DevOps Tech Stack : How to Choose the Right Tools & Solutions

DevOps optimizes software delivery by introducing automated tools and processes that bring developers and operators closer together. It combines a cultural shift towards greater collaboration with technological best practices, including CI/CD, IaC, and platform engineering.

In this article, we’ll explore how to assemble a DevOps tech stack and the components it should include. We’ll evaluate different tools, so you always choose the best option for your workflows, then finish with some best practices that will ensure your DevOps stack succeeds.

What we will cover:

1. What is a DevOps tech stack?
2. What to include in a DevOps tech stack?
3. Factors to consider when planning a DevOps tech stack
4. Top tools and solutions for your DevOps stack
5. Tips and best practices for building your DevOps tech stack

Your DevOps tech stack is the collection of tools, services, and platforms you use to implement DevOps. Modern software delivery workflows are dependent on multiple tools working together, such as a version control system, CI/CD server, and cloud deployment platform. Together, these components form the tech stack that underpins your engineering work.

Your DevOps tech stack should include all the tools and technologies that let you successfully deliver your software projects with maximum throughput and quality. The following list describes the most commonly used components, but your own stack could feature some more specialized technologies, too — such as an ML model training platform if you’re involved in AI development.

1. Version Control System (VCS)

Version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket underpin the DevOps process. These platforms store your code and allow team members to collaborate. You can use pull request workflows to review changes before they’re merged into your main branch, providing an opportunity to detect issues and perform testing routines.

2. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)

CI/CD accelerates DevOps processes by automating the integration and delivery of new changes. CI/CD servers such as Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI run pipelines of jobs when key events occur, such as pushing a new Git commit, branch, or tag. You can use them to run tests, produce builds, and start deployments.

3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, and Pulumi allow you to manage your infrastructure in the same way as your app’s source code. You write declarative config files that are stored in a VCS, then consumed by the IaC tool to automatically apply changes to your cloud resources.

4. Internal Developer Platform (IDP)

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) make it easier for devs to utilize the other technologies available in your DevOps stack. Maintained by the platform team, IDPs provide a catalog of standardized self-service actions that devs can use to achieve their tasks. 

Backstage, Qovery, and Port are popular choices for creating an IDP.

5. Automated testing tools

Testing is vital to maintaining software quality throughout the SDLC. Automated tools such as BrowserStack, Cypress, and Selenium can be used to author your app’s test suites and run them with good repeatability in different environments. This lets you continually verify that features work as they should.

6. Observability suites

Observability refers to the use of metrics, logs, and traces to learn about a system’s internal state and how it arose. Regularly monitoring these outputs via tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and the Elastic Stack allows you to identify problems and validate the effects of fixes.

7. Cloud and PaaS solutions

Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud make it simple to scale your infrastructure by provisioning the resources you need when they’re required. 

Alternatively, you can use PaaS options like Heroku, Vercel, and Platform.sh to deploy your apps directly without having to manually configure any infrastructure.

8. Containers and container orchestrators

Containers can be found throughout the DevOps process. Packaging your apps and their dependencies as containers permits easier use with your other tools, such as when testing in a CI/CD pipeline, or deploying to a cloud PaaS solution. 

Container orchestrators including Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Nomad allow you to effectively operate and scale your containerized apps in production.

9. SAST, DAST, and vulnerability scanners

Automated scan tools improve the reliability and security of your projects. They can find problems such as coding errors and vulnerable dependencies, letting you apply fixes during the development cycle. 

Static application security testers (SAST) such as Semgrep provide insights without actually running your code, while dynamic (DAST) testers like ZAP interact with your apps to reveal runtime problems. Security scanners, including Anchore and Trivy focus on highlighting misconfigurations and known CVEs.

10. Infrastructure orchestration tools and platforms

Infrastructure orchestration platforms, like Spacelift, simplify the management of complex environments by automating and coordinating key processes such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management (CM), container orchestration (CO), and CI/CD pipelines. These platforms also offer governance, compliance, and security guardrails to prevent misconfigurations and ensure alignment with organizational policies.

Several important factors must be considered when evaluating tools to include in your DevOps tech stack. Your stack should actively support your developers, so it needs to be populated with services that closely align with how you work. Stack components also need to be scalable, flexible, and easy to use to meet developer requirements effectively.

Here are some key factors to consider when adding tools to your stack:

• Ability to integrate with other tools: Platforms and services need to integrate deeply with each other to keep your DevOps process running smoothly; for example, observability suites should be capable of connecting natively to your chosen cloud providers.
• Flexibility and customization options: Your DevOps stack needs to be flexible enough to accommodate future changes to your workflows. Tools that are extensible through plugins and APIs will be easier to adapt to new use cases as your team’s strategy evolves.
• Learning curve and ease of use: Complex tools with a steep learning curve could be harder for developers to use effectively. Even if your current team members are satisfied with a tool, it could make it harder for new hires to be productive in the future. Intuitive tools that solve specific problems are generally more efficient.
  
