73 Most Useful DevOps Tools to Use in 2026

This blog post gathers some of the most useful DevOps tools and technologies. Throughout the article, we will explore tools, technologies, frameworks, products, and platforms that can make your life easier as a DevOps or Cloud Engineer.

As you might have heard by now, DevOps and Cloud Engineering aren’t about obsessing over specific tools. It’s about fostering a culture of continuous improvement and focusing on best practices and fundamental concepts to build architectures that meet your needs. Having said that, we have to leverage different tools and technologies during this journey, so use this list as a compass and not as a tool comparison.

This list contains many technologies across different focus areas and categories, and is heavily opinionated based on my taste and experiences

DevOps Tools categories:

1. Version control systems and code repository management
2. Containerization
3. Infrastructure as code (IaC)
4. Configuration management
5. Container orchestration
6. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)
7. Cloud providers
8. Observability
9. Log management
10. Collaborative infrastructure
11. Software testing and quality assurance
12. Developer environment
13. Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
14. Security and vulnerability scanning
15. Service mesh
16. Secret management
17. Infrastructure access management
18. Application deployment and progressive delivery
19. Serverless solutions
20. Chaos engineering
21. AI and automation for DevOps

This section contains version control systems to track and manage source code and cloud-based hosting options for managing code repositories. 

1. Git

Git is the most commonly used tool in DevOps and the clear winner because of first-class branching and merging, which is what makes collaboration on large codebases work and version management in complex projects. It’s a free, open-source version control system that is easy to get started with a minimal footprint and fast performance.

Git ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.7/5 (513 reviews)

2. GitHub

GitHub is the default code repository for open source, and increasingly the default for private code too. It hosts Git repos and adds issues, pull requests, Actions for CI/CD, package registries, and Copilot for AI assistance. 

Worth choosing on purpose rather than by default, because Actions minutes, storage, and Copilot seats all add to the per-user cost.

GitHub ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.7/5 (2291 reviews)

3. GitLab

GitLab is a single platform that bundles source control, CI/CD, a container registry, security scanning, and issue tracking under one login. That bundle is the main reason to pick it. If you want best-of-breed tools in each layer, the bundle becomes a downside. 

If you want one vendor and one bill, GitLab is the shortest path. It runs as SaaS or self-hosted.

GitLab ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (871 reviews)

4. BitBucket

Bitbucket is Atlassian’s code host, with built-in Jira integration and Pipelines for CI/CD. The reason to use it is almost always that your team already uses Jira and Confluence. 

Outside that Atlassian setup, GitHub and GitLab tend to win. Inside it, the cross-tool linking is genuinely useful.

BitBucket ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (981 reviews)

This area refers to tools and technologies used for building and packaging containers.

5. Docker

Docker made containers mainstream in 2013. It’s still the default for local development with docker build, docker run, and docker compose. In production, most teams now use other runtimes like containerd or CRI-O and only keep Docker for the build step.

The Docker Desktop license changed in 2022, so check your enterprise license before standardising on it.

Docker ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (274 reviews)

6. Kaniko

Kaniko, originally from Google, builds container images from a Dockerfile inside a Kubernetes cluster without needing privileged access to the host Docker daemon.

That’s the main reason to use it: if you’ve run image builds in CI on Kubernetes and hit the “Docker-in-Docker is a security problem” wall, Kaniko solves that. If you haven’t hit that problem, you probably don’t need Kaniko.

Google archived the original GoogleContainerTools/kaniko repository on June 3, 2025. Chainguard has forked it and is keeping it alive with bug fixes and security patches, though they’ve said no new features are planned. If you’re starting fresh today, BuildKit and Buildah are the more actively developed alternatives.

This section gathers tools that allow us to declare infrastructure components as code. 

7. Hashicorp Terraform

Terraform by HashiCorp is the most widely used multi-cloud infrastructure as code tool. It uses a declarative language (HCL), has a large provider ecosystem, and runs the same plan/apply flow whether you’re targeting AWS, on-premises, or smaller SaaS.

Two things have changed the trajectory of Terraform in the last few years. In August 2023, HashiCorp switched the license from MPL to the Business Source License (BSL), making Terraform source-available rather than fully open source. 

Then in February 2025, IBM completed its $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp, putting Terraform under IBM ownership. Read the BSL before committing to a long roadmap on Terraform 1.6+, especially if you’re a vendor or managed service provider.

