Businesses are increasingly adopting Kubernetes and DevOps automation tools. This shift is largely due to the adoption of microservices and event-driven architectures. While powerful, this comes with its own DevOps challenges and manual DevOps management becomes a nightmare.
Choosing the right DevOps automation tools is a critical decision. It's essential your DevOps automation tools align well with your product. Otherwise, you risk ending up with a deployment pipeline that’s inefficient, a product that’s unreliable, or a solution that’s unnecessarily expensive.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the top DevOps automation tools available today and the features they offer, helping you make an informed choice for your product.
What is DevOps automation?
DevOps refers to the tools and practices which increase the ability to deliver services and applications at increased velocity while keeping them reliable and secure. DevOps Automation is the automation of such tasks, processes, and workflows which require minimum developer intervention. Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Version Control, Monitoring and Alerting are all part of DevOps automation.
Why is DevOps automation important?
- Speed and Efficiency – Every minute spent on manual DevOps is a minute taken away from product development. Automation eliminates the need for manual intervention and can help development teams focus on product.
- Consistency and Reliability – It enables you to have automated pipelines to ensure consistency in deployment and configurations.
- Scalability and Cost Efficiency – Automation helps you scale your infrastructure quickly with changing workload requirements.
How to select DevOps automation tools?
It’s crucial to select the correct DevOps tool according to your infrastructure and development needs. To efficiently select a DevOps automation tool for your product, you should:
- Identify and assess your requirements and goals such as improving deployment speed, enhancing collaboration, ensuring security, or scaling infrastructure efficiently.
- Review integration compatibility with your existing toolchain and infrastructure. You don’t want to remodel your entire infrastructure just to integrate with a DevOps automation tools.
- Ensure that the tool supports various deployment models (e.g., on-premises, cloud, hybrid) and technologies used within your organization.
- Make sure that the tool supports secure coding practices, integrates well with security testing tools, and facilitates compliance audits and reporting. Since this tool is going to be a core part of your software, you should make sure that it is reliable.
- Evaluate the ease of use, documentation and support resources available. Nothing beats excellent support and a wide community.
- Analyze the cost and ROI with respect to the feature set provided and do a POC before commitment. This will help you understand the feature set and the learning curve.
DevOps toolchain categories
There are various tools which fall under the umbrella of DevOps automation toolchain. You can think of them in the following categories:
- DevOps Automation Platform – These are platforms rather than tools, which provide the entire range of automated services for an application’s development and operational requirements. These let you eliminate the hassles of taking your tested code to production (CI/CD), deploying the infrastructure to support your code at scale and managing multiple environments while monitoring your applications. They help developers focus solely on developing the application.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - These tools help you automate provisioning and management of infrastructure resources required by your application via descriptive and declarative code. They can keep track of the changes in infrastructure and make it easy to rollback to any infrastructure configuration. These are the go-to tools if you need to create multiple copies of similar infrastructure. Some great tools may provide support for making your application cloud agnostic!
- Configuration management – These enable you to effectively manage and create configuration for applications across various environments at scale. Whether you need to manage multiple environments with separate configuration, or maintain consistency across multiple systems of the same environment, these tools make your task a lot easier. They can help you enforce compliance, manage dependencies, simplify deployment and so much more while maintaining version control.
- Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) - These tools create automated pipelines to build, publish, test, deploy and rollback your applications across various environments. They keep your app fast paced and reduce efforts on manual processes to test and upgrade your applications. They provide a varied set of features like multiple levels of testing, automated deployment and rollback, freezing pipelines etc. to avoid bugs reaching your production environment.
- Container orchestration – These tools help you deploy, scale and manage containerized applications. They make it easy to scale quickly and help keep the setup of your application consistent. They maintain a system independent application environment which makes sure that your application runs just the way it ran in your local environment. No more - “But it was working in my machine”!
- Monitoring and logging – Once an application is deployed, you need monitoring and logging to ensure the application’s health, performance and security. Gone are the days when you needed to ssh to a machine to figure out any issues. They are one of the best tools to debug your application – whether it is for a usability bug, or cost increase, or performance degradation, and so much more. They help keep your application secure by providing out of the box insights and automated alerting.
Best DevOps automation tools in 2024
DevOps Automation Platform
1. Kapstan
Overview
Kapstan is a modern DevOps Automation Platform designed to instantly provision well-architected and secure cloud infrastructure. Kapstan calls itself your in-house DevSecOps engineer, streamlining the workflow for development teams across the board.
Features
- Simple and intuitive workflows to build and deploy modern infrastructure and applications, without requiring you to learn any complex technologies.