• Scalability: Tools need to be scalable so they remain performant as your teams and projects increase in size. Otherwise, you could encounter unexpected roadblocks that impede your ability to deliver changes to your users. Review each tool’s resource requirements and check if the community has reported any performance problems.
• Costs and license types: DevOps tech stack costs can add up as you continue to adopt new tools and services. Different billing models can affect the price you pay for similar tools substantially; real-time usage-based billing is often the most affordable but can be the hardest to predict.
  
  Looking for open-source alternatives to commercial platforms can save costs, but these may have limited support and be more challenging to scale.
• Support and documentation: Tools are useless if they’re not backed by clear documentation and robust support options.
  
  Check that the docs cover all the available features and that the material is regularly updated when new releases arrive. Forums, tutorials, community blog posts, and videos are also invaluable resources for helpingnew devs get acquainted with a tool.

Need more ideas for your DevOps tech stack? Here’s a quick summary and examples of some of the top options to include.

• GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket: These are popular VCS solutions for storing, versioning, and collaborating on code. It’s best to choose one and stick to it for all your teams and projects.
• AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud: These are among the leading public cloud solutions. Some workloads may benefit from a multi-cloud approach, where you combine services from different clouds to improve redundancy or make cost savings.
• Docker or Podman: Both options are ideal developer platforms for working with containers. Docker is the best-known solution, but Podman is a compelling fully open-source alternative.
• Kubernetes, OpenShift, or Nomad: These are container orchestrators that make it easier to operate and scale your containers in distributed environments. Kubernetes leads the field, but OpenShift provides a simplified management layer, and Nomad offers support for running both containers and legacy apps.
• Jenkins, Circle CI, or Travis CI: These are standalone CI servers that can be used to run automated jobs in response to events in your DevOps process. Alternatively, many VCS providers include a CI/CD service, such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
• Backstage, Qovery, or OpsLevel: These are solutions for building internal developer platforms and portals. Use these tools to create service catalogs and simplify how developers access your DevOps tech stack’s tools.
• Prometheus, InfluxDB, or Nagios: These are leading observability platforms for collecting metrics data from your apps. Use them to analyze performance and understand system activity.
• Semgrep, Snyk, or SonarQube: These tools are leading choices for conducting static analysis tests to uncover bugs, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities.
• Terraform, Ansible, or Puppet: These are popular IaC tools for managing your infrastructure. Use them to automate changes to your infrastructure based on declarative config files.
• Spacelift: Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that supports Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Ansible, Pulumi, Kubernetes, and more. Spacelift makes it simple to automate your infrastructure workflows and enable self-service developer access, all within safe policy-driven guardrails.

These solutions are just a small slice of the options available for your DevOps tech stack. To learn more about what’s available, check out our other blog posts, such as our dedicated guides to CI/CD tools, IaC tools, and configuration management tools.

It’s easier to assemble a DevOps tech stack if you follow a methodical plan from start to finish. Here are a few simple tips to help guide you through the process and ensure important steps aren’t missed.

1. Carefully evaluate tools using a decision tree: Evaluate your tools against the factors discussed in this guide to ensure they’re the best options for your workflows. Don’t choose tools just because they’re new or popular.
2. Involve all team members in tool selection decisions: What’s best for the DevOps team and platform engineers isn’t necessarily right for developers, QA staff, or security specialists. It’s best to ensure all team members have a say in which tools are chosen, as this makes it more likely that each solution will produce the positive effects you expect.
3. Train developers on how to use each tool: Developers should be provided with clear training and documentation so they understand the purpose of each tool and how to get the most from it. Don’t assume developers will be able to figure out how complex processes work — relatively few devs possess specific skills in fields such as cloud-native operations and observability.
4. Monitor tool usage and swap tools that don’t perform as expected: Your DevOps tech stack should continually evolve with your team’s requirements. Regularly monitoring which tools are actually adding value to your delivery process is important so you can make informed iterative improvements, such as by replacing less successful tools with alternatives that were previously identified but discarded during the decision-making process.

Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that increases your infrastructure deployment speed without sacrificing control. With Spacelift, you can provision, configure, and govern with one or more automated workflows that orchestrate Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Kubernetes. 

You don’t need to define all the prerequisite steps for installing and configuring the infrastructure tool you are using, nor the deployment and security steps, as they are all available in the default workflow.

With Spacelift, you get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, or Spacelift’s Kubernetes operator, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

Spacelift was built with DevOps/platform engineers in mind, but it has become the go-to platform for software engineers because it allows them to increase their velocity with self-service infrastructure that implements all the organization’s guardrails. It greatly enhances collaboration among engineers, offering them a central location to make infrastructure-related decisions.

If you want to learn more about what you can do with Spacelift, check out this article.

We’ve examined the DevOps tech stack and the top tool categories to include when assembling your own. You can now start improving your DevOps practices by identifying the capabilities your developers require and then evaluating different tools to find the best fit for your deployment processes.

If you are looking for a new infrastructure management solution, check out Spacelift to implement versatile CI/CD around your infrastructure tools. Spacelift supports self-service developer access, enables unified monitoring of your provisioned resources, and supports continual security and compliance through customizable policies. You can start for free or book your demo today.