For day-to-day use, see How to Manage Terraform at Scale.

Terraform ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~46k
• License: BUSL-1.1 since August 2023

8. OpenTofu

OpenTofu is the open-source answer to Terraform’s license change. It’s a community-driven, MPL-licensed fork maintained under the Linux Foundation, and it stays compatible with most Terraform workflows so most teams can switch with minimal changes. State encryption and a separate provider registry are the two main features OpenTofu has that Terraform doesn’t.

The project reached general availability in early 2024 and now ships regular minor releases.

OpenTofu ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 28.5k on opentofu/opentofu
• License: MPL 2.0

9. AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation lets you model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources with infrastructure as code principles. Provides native integrations with other AWS services to build a robust infrastructure management pipeline. 

For multi-cloud or hybrid setups, Terraform or OpenTofu does the same job without that limit. For an AWS-only team that wants to stay inside the AWS console, CloudFormation is the easiest option. See our CloudFormation vs. Terraform comparison for a closer look.

AWS CloudFormation ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (207 reviews)

10. AWS CDK

The AWS Cloud Development Kit(CDK) allows you to define AWS infrastructure in TypeScript, Python, Java, Go, or C# instead of YAML. It enables developers to use the same language for building applications and infrastructure with the same language they are familiar with.

It still produces CloudFormation templates underneath, so you get the same AWS-only scope. A good fit when your team would rather write code than maintain ten thousand lines of YAML. 

Note: Don’t confuse this with HashiCorp’s CDK for Terraform, which is a different project. CDKTF was deprecated and archived on December 10, 2025, so if you saw it on an older list, treat it as gone.

AWS CDK ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (125 reviews)

11. Pulumi

Pulumi is an open-source IaC tool that allows developers to write IaC in their favorite programming language. It supports most cloud providers, on-premises, and SaaS, with the same pulumi up workflow regardless of language. The trade-off is that full programming language flexibility makes it easier to write infrastructure code that’s hard for other people to review. 

See our Pulumi overview for more detail.

Pulumi ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.8/5 (25 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 24k on pulumi/pulumi, very frequent releases

12. ARM Templates & Bicep

ARM Templates are Azure’s native infrastructure as code format, written in JSON. 

Bicep is Microsoft’s newer DSL that compiles to ARM and is what Azure documentation now recommends for new projects. Bicep is much easier to read and write than raw ARM JSON, and feels closer to HCL than to YAML.

If we are talking about IaC tools, we strongly encourage you to read: Most Useful Infrastructure as Code Deployment Tools.

This section mentions two tools for configuration management and for automating IT tasks. 

13. Ansible

Ansible, owned by Red Hat, is the standard tool for managing servers that already exist. It’s agentless, runs over SSH, and uses YAML playbooks. The community module catalog is the largest in the configuration management space. 

Ansible is best at configuring machines, not provisioning them. If you’re using it to create cloud resources from scratch, almost any IaC tool above does that job better.

If you are interested in Ansible, here you will find useful Ansible content. 

Ansible ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 69k on ansible/ansible

14. Chef

Chef Infra (now Progress Chef, after Progress acquired the company in 2020) is a Ruby-based configuration management tool that predates Ansible by a few years. It’s good at drift remediation, compliance as code via InSpec, and managing both Windows and Linux fleets with the same toolchain. 

Release cadence has slowed under Progress, with major releases roughly once a year. If you’re starting fresh in 2026, Ansible has more momentum. If you have a working Chef setup, there’s no strong reason to migrate.

Chef ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 8.5k on chef/chef

15. Puppet

Puppet, now owned by Perforce (acquired in 2022), is one of the original infrastructure delivery tools and still runs in many large enterprises. It uses a declarative DSL and a pull-based agent model, which fits environments where every node needs to converge to a known state rather than receive ad-hoc changes. 

Like Chef, the release cadence has slowed. Sticking with Puppet makes sense when you have a working setup. New projects usually pick Ansible or Salt instead.

Puppet ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 8k on puppetlabs/puppet

16. Salt

Salt (formerly SaltStack) is now owned by Broadcom, after VMware’s 2020 acquisition and Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware. It can assist teams with configuration management, data-driven orchestration, and remove execution across any environment and infrastructure.

The community is smaller than Ansible’s, but the technical capabilities are still different enough to matter.

