license: Apache 2.0 open source
Official documentation: https://spinnaker.io/docs/
Container orchestration and image management form the foundation of automated container pipelines in DevOps.
Kubernetes (also known as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It was initially designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Kubernetes provides a platform-agnostic way to deploy and manage containers, making it easier to build and maintain scalable, reliable, and portable applications.
To learn how to use this tool, check out our Kubernetes Tutorial for Beginners.
Key features of Kubernetes
- Self-healing: Kubernetes has built-in self-healing capabilities, automatically replacing and rescheduling failed pods.
- Deployment strategies: Kubernetes provides a variety of deployment strategies, such as rolling updates and blue/green deployments, to help you deploy your applications in a controlled and reliable manner.
- Load balancing: Kubernetes can automatically distribute incoming traffic across multiple service replicas.
- Secrets and configuration management: Kubernetes provides a mechanism for securely storing and managing sensitive information, such as passwords, keys, and application configuration data.
Price/license: Apache 2.0 open source
Official documentation: https://kubernetes.io/docs/
Use case example: How to Deploy Kubernetes Resources with Terraform
Nomad is an open-source, simple, flexible workload orchestrator developed by HashiCorp. With Nomad, you can easily deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-premise and cloud at scale.
Key features of Nomad
- Lightweight, single binary: Nomad runs as a single binary with a small resource footprint.
- General-purpose workloads: Unlike Kubernetes (which focuses on Linux containers), Nomad supports a wider range of workloads (IIS on Windows, QEMU, etc.).
- Extensible architecture: Nomad is designed to be pluggable, allowing custom plugins and integrations with other tools.
Price/license: HashiCorp BSL 1.1 license; enterprise features via subscription
Official documentation: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/docs
OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container orchestration platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge deployments.
Openshift is more than just the Kubernetes you read earlier; it’s a collection of other software, such as Tekton, Grafana, Prometheus, RHEL CoreOS, and CRI-O, that can be used together as a single set to run Kubernetes in production easily.
Take a look at the comparison between OpenShift and Kubernetes.
Key features of Red Hat OpenShift
- Automatic scaling: OpenShift’s built-in scaling features automatically scale applications based on load, ensuring that resources are always available when needed.
- Integrated CI/CD: OpenShift includes built-in support for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows, making it easy to build, test, and deploy applications.
- Self-service provisioning: OpenShift’s self-service provisioning allows developers to easily provision and manage the resources they need to build and run applications without needing to go through IT.
Price/license: Subscription-based
Official documentation: https://docs.openshift.com/
Packer is a tool developed by HashiCorp that you can use to create identical machine and container images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
With its “Images as Code” approach, Packer standardizes and automates the process of building machine images.
Key features of Packer
- Extendable: You can extend Packer’s capability without changing its core by adding new builders, provisioners, post-processors, and data sources.
- Image security and compliance: With Packer, you can create a single compliance and security workflow for images that are provisioned across multiple clouds.
- Automation: Automate image updates across provisioning pipelines and downstream builds.
Price/license: HashiCorp BSL 1.1 license (source-available)
Official documentation: https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/docs
Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. It is designed to work with various infrastructure providers, such as VirtualBox, VMware, and AWS.
Vagrant provides a simple, easy-to-use command-line interface for managing the lifecycle of virtual machines. This allows developers to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.
Key features of Vagrant
- Single workflow: Vagrant has a single workflow to build and manage virtual machine environments.
- Vagrant mirrors production environments by providing the same operating system and configurations, all while allowing users to use their favorite editor, IDE, and browser.
Price/license: HashiCorp BSL 1.1 license (source-available)
Official documentation: https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/docs
Docker is an open-source platform that enables developers and DevOps teams to build, ship, and run applications inside lightweight, portable containers. Containers encapsulate an application and all its dependencies, ensuring consistency across different computing environments — from development to testing and production.
Docker simplifies DevOps workflows by allowing teams to automate application packaging, deployment, scaling, and management. It is commonly used alongside CI/CD tools to streamline the build, test, and deployment stages within automated pipelines.
Key features of Docker
- Containerization of applications: Docker packages applications and their dependencies into standardized units called containers, ensuring consistency and portability across different systems and environments.
- Docker Compose for multi-container applications: Developers can define and manage multi-service applications using simple YAML configuration files, simplifying orchestration of complex development and testing environments.
- Docker Hub and private registries: Teams can access a large ecosystem of prebuilt images through Docker Hub or manage their own secure image repositories for efficient distribution and versioning of containerized applications.