- Open and transparent: Kapstan deploys infrastructure and applications using open standards directly into your cloud provider account, giving you complete control over your resources.
- Cloud-Agnostic Approach: Kapstan provides an abstraction layer on top of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP hiding their complexities.
- Secure and Robust: Kapstan is designed to provide a well-architected infrastructure that meets the highest standards of security and reliability.
- Kapstan integrates well with your existing tool chain.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools
2. Terraform
Overview
Terraform is an IaC tool which helps you deploy and manage your infrastructure using its declarative language. It makes it easy for you to keep your infrastructure provisioning consistent and reliable and avoid manual errors.
Features
- Declarative Language – It's easy to understand and manage infrastructure provisioning without worrying about the implementation details.
- Multi-Cloud Support– It supports multiple cloud providers and can be used across diverse platforms.
- Allows Version Control, reusability and transparency following IaC principles.
- Dry Run – It allows you to verify all the changes before any action is executed by generating a clear execution plan.
- Modular and extensible
3. Pulumi
Overview
Pulumi is another IaC tool which helps you automate infrastructure provisioning. Unlike Terraform, it is open source and supports a broad range of programming languages like (Python, Java, Go, YAML etc.) thus allowing developers from any background to onboard easily.
Features
- Open-source tool with rich resource documentation
- Functions on variety of popular languages, thus is also extensible and modular
- Supports a variety of testing frameworks and methodologies
- Audit capabilities and in-house Secret Management
- Multi cloud support
- Supports generation of an execution plan before making any infrastructure changes
4. OpenTofu
Overview
OpenTofu is an open-source fork of Terraform. It maintains compatibility with Terraform's ecosystem while focusing on community-driven development. It aims to provide a reliable, vendor-neutral alternative for infrastructure provisioning, allowing users to define and manage cloud resources using a declarative language.
Features
- Backwards compatibility with Terraform
- Community-driven development and governance
- Multi-cloud and provider support
- State management for infrastructure tracking
- Modular architecture for code reusability
- Plan and apply workflow for controlled changes
5. Chef
Overview
Chef is a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code. It uses a pull-based model where clients periodically check for and apply updates. Chef enables the management of infrastructure as code, allowing for version control, testing, and continuous delivery of infrastructure changes.
Features
- Ruby-based Domain Specific Language (DSL)
- Cookbook-driven configuration management
- Test-driven infrastructure development
- Integration with multiple cloud platforms
- Centralized management console
- Extensible through custom resources
6. Puppet
Overview
Puppet is a tool that helps automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure. It uses declarative language to define system configurations and automatically enforces the desired state. Puppet supports both agent-based and agentless models, providing flexibility in managing diverse environments.
Features
- Declarative language for configuration
- Model-driven architecture
- Cross-platform support
- Reporting and compliance tools
- Extensible through modules
- Role-based access control
7. Spacelift
Overview
Spacelift is a sophisticated management platform for Infrastructure as Code. It provides advanced features for managing Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Kubernetes manifests.
Features
- Git-based workflow
- Policy as code with Open Policy Agent
- Drift detection and reconciliation
- Collaborative review process
- Comprehensive audit trails
- Integration with major cloud providers
8. AWS Cloudformation
Overview
AWS CloudFormation is Amazon's native Infrastructure as Code service, enabling users to model and provision AWS resources using templates. It allows for the creation, update, and deletion of resource stacks, providing a consistent way to manage AWS infrastructure across multiple accounts and regions.
Features
- Template-based resource provisioning for AWS
- Automated stack creation and updates
- Rollback capabilities for failed deployments
- Integration with other AWS services
- Change sets for reviewing infrastructure modifications
- Nested stacks for complex architectures
9. AWS CDK
Overview
AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is an open-source software development framework for defining cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages. It synthesizes CloudFormation templates from code, allowing developers to use their preferred language to model AWS resources and leverage object-oriented techniques.
Features
- Multi-language support (TypeScript, Python, Java, C#)
- High-level constructs for common AWS patterns
- Integration with existing IDEs and tools
- Automated testing of infrastructure code
- Composition and sharing of reusable components
- Direct deployment to AWS or CloudFormation export
10. Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Overview
Azure Resource Manager is Microsoft's native Infrastructure as Code solution for Azure. It provides a way to define, deploy, and manage Azure resources using declarative JSON templates. ARM enables consistent resource management, access control, and organization of resources into logical groups.