Salt ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 15.5k on saltstack/salt, owned by Broadcom since 2023

This section contains my favorite modern technologies for orchestrating and running container workloads. 

17. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source system for container orchestration, automating deployments, and managing container apps. Its powerful orchestration system enables applications to scale seamlessly and achieve high availability. Each of the three most used cloud providers offers its own Kubernetes distribution; AWS has EKS, Azure AKS, and Google Cloud GKE. 

Kubernetes ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (149 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 122k on kubernetes/kubernetes

18. Amazon ECS & AWS Fargate

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is AWS’s container orchestrator. It’s simpler than Kubernetes and tightly tied to the rest of AWS. Combined with Fargate, you can run serverless container systems securely and at scale without managing servers. 

For teams on AWS that don’t need the wider CNCF ecosystem, ECS plus Fargate is often the easiest option.

19. Azure Container Apps

Azure Container Apps allows developers to quickly build and deploy modern applications and microservices using a serverless container service. It’s a fully managed service that simplifies infrastructure management and accelerates developer productivity at scale. 

It’s built on Kubernetes and KEDA under the hood but exposed as a fully managed PaaS. It’s the closest Azure equivalent to AWS App Runner or Google Cloud Run, and a good pick when you want container ergonomics without running AKS yourself. 

Check our list of the Most Useful Container Orchestration Tools.

Some of the most used and battle-tested CI/CD tools. 

20. CircleCI

CircleCI is one of the longest-running hosted CI/CD platforms. Pipelines are defined in YAML, orbs (reusable config bundles) cover most common integrations, and the platform handles macOS, Linux, and Windows runners. 

It competes with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI on convenience but holds an edge in raw build performance and macOS support.

CircleCI ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (507 reviews)

21. GitLab CI/CD

GitLab CI/CD is built into the GitLab platform and pairs naturally with GitLab repos. Pipelines live in .gitlab-ci.yml, runners can be self-hosted or GitLab-managed, and the integration with GitLab Issues, Merge Requests, and the container registry is the main reason to use it. 

If you’re already on GitLab, there’s no reason to add a separate CI tool. If you’re not, the CI alone isn’t usually enough to make you migrate.

22. GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is GitHub’s built-in CI/CD, free for public repos and the default for most new open source projects. The marketplace of community-published actions covers nearly every common task, and the YAML syntax is simple enough that most teams pick it up without external training. 

The main thing to watch is self-hosted runner security. The default network and filesystem permissions are too open for sensitive workloads, and supply-chain attacks on third-party actions have happened.

23. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server tool that facilitates continuous integration and delivery. The plugin ecosystem is both the reason it’s still on this list and the reason teams want to leave it. There’s a plugin for everything, but inheriting a Jenkinsfile graveyard from a previous team is a familiar pain. 

New projects rarely start on Jenkins, but existing Jenkins setups rarely move off it quickly. Weekly releases continue and the LTS line is stable for production use.

Jenkins ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (546 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 25.5k on jenkinsci/jenkins, weekly releases

More on CD tools you can find in this article: Top Continuous Delivery Tools.

This part lists the three leading cloud computing platforms. 

24. Amazon Web Services(AWS)

AWS is the most widely adopted cloud computing platform, innovating relentlessly and offering reliable, scalable, and cost-effective services to help you build virtually any workload.

25. Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform, built by Google, is a collection of robust and powerful cloud computing services that run on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its other products. 

26. Microsoft Azure

Azure, operated by Microsoft, is a flexible cloud computing service for application management that fosters efficiency and developer productivity. A good choice when your organisation already has a Microsoft-flavored stack.

This section gathers excellent tools for monitoring, alerting, and dashboarding. 

27. Prometheus

Prometheus is the CNCF-graduated standard for metrics and the default monitoring system in the Kubernetes ecosystem. The dimensional data model and PromQL query language are what made it stick. Both have outlasted several competitors.

Prometheus ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (61 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 64k on prometheus/prometheus, active, security patches every few weeks

28. Grafana

Grafana started as the dashboard layer for Prometheus and is now the front end for a full observability stack: Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Pyroscope for profiles, and k6 for load testing. It also connects to dozens of other data sources, from Datadog and Splunk to PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch.

It provides a user-friendly user interface to build graphs, dashboards, charts, alerts, and more and connects to various data sources.

