DevOps Vendors at the Forefront in 2019

The DevOps approach has made substantial headway in the enterprise and continues to become even more widespread. 

The Interop ITX and InformationWeek 2018 State of DevOps report found that only 9% enterprises surveyed had no plans to adopt DevOps, down from 20% who said the same thing the previous year. And 33% had already implemented DevOps principles, a significant increase from 18% in 2017. Only 3% of those surveyed said they weren't familiar with DevOps, compared to 15% the year before.

Given the growing interest in DevOps, it's not surprising that this year more vendors are beginning to offer DevOps tools. Many existing vendors also expanded their lineup of DevOps products and added new features to their existing tools. While there are still a few vendors who have merely slapped the DevOps label on products that were designed for older approaches to IT, that is becoming somewhat less common.

In addition to embracing DevOps, a growing number of enterprises are becoming interested in DevSecOps, an approach that incorporates security into the approach and makes everyone in the organization responsible for security. That has given vendors a whole new category of potential tools to market to DevOps organizations.

Capitalizing on DevOps trends

Because DevOps is such a broad and all-encompassing approach, no single tool can offer all the capabilities that an organization will need to implement DevOps principles. Instead, most enterprises use an assortment of tools to enable their developers and operations personnel to collaborate more closely while automating as much of their work as possible.

These tools may overlap and can be hard to categorize. In many cases, organizations’ DevOps toolchains are constantly evolving as vendors add new capabilities and organizations refine their approaches.

The trends toward adopting cloud computing and open source continue to be important to the DevOps movement. Many of the top tools are either delivered as software as a service (SaaS) or they are designed to be helpful in creating cloud-native applications. And many vendors offer tools based on open source software and/or they are actively contributing to open source projects.

Other noteworthy trends to watch for 2019 include potential consolidation as larger vendors look to acquire startups with promising technology. In addition, 2018 has seen more partnerships and integrations among the various vendors. For example, former competitors Atlassian and Slack announced a partnership with Atlassian discontinuing development on Stride, which was its real-time communications tool. Similarly, Docker offers a container orchestration tool called Swarm that competes with the open source project Kubernetes, but in 2018, it began incorporating Kubernetes into its enterprise products. This sort of integration may become even more common in 2019.

Another key trend involves incorporating artificial intelligence into DevOps tools, particularly those used for monitoring and managing infrastructure. AIOps, as it is sometimes called, offers the potential to make automation tools more helpful and, thus, improve efficiency for IT operations teams.

25 top DevOps vendors

The companies for this year's list were selected based on their market leadership, analyst reviews, user reviews, the depth of their product portfolios and the quality of their products. Also, we've included vendors with many different types of DevOps tools in order to demonstrate the breadth of the available offerings. It is by no means an exhaustive list of all the DevOps vendors, and the companies are arranged in alphabetical order. Check out the hot vendors in other segments of IT in our full Vendors to Watch package.

Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) offers multiples cloud services related to DevOps, including its EC2 Container Service, Lambda serverless computing, CodeStar continuous delivery toolchain, CodeCommit source control service based on Git, CodeBuild building and testing service, CodeDeploy automated deployment, CodePipeline continuous integration and continuous delivery and X-Ray debugging tools. It has a section of its website devoted to explaining how AWS services support DevOps, and it also makes third-party DevOps tools available through AWS Marketplace.

Atlassian (@Atlassian) has earned a reputation as one of the most well-respected providers of collaboration tools for agile and DevOps teams. It claims that its Jira development planning and tracking software is "the #1 software development tool used by agile teams," and it also offers the Git-based Bitbucket code repository software, Jira Ops for incident management, Confluence collaboration software and Bamboo continuous integration and deployment software. 

CA Technologies (@CAinc) CA offers both products and services to assist with DevOps adoption. It has a very large portfolio of DevOps and Agile software, which includes CA Project and Portfolio Management, CA Agile Central, CA API Gateway, CA API Management, BlazeMeter, CA Continuous Delivery Director, CA Test Data Manager, CA Agile Requirements Designer, CA Veracode, CA Continuous Delivery Automation, CA Operational Intelligence, CA Automic Service Orchestration, CA Automic Workload Automation and others.

Chef (@chef) is best known for its open source infrastructure management solution with the same name. It also has a paid solution called Chef Automate, which it describes as a "continuous automation platform," and it has developed several other open source tools, most notably the Inspec testing automation platform and Habitat for containerized build automation. The State of DevOps report found that 26% of those surveyed were using or planning to use Chef. In the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud report, Chef was the second most popular configuration tool with 36% of respondents using it and 17% saying they planned to do so.

CircleCI (@circleci) automates the build, test and deploy process, and it was named a "Leader" in the Forrester Wave for Continuous Integration Tools. Its customers, which include Facebook, Kickstarter, Spotify, Lyft, Palantir, Coinbase, Expedia, Stitch Fix and Dollar Shave Club, run more than 12 million builds on CircleCI every month.

CloudPassage (@CloudPassage) is one of the new DevSecOps vendors on the list. Its primary product is Halo Cloud Secure, an automated solution for protecting, providing visibility and ensuring compliance of cloud workloads. The company says, "Halo was purpose-built for DevSecOps," and it supports all cloud computing environments, including containers and microservices. 

CollabNet VersionOne (@CollabNetV1) is the result of a 2017 merger between CollabNet and VersionOne. It offers a range of DevOps and Agile solutions including the TeamForge application lifecycle management platform, TeamForge SCM Git-based version control, VersionOne agile management and the Continuum DevOps platform.