Price/license: Docker Engine/Moby is Apache 2.0 (free); Docker Desktop requires a paid subscription for most commercial use
Official documentation: https://docs.docker.com/
Use case example: How to Create a CI/CD Pipeline with Docker
Check our list of the 12 Most Useful Container Orchestration Tools.
Infrastructure monitoring and logging are essential parts of DevOps automation used to ensure system health, performance, and reliability.
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. It helps you collect and track metrics from your applications and infrastructure and can be used to identify and troubleshoot issues.
Prometheus provides a fast and straightforward functional query language called PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) for selecting and aggregating time-series data in real-time. It can also trigger alerts based on certain thresholds or patterns you define.
Prometheus is widely used in cloud-native environments and is a popular choice for monitoring Kubernetes clusters.
Key features of Prometheus
- Time series storage: Prometheus uses a time series database, making it efficient to track and analyze metric changes over time.
- Pull-based collection: Its pull-based model means monitored applications don’t need to push metrics or include custom instrumentation logic.
- Centralized monitoring: A central control server handles metric collection, reducing the need for per-application configuration.
- Alert management: Alertmanager integrates with Prometheus to route alerts and manage notification policies effectively.
Price/license: Apache 2.0 open source
Official documentation: https://prometheus.io/docs/
Use case example: Prometheus with Docker Compose: Guide & Examples
Sensu is an observability platform that helps you monitor and troubleshoot issues in your infrastructure and applications. It allows you to collect and track metrics, set alerts, and visualize your data in various ways.
Sensu is highly scalable and flexible and can monitor a wide range of systems and services, including bare metal and cloud-native environments.
Key features of Sensu
- Consolidates monitoring tools: Sensu consolidates monitoring tools like Prometheus to fill gaps in observability by eliminating data silos and bringing:
- Automate diagnosis and
- Self-healing capabilities.
- Observability control plane: to manage infrastructure complexity at scale.
Price/license: Open-core: Sensu Go OSS is MIT
Official documentation: https://docs.sensu.io/
Nagios is an industry-standard IT infrastructure monitoring tool. With Nagios solutions, you can monitor your entire IT infrastructure, quickly sort log data, or analyze your bandwidth.
Nagios alerts administrators when things go wrong or when predetermined thresholds are reached. Nagios can monitor a wide range of resources, including servers, switches, applications, and services on-prem and on the cloud.
Key features of Nagios
- Detailed reporting: Nagios provides detailed reports on the status of your network, servers, and applications, including historical data and trend analysis.
- Scalability: Nagios can scale to monitor large networks with hundreds or thousands of devices, making it suitable for use in enterprise environments.
- Automation: Nagios can be integrated with other tools and automated processes, allowing you to automate incident response and remediation tasks.
Price/license: Nagios Core is GPLv2 (free); Nagios XI and other editions are commercial
Official documentation: https://www.nagios.org/documentation/
Infrastructure automation is a critical aspect of modern software development and DevOps practices. The 25 DevOps infrastructure automation tools outlined in this blog provide a wide range of options for automating various aspects of infrastructure management, including provisioning, configuration management, continuous integration and delivery, and monitoring.
Whether you are a small startup or a large enterprise, a DevOps automation tool on this list can help you manage your infrastructure and improve your overall development and operations workflow.
If you want to expand your DevOps stack, check out our list of 73 best DevOps tools.
The best DevOps automation tool
Spacelift is a DevOps infrastructure automation tool that can be used as an alternative to homegrown solutions on top of a generic CI solution. It allows you to automate, audit, secure, and continuously deliver your infrastructure.
Frequently asked questions
What is automation in DevOps?
Automation in DevOps refers to using tools and scripts to perform repetitive tasks across the software delivery lifecycle without manual intervention.
How to automate tasks in DevOps?
To automate tasks in DevOps, use CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and scripting. Common tools include:
- Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI for building, testing, and deploying applications.
- Terraform or OpenTofu to automate cloud infrastructure provisioning.
- Spacelift to manage infrastructure automation with policy-as-code, GitOps workflows, and integrations for IaC tools.
- Ansible, Chef, or Puppet for server configuration and orchestration.
- Bash, Python, or PowerShell scripts for custom automation logic.
What is a DevOps automation tool?
A DevOps automation tool is software that helps streamline repetitive tasks across development and operations, such as code integration, testing, deployment, configuration, and infrastructure provisioning.
What are the benefits of using DevOps automation tools?
DevOps automation tools reduce manual work, speed up deployments, and improve consistency across environments. By integrating testing, provisioning, and monitoring, these tools improve visibility and operational efficiency while freeing engineers to focus on higher-value tasks.
Which tools are best for automating infrastructure as code?
Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and AWS CloudFormation are leading tools for automating infrastructure as code.