Grafana ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 74k on grafana/grafana, many security releases per month

29. Datadog

Datadog is a tool that has grown significantly over the last few years and provides a feature-rich observability platform that handles your monitoring and alerting needs across applications and infrastructure components.

Datadog ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (690 reviews)

30. Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is AWS native monitoring and observability tool for infrastructure and applications in the cloud and on-premises. It integrates with most AWS services out of the box to simplify the monitoring experience. 

Amazon CloudWatch ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.3/5 (394 reviews)

31. Komodor

Komodor positions itself as an autonomous AI SRE platform for Kubernetes, with an AI agent (Klaudia) that analyzes logs, events, and deployments to surface root cause and suggest fixes. The pitch is shorter time to resolution for teams that don’t have deep Kubernetes expertise on every shift.

Komodor ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (36 reviews)

32. Lens

Lens, developed by Mirantis, is a desktop IDE for Kubernetes. It combines kubectl, cluster dashboards, log viewing, and shell access in a single application. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and handles multiple clusters and contexts from one window.

Lens ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.3/5 (3 reviews)

This part gathers a few tools around storing and managing application and infrastructure logs. 

33. Elastic Stack(ELK)

The Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, plus Beats and now Elastic Agent — is one of the most widely deployed log management platforms in production. It scales to very large log volumes and handles search, alerting, and dashboards out of the box. 

The Elastic License v2 change in 2021 ended the “fully open source” framing. If licensing matters, OpenSearch (the AWS-led fork) is the equivalent under Apache 2.0.

Elastic Stack ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (95 reviews)

34. Grafana Loki

Loki is an open-source, highly scalable, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It’s easy to use and operate and designed to store and query logs from apps and infrastructure.

It scales horizontally, is multi-tenant out of the box, and integrates natively with Grafana.

Grafana Loki ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 28k on grafana/loki

35. Fluentd

Fluentd is a CNCF-graduated unified logging layer: collect, parse, and route logs from anywhere to anywhere via a plugin ecosystem with hundreds of integrations. It is still maintained and remains the right choice when you need the full plugin catalog or Ruby-level extensibility.

Fluentd ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (15 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 13.5k on fluent/fluentd

This section talks about collaborative infrastructure delivery tools. 

36. Spacelift

Vendor disclosure: Spacelift is the publisher of this article. We’ve included ourselves so you can compare, but treat this entry as a vendor perspective, not an independent ranking.

Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that sits on top of your IaC tools and cloud providers to standardize how you provision, configure, and govern infrastructure. It supports Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible, and Kubernetes, with policy as code, drift detection, stack dependencies, and self-service through Blueprints and Templates. 

Spacelift Intelligence adds an AI layer. Infra Assistant for asking questions about your stacks, and Intent for provisioning infrastructure in natural language, both inside the same policy and audit controls.

Here you can learn more about How Spacelift Can Improve Your Infrastructure Orchestration.

Spacelift ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.9/5 (12 reviews)

37. Atlantis

Atlantis is the original Terraform pull-request automation tool, self-hosted and free. It listens for PR events, runs terraform plan, and posts the output back as a comment on the pull request. Now a CNCF Sandbox project.

The right pick when your team is small enough that one person can own the runner and the GitHub App. Less of a fit at larger scale, where multi-tenant policy and self-service need more than Atlantis provides.

Atlantis ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 9k on runatlantis/atlantis, a CNCF-supported project

38. Terraform Cloud

Terraform Cloud, rebranded to HCP Terraform in April 2024, is HashiCorp’s SaaS for Terraform, now owned by IBM following the February 2025 acquisition. It handles remote runs, state storage, policy as code via Sentinel or OPA, and a private module registry. HCP Terraform runs the same BUSL-licensed Terraform engine, so the same license considerations apply. 

The legacy free plan reached end of life on March 31, 2026. Remaining organizations were transitioned to the enhanced Free tier, which caps usage at 500 managed resources. A real EKS cluster with networking and IAM can burn through that fast, so check your Resources Under Management before assuming free still fits.

See our Atlantis vs. Terraform Cloud comparison for a closer look.

39. Env0

Env0 (now branded as env zero) enables you to manage, deploy, scale, and control all your Terraform, Terragrunt, Pulumi, and related frameworks. It provides automation, governance, cost management, and self-service components for your infrastructure management at scale.