Features
- JSON-based template language for Azure resources
- Resource group management for logical organization
- Role-based access control integration
- Dependency management between resources
- Tagging support for resource groups
- Template validation and what-if analysis
11. Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Overview
Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an Infrastructure as Code tool specific to Google Cloud Platform. It allows users to define and deploy GCP resources using YAML or Python templates. The service automates the creation and management of cloud resources, ensuring consistency and repeatability in infrastructure deployments.
Features
- YAML and Python support for template creation
- Integration with Google Cloud APIs
- Preview and review of deployment changes
- Templating for reusable configurations
- Version control of deployment configurations and rollbacks for failed deployments
- Extensible through community-contributed templates and Google Cloud Marketplace
12. Bicep
Overview
Bicep is Microsoft’s very own IaC tool which can be used to deploy your resources to Azure using a declarative syntax. It can be very useful for users sticking to Azure as their cloud platform as it provides very extensive support for Azure.
Features
- Much simpler syntax as compared to JSON
- Support for all resource types and API versions for Azure
- Type safety and linter support
- Supports code reusability
- Resource Manager helps orchestrate interdependent resource deployment
- Automatic deployment on code merges
- Open source
Configuration management tools
13. Ansible
Overview
Ansible is an open-source automation tool that simplifies configuration management, application deployment, and task automation. It uses a push-based, agentless architecture and YAML for defining playbooks, making it easy to manage and orchestrate complex IT environments across multiple systems simultaneously.
Features
- Agentless architecture
- Simple to use and easy to install
- YAML-based playbooks for configuration
- Extensive community driven module library
- Idempotent operations
- Supports a huge list of OS platforms
- Role-based configuration management
Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)
14. Gitlab CI/CD
Overview
GitLab CI/CD is an integrated part of the GitLab platform, offering a complete CI/CD toolchain. It allows developers to automate the building, testing, and deployment of applications directly from their GitLab repositories. The tool supports concurrent jobs, container registry, and easy pipeline configuration.
Features
- Built-in CI/CD with GitLab repositories
- YAML-based pipeline configuration
- Auto DevOps for quick setup
- Container registry integration
- Parallel and matrix builds
- Review apps for merge requests
15. Github Actions
Overview
GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform integrated directly into GitHub repositories. It allows developers to automate workflows triggered by repository events. With a marketplace of pre-built actions and support for custom actions, it offers flexibility in creating complex automation workflows for building, testing, and deploying applications.
Features
- Event-driven workflow automation
- Matrix builds for multiple configurations
- Marketplace for community-created actions
- Built-in secret management
- Self-hosted runner support
- Integrated with GitHub ecosystem
16. Azure DevOps
Overview
Azure DevOps is a comprehensive set of development tools provided by Microsoft. It includes services for version control, reporting, requirements management, project management, automated builds, testing, and release management. Azure DevOps supports a collaborative culture and set of processes that bring developers and IT operations together.
Features
- Integrated source control with Git
- Agile project management tools
- CI/CD pipelines with Azure Pipelines
- Artifact management
- Test plans and manual testing tools
- Extensibility through marketplace
17. AWS Code Pipeline
Overview
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps automate release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. It integrates with other AWS services and third-party tools to model, visualize, and automate the steps required to release software.
Features
- Visual workflow editor
- Integration with AWS services
- Support for custom actions
- Automated releases
- Pipeline history and rollback
- Manual approval actions
18. Google Cloud Build
Overview
Google Cloud Build is a serverless CI/CD platform that executes your builds on Google Cloud Platform. It can import source code from various repositories, execute a build to your specifications, and produce artifacts such as Docker containers or Java archives. Cloud Build scales from small tasks to large-scale CI/CD operations.
Features
- Serverless execution of builds
- Integration with Google Cloud services
- Support for Docker and Kubernetes
- Customizable build steps
- Trigger builds on repository events
- Build caching for faster execution
19. Jenkins
Overview
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying, and automating any project. It supports continuous integration and facilitates continuous delivery. Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any project.
Features
- Extensible plugin ecosystem
- Easy configuration via web interface
- Distributed builds with master-agent architecture
- Pipeline support for complex workflows
- Integration with various SCM tools
- Built-in GUI tool for monitoring
20. Harness
Overview
Harness is a Continuous Delivery as a Service platform. It uses AI and machine learning to automate the entire CI/CD process, including canary deployments, automatic rollbacks, and pipeline optimization. Harness aims to simplify software delivery while providing enterprise-grade security and compliance features.