CyberArk (@CyberArk) offers the Conjur open source DevSecOps solution, which includes a secrets vault, secure CI/CD, secure PaaS and more. The paid enterprise version adds more features and support. It claims half of the companies on the Fortune 100 list as customers.

Docker (@Docker) containerization software offers enterprises an easy way to package applications and their dependencies for faster deployment and improved portability. In the State of DevOps report, 61% of respondents said that they were using or planning to use Docker. The software is available as an open source download or in a supported enterprise version.

Elastic (@elastic) is best known for the Elastic Stack, which includes four open source tools: Beats and Logstash for ingesting data, Elasticsearch for search and analytics, and Kibana for visualizations. DevOps teams frequently use the stack for monitoring and analyzing log data. Elastic's customers include Sprint, Airbus, Indiana University, eBay, Ticketmaster, Vimeo and others.

Electric Cloud (@electriccloud) has received the highest ranking in the Gartner "Leaders" quadrant for application release orchestration tools for three years in a row. Its products include ElectricFlow for release automation and ElectricAccelerator for continuous integration with build and test automation.

GitHub (@github) provides the world's leading code repository. It hosts a huge array of public open source projects, and it also offers paid private repositories for enterprises. Its DevOps-related features include code review, product management, team management and social coding capabilities. GitHub boasts that more than 31 million developers use its services.

GitLab (@gitlab) offers an alternative to GitHub that is particularly focused on the DevOps lifecycle. While it doesn't host as many open source projects as GitHub, it claims that more than 100,000 enterprises use it. Like GitHub, it is based on the Git version control software, and it comes in both free and paid enterprise versions. 

HashiCorp (@HashiCorp) is the company behind the open source tools Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad. It also sells cloud infrastructure automation tools based on those open source products. In the RightScale survey, 20% of respondents said they have deployed Terraform. HashiCorp customers include Adobe, Barclays, Cisco, SAP Ariba, Pinterest, Pandora and others.

IBM (@IBMDevOps) offers a wide variety of DevOps products and services, but the most notable are probably its UrbanCode products for automated deployment and release management and its Garage Method cloud services available through Bluemix. Gartner has named IBM as a leader in the application release orchestration market.

Micro Focus (@MicroFocus) offers a wide range of enterprise software including application development, testing and delivery and IT operations tools that can help enable DevOps. It also has tools and resources for bringing a DevOps approach to mainframe operations. Gartner has ranked it as a Niche Player for automation release orchestration. 

Microsoft (@msdev) offers both cloud-based and on-premises development tools with features that support DevOps. On the cloud side, it has a new service called Azure DevOps that bundles together Azure Boards, Azure Pipelines, Azure Repos, Azure Test Plans and Azure Artifacts. The company also offers Visual Studio Team Services for code sharing and development project management, Azure DevTest Labs for testing, Log Analytics, Container Services, Container Instances, Service Fabric for microservices applications and container orchestration, and Functions serverless computing. On the on-premise side, it has Team Foundation Server with some of the same capabilities as Visual Studio Team Services. And in the State of DevOps survey, 37% of respondents said they use Microsoft PowerShell for configuration management.

Nagios (@nagiosinc) claims to be "the industry standard in IT infrastructure monitoring." It offers both free open source and paid solutions for server, network and application monitoring, and it boasts more than 9,000 customers, including Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, UnitedHealthcare and others.

Puppet (@puppetize) was the second most popular DevOps tool in the State of DevOps survey and third in the RightScale survey. The company offers open source and paid DevOps tools to automate common IT operations tasks. It boasts more than 40,000 customers, including 75 of the Fortune 100.

Red Hat (@RedHatNews and @ansible) owns Ansible, which was the most popular configuration tool in the RightScale survey and the third most popular DevOps tool in the State of DevOps survey. It comes in two versions: the Ansible Engine (designed for Dev teams) and the Ansible Tower (designed for Ops teams). Red Hat also sells its OpenShift Container Platform, which is popular with DevOps teams. The company is currently in talks to be acquired by IBM.

SaltStack (@SaltStack) manages the open source Salt IT automation project. It also offers a paid versions of the product called SaltStack Enterprise and SaltStack SecOps. In the State of DevOps survey, 9% of respondents said they used Salt, and in the RightScale survey, 13% said they use the tool.

Slack (@SlackHQ) is the go-to collaboration platform for many enterprise IT teams, and it integrates with many DevOps tools, including those made by Atlassian. It's a Web-based service that simplifies communication among team members. Well-known Slack customers include Ticketmaster, Airbnb, Target, CapitalOne and Oracle.

Splunk (@splunk) provides tools for analyzing machine data, particularly the data generated by IT operations and IT security, which makes it a good fit for DevOps and DevSecOps. It offers several different editions of its product: Free, Light, Enterprise and Cloud. Its customers include 89 of the companies on the Fortune 100 list.

XebiaLabs (@xebialabs) is very highly regarded by analysts, earning the "Leader" designation from Gartner. It offers a complete platform that includes deployment automation, release orchestration and DevOps intelligence. Its customers include GE, KLM, KeyBank, Paychex, Duke Energy, Expedia, First National Bank, Pitney Bowes, Priceline.com, Xerox and many others.

WhiteHat Security (@whitehatsec) offers a DevSecOps platform that combines dynamic application security testing (DAST) through WhiteHat Sentinel Dynamic, static application security testing (SAST) through WhiteHat Sentinel Source and WhiteHat Scout, and mobile application security testing through WhiteHat Sentinel Mobile. Its customers include Akamai, Dell, NetApp and Pitney Bowes.

Learn about more hot vendors in our full Vendors to Watch package.

(Cover image: Kalakruthi/Shutterstock)