Env0 ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.1/5 (21 reviews)

40. Scalr

Scalr is a Terraform and OpenTofu collaboration platform with a hierarchical configuration model, OPA integration, and full CLI support. Smaller community than the alternatives but solid for the specific shape of problem it solves.

Scalr ratings and reviews:

• G2: 5/5 (1 reviews)

This part gathers a few tools for software testing and quality assurance. 

41. TestRail

TestRail is a web-based test case management tool. It tracks manual and automated test runs, surfaces QA metrics, and integrates with most popular CI and bug tracking systems. Easy to set up and customise, and the integrations cover what most teams need.

TestRail ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (611 reviews)

42. Katalon Studio

Katalon Studio is a test automation platform built on Selenium and Appium that covers web, mobile, API, and desktop testing in one tool. 

A good fit for QA teams that want full automation without standing up Selenium Grid, Appium servers, and a reporting layer separately. Comes in free and commercial editions.

43. k6

k6, now part of Grafana Labs, is a load testing tool that runs in Go but lets you write tests in JavaScript. The integration with the Grafana stack is the obvious reason to pick it if you already use Grafana for dashboards.

K6 ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 30k on grafana/k6

44. Selenium

Selenium is an open-source toolkit for browser automation, mostly used for testing. It supports Java, Python, JavaScript, C#, and Ruby, and runs across all major browsers and operating systems. 

The framework is mature and reliable for cross-browser testing, though newer tools like Playwright are often a better fit for modern single-page apps.

Selenium ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 32k on SeleniumHQ/selenium, Roughly monthly releases for multi-language support

This section contains two products that focus on providing development environments frictionlessly. 

45. Hashicorp Vagrant

Vagrant by HashiCorp (an IBM company since February 2025) creates reproducible local development environments using VMs (VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V) or containers. It was a default in DevOps onboarding kits for years. It’s used less often now than it used to be, because most teams have moved local dev to Docker, Kubernetes-in-Docker, or hosted environments like Codespaces. 

Vagrant still works well for cases that genuinely need full VM isolation.

Hashicorp Vagrant ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (32 reviews)

46. Gitpod / Ona

Gitpod was a cloud development environment that spun up a pre-configured workspace in your browser when you opened a repository. In September 2025 the company rebranded to Ona and pivoted to an AI agent platform, positioning itself as “mission control for AI engineering agents.” Gitpod Classic (gitpod.io) was sunset for pay-as-you-go users on October 15, 2025, with the product moving to app.ona.com.

If you want what Gitpod used to do, the current alternatives are GitHub Codespaces, Coder, DevPod, or Daytona. If you want the new Ona, treat it as a different product and evaluate it on its own merits.

Gitpod ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.3/5 (16 reviews)

This category consists of some of my favorite code editors and their use cases. 

47. VScode

Visual Studio Code is the dominant code editor today, free and from Microsoft. It’s extensible, fast, and the extension ecosystem covers nearly every language, framework, and cloud you might work with. GitHub Copilot integrates natively, and the Remote Containers and Remote SSH extensions are widely used for hybrid local-and-cloud development. 

It’s the default choice for new projects unless you have a specific reason to use something else.

48. IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is JetBrains’ flagship IDE for JVM-based languages: Java, Kotlin, Scala, Groovy. Comes in a free Community Edition and a paid Ultimate Edition with framework-specific features. The right choice for serious Java or Kotlin development.

49. PyCharm

PyCharm is JetBrains’ Python IDE, the standard for serious Python development. It handles virtual environments, debugging, scientific computing libraries, and web frameworks like Django and Flask with first-class support. 

Same Community vs. Professional split as IntelliJ.

PyCharm ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (766 reviews)

50. AWS Cloud9 (closed to new customers)

AWS Cloud9 was a browser-based IDE for writing, running, and debugging code with direct AWS integration. AWS closed Cloud9 to new customers in July 2024. Existing users can keep using it, but no new sign-ups are accepted. 

If you wanted Cloud9, the closest replacements are GitHub Codespaces or AWS CloudShell for AWS-CLI-focused workflows.

AWS Cloud9 ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.3/5 (324 reviews)

This section contains two products targeting the security and vulnerability scanning space. 

51. Snyk

Snyk is a developer security platform that efficiently finds and automatically fixes vulnerabilities in code and containers. It supports various languages and integrates with other tools, CI/CD pipelines, and workflows. 