Features
- AI-driven automated canary analysis
- Automated rollbacks
- Pipeline optimization
- Multi-cloud deployment support
- Secrets management
- Continuous verification
21. Blacksmith
Overview
Blacksmith is a managed solution which provides high-performance runners for your GitHub actions. It boasts up to 2x faster speed at half the cost. It uses gaming CPUs and system level caching to increase the performance of your jobs. It provides seamless integration with your existing GitHub workflows with just one line of code change.
Features
- Cost efficient with 3000 free minutes per month
- Custom cache which quadruples the cache speed to 400MB/s.
- Uses cutting-edge gaming CPUs
- Provides secure static IP runners for use cases needing strict network policies.
Container orchestration
22. Kubernetes
Overview
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes provides a framework to run distributed systems resiliently, taking care of scaling and failover for your application.
Features
- Automated rollouts and rollbacks
- Service discovery and load balancing
- Horizontal scaling
- Self-healing capabilities
- Secret and configuration management
- Batch execution
23. Docker Swarm
Overview
Docker Swarm is a native clustering and orchestration solution for Docker. It turns a pool of Docker hosts into a single, virtual host, allowing for easy scaling and management of containerized applications. Swarm provides a standard Docker API, making it easy for tools that already communicate with a Docker daemon to use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts.
Features
- Native Docker orchestration
- Declarative service model
- Load balancing
- Service discovery
- Rolling updates
- Scaling of services
24. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Overview
Google Kubernetes Engine is a managed Kubernetes service provided by Google Cloud Platform. It offers a production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications, combining the simplicity of a fully managed service with the flexibility of Kubernetes. GKE automates operations like upgrades, networking, and security management.
Features
- Auto-scaling and auto-repair
- Integration with Google Cloud services
- Multi-zone and regional clusters
- Integrated logging and monitoring
- Auto-upgrading for cluster components
- Node auto-provisioning
25. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
Overview
Amazon Elastic Container Service is a fully managed container orchestration service provided by AWS. It supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. ECS eliminates the need to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure.
Features
- Integration with AWS services
- Task definitions for application architecture
- Service auto-scaling
- Scheduled tasks
- Integrated logging and monitoring
- Support for AWS Fargate
26. AWS Fargate
Overview
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, letting you focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.
Features
- Serverless container execution
- Pay-per-task pricing model
- Integrated networking and security
- Application-level isolation
- Seamless scaling
- Integration with other AWS services
27. Red Hat OpenShift
Overview
OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based container application platform developed by Red Hat. It provides a complete set of tools for cloud-native application development, deployment, and management. OpenShift adds developer and operations-centric tools on top of Kubernetes to enable rapid application development, easy deployment and scaling, and long-term lifecycle maintenance.
Features
- Built-in CI/CD pipelines
- Developer-focused web console
- Integrated image registry
- Multi-tenancy support
- Automated application builds and deployments
- Service mesh integration
Monitoring and Logging
28. Datadog
Overview
Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform for large-scale applications. It brings together data from servers, containers, databases, and third-party services to provide a unified view of the entire stack. Datadog offers real-time visibility into application performance, log management, and infrastructure monitoring.
Features
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Application performance monitoring
- Log management and analytics
- Real-time dashboards
- Alerts and notifications
- Extensive integrations ecosystem
29. New Relic
Overview
New Relic is an observability platform designed to help organizations analyze and improve their software stack. It provides full-stack visibility from the infrastructure to the end-user experience. New Relic offers tools for application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, log management, and more, all in a unified platform.
Features
- Full-stack observability
- Real-time analytics
- Distributed tracing
- Custom dashboards and alerting
- AI-powered anomaly detection
- Kubernetes monitoring
How Kapstan approaches DevOps automation
There are a lot of different small tools which target DevOps automation, but very few platforms like Kapstan that can provide a complete DevOps automation setup. Kapstan provides a no code solution to all DevOps problems including:
- Infrastructure Management – Manage infrastructure using simple clicks, without any expert knowledge.
- Configuration management – Managing environment variables and secrets is no longer a tedious task. Simply manage all of them via Kapstan UI.
- Support for CI/CD – Enable the programmatic deployment, and trigger deployment from any platform using our APIs and GitHub Action.
- Container orchestration – Minimal effort to deploy new applications and configure resources for them.
- Monitoring and logging – Out of the box observability using logs and metrics without any extra configuration. Cloud Agnostic – Deploy in your own cloud account on the cloud of your choice.
Wrapping up
DevOps automation is becoming increasingly important and provides a huge advantage when integrated with the product by improving cost and reliability.
Interested in learning how Kapstan’s internal developer platform can help you with DevOps automation? Request a demo and ask about our 30-day free trial!