Snyk ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (126 reviews)

52. Trivy

Trivy by Aqua Security is an open-source security scanner that handles containers, file systems, Git repos, Kubernetes clusters, and IaC in one tool. It’s the default scanner in many CNCF projects, which is a strong signal. Particularly useful as the default scanner step in CI.

Trivy ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 35k on aquasecurity/trivy, active, multiple releases per month

53. Tenable One

Tenable One is a cloud-based platform with an analytics-focused security and exposure management approach. It can assist with vulnerability management, cloud and identity security, and mitigating cyber risks. 

54. BridgeCrew (now Prisma Cloud)

BridgeCrew was a developer-focused IaC and cloud security scanner that Palo Alto Networks acquired in 2021. In 2026, the capability lives inside Prisma Cloud, and most of what made BridgeCrew interesting (Checkov, IaC misconfig scanning, fix PRs) is now a feature of the broader CNAPP rather than a standalone purchase.

Checkov, the open-source policy-as-code engine BridgeCrew built, is still freely available and is what most teams actually run in CI. The lighter entry point if you want the OSS scanner without the Prisma Cloud commitment.

BridgeCrew ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (1 review)

55. Oak9

Oak9 is a security-as-code platform that scans IaC and deployed cloud workloads against compliance frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, and others). Useful for teams that need to demonstrate compliance and have IaC discipline already in place.

Oak9 ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (5 reviews)

This section discusses three of the most popular service mesh technologies currently available.

56. Istio

Istio is the most widely deployed service mesh, donated to the CNCF by Google in 2022 and graduated in 2023. It handles traffic management, observability, and security (mTLS, authorisation policies) across services in a Kubernetes cluster.

Istio ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.2/5 (17 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 38k on istio/istio

57. Linkerd

Linkerd is the lightweight alternative to Istio. Also a CNCF graduated project, focused on minimal overhead, simple operation, and Rust-based proxies for performance.

Linkerd ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (9 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 11.5k on linkerd/linkerd2

58. Hashicorp Consul

Consul by HashiCorp is a service networking platform: service discovery, network segmentation via service mesh, and securing service-to-service traffic across environments. Often paired with Nomad or Kubernetes. Service discovery is the job Consul has owned since 2014. 

The main reason to pick it now is almost always that you want HashiCorp stack alignment with Vault, Boundary, and Terraform, or that you run mixed VM-and-Kubernetes workloads and need a discovery layer that works across both. 

Consul moved to BUSL-1.1 in 2023, same as Terraform and Vault, and is now under IBM ownership following the HashiCorp acquisition that closed in February 2025.

Hashicorp Consul ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.3/5 (23 reviews)

This category lists some of my favorite technologies for managing secrets and sensitive information for software systems. 

59. Hashicorp Vault

Vault by Hashicorp is one of the most used and preferred secret management solutions. It assists developers with securing, storing, and managing access to sensitive information and secrets for modern systems.  

Hashicorp Vault ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.3/5 (46 reviews)

60. AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager allows users to manage the lifecycle of secrets and sensitive information centrally. Similarly to other AWS services, it hooks into IAM, Lambda, RDS, and the rest of the AWS catalog without extra glue.

AWS Secrets Manager ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (18 reviews)

61. Doppler

Doppler is a SecretOps platform that enables developers and security teams to keep their secrets and app configuration in sync and secure across devices and teams. 

Doppler ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.8/5 (61 reviews)

This section talks about accessing infrastructure, tools, and services securely.

62. Teleport

Teleport is an access platform for infrastructure: SSH, Kubernetes, databases, web apps, and Windows hosts, all behind a single identity layer with zero standing credentials. The model is short-lived, cryptographically-issued certificates rather than long-lived passwords or SSH keys. 

Strong fit for security-conscious teams that want auditability and identity-based access without losing developer ergonomics.

Teleport ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (107 reviews)

63. Hashicorp Boundary

Boundary, now part of IBM following the February 2025 HashiCorp acquisition, is an identity-based access platform focused on giving users access to applications and systems without exposing networks or distributing credentials.

Newer and less mature than Teleport, but tightly integrated with Vault for credential management, which is the main reason to pick it.

This category collects the two most widely used products that enable GitOps. 

64. ArgoCD

ArgoCD is a declarative GitOps delivery tool for Kubernetes. It continuously monitors applications running in Kubernetes clusters and automates the deployment of the desired application states. 

ArgoCD ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (34 reviews)
• GitHub stars: ~ 23k on argoproj/argo-cd

Read more about this tool in our ArgoCD – Practical Tutorial With Kubernetes article.

65. Flux

Flux is the other major GitOps tool for Kubernetes, also CNCF graduated. It’s more modular than ArgoCD — multiple controllers rather than one application — which suits teams that want to mix and match. 

ArgoCD has the larger user base and a better UI, but Flux has the cleaner architecture and is often easier to integrate with Helm and Kustomize-heavy workflows.

Flux ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 8.1k on fluxcd/flux2

This section gathers products that enable developers to run serverless applications and event-driven solutions without provisioning infrastructure. 

66. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is the original serverless function service, launched in 2014. It allows developers to build event-driven serverless applications without thinking about servers. It runs code in response to events, integrates nicely with the AWS ecosystem, and abstracts the user from any underlying computing resources.

AWS Lambda ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (983 reviews)

67. Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions let you run your code in the cloud with no servers or containers to manage, using our scalable, pay-as-you-go functions-as-a-service (FaaS) product. 

Google Cloud Functions ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (81 reviews)

68. Google Cloud Run

Google Cloud Run is a fully managed platform for running and scaling containers. It focuses on quick deployment and ease of use, allowing developers to spend time writing code rather than managing infrastructure. It has a pay-per-use model and automatically scales containers with support for concurrent requests.

Google Cloud Run ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (227 reviews)

69. OpenFaaS

OpenFaaS is an open-source project that provides serverless functions-as-a-service for Kubernetes. It makes it easy to deploy functions and existing code on any private or public cloud at scale.

The Community Edition is open source under MIT but the development focus has shifted to commercial editions and faasd. Worth checking the licensing carefully if you’re considering production use.

OpenFaaS ratings and reviews:

• GitHub stars: ~ 26k on openfaas/faas, Community Edition

This category contains two tools from the Chaos Engineering space focused on testing distributed systems and reliability. 

70. Chaos Monkey

Chaos Monkey is Netflix’s original chaos engineering tool. It randomly terminates instances and containers in production to expose single points of failure. As of 2025 it’s effectively in maintenance mode, and most teams have moved to richer chaos platforms like Gremlin, LitmusChaos, or Chaos Mesh. Chaos Monkey is still useful as a teaching example and for the specific job it does, but it’s no longer where active development happens.

71. AWS Fault Injection Simulator

AWS Fault Injection Simulator is a service for load testing and fault injection experiments to improve the reliability and resilience of applications and environments. The right choice for chaos engineering on AWS workloads.

This section examines AI-powered assistants and automation tools that promise to dramatically improve developers’ productivity and reduce operational toil across the software delivery lifecycle.

72. GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot uses OpenAI-powered models to suggest code and functions in real time as you code in your IDE. It can convert comments into code blocks, generate boilerplate in many languages, and support tests, refactors, and documentation based on the current file and project context. 

Beyond inline completion, Copilot Chat can answer questions about your codebase, explain snippets, and propose changes, making it a powerful assistant for everyday DevOps work.

GitHub Copilot ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (228 reviews)

See: How to use GitHub Copilot with Terraform

73. Amazon Q Developer (formerly Amazon CodeWhisperer)

Amazon Q Developer is AWS’s generative AI–powered assistant for developers and DevOps engineers, incorporating and expanding on the capabilities of the former Amazon CodeWhisperer service. 

It provides real-time code suggestions in IDEs and the CLI, helps generate and review infrastructure as code templates such as AWS CloudFormation and Terraform, and can answer natural-language questions about AWS services, best practices, and your own resources. Q Developer also assists with debugging, security scanning, and code transformation tasks, making it especially useful for teams building and operating workloads on AWS.

Note: Amazon Q Developer’s IDE and CLI offering is being sunset in favor of Kiro (AWS’s spec-driven agentic dev environment). New signups closed May 15, 2026 and full end of support is April 30, 2027. The console, docs, and chat-app integrations are unaffected.

Amazon Q Developer ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.6/5 (34 reviews)

For a deeper dive into AI across CI/CD, monitoring, and security, see our Top 12 AI Tools for DevOps guide.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you found some inspiration from this list of widely used and battle-tested tools, technologies, and products. We explored various modern tools across different areas and categories to accelerate your projects and processes.