Originally based on reporting from crn.com (August 2018). Tool descriptions have been expanded and clarified for a technical DevOps audience.
The rapid adoption of cloud computing has triggered a fundamental shift in how software is developed, packaged, deployed, updated, and retired. Multi-cloud architectures created powerful use cases for containers, and technologies like Kubernetes emerged to orchestrate those containers at scale. Developers now build cloud-native software using service-oriented architectures, decomposing applications into micro-services that can scale independently to handle massive loads.
These changes also drove a rethinking of team culture and process — the core of the DevOps movement — merging development and operations disciplines to enable rapid, reliable software delivery. A new generation of tools supports that mission, spanning infrastructure configuration management, code repositories, release automation, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), team collaboration, and service meshes.
Below are ten tools that gained significant traction in the DevOps ecosystem. While some details reflect their state circa 2018, each tool remains relevant and has continued to evolve.
1. XL Deploy (XebiaLabs)
XebiaLabs built a comprehensive DevOps platform focused on intelligence, automation, and control of continuous delivery pipelines at enterprise scale. XL Deploy specifically addresses one of the harder problems in large organisations: reliably propagating software changes across heterogeneous environments — legacy on-premises systems, private clouds, and public clouds simultaneously.
Key capabilities include:
- A visual deployment dashboard for tracking rollouts in real time
- Built-in analytics, security controls, and audit trails
- Support for deploying both containerised workloads and traditional virtual machine packages
- Integrations with major CI servers and cloud platforms
XL Deploy is particularly valued by enterprises that need governance and traceability around production deployments without sacrificing deployment velocity.
2. GitLab
GitLab provides a self-hostable or SaaS Git repository combined with a full DevOps platform spanning the entire application lifecycle. Both the open-source (Community Edition) and commercial (Enterprise Edition) versions include:
- Version control with merge request workflows
- Issue tracking and kanban boards
- Code review with inline comments
- Built-in CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI)
- Container registry and package registry
- Security scanning (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning)
The “single application” philosophy — where source control, CI/CD, and monitoring live in the same tool — reduces context switching and integration complexity for engineering teams. GitLab saw notable migration interest following Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition of GitHub, though both platforms have since continued to grow.
3. Envoy Proxy
Envoy was originally developed at Lyft to handle the networking complexity of their micro-services architecture at ride-sharing scale. It is now a graduated project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Envoy operates as an L4/L7 proxy and forms the data plane for many service mesh implementations.
Core features include:
- Automatic service discovery
- Advanced load balancing (round robin, least request, zone-aware)
- Circuit breaking and retry policies
- Distributed tracing and rich observability metrics
- TLS termination and mutual TLS (mTLS)
- gRPC and HTTP/2 support
Envoy is commonly deployed as a sidecar proxy alongside each micro-service instance, abstracting all network communication from application code. It underpins service meshes including Istio and AWS App Mesh.
4. HashiCorp Consul
Consul from HashiCorp began as a service discovery and distributed key-value configuration tool. It was later expanded into a full service mesh solution with the addition of network segmentation capabilities, enabling secure service-to-service communication across complex environments.
Consul’s primary capabilities include:
- Service registration and health checking
- DNS and HTTP-based service discovery
- Distributed key-value store for configuration
- Automatic mTLS encryption between services (via Connect)
- Identity-based authorisation using service intentions
- Support for containers, VMs, and serverless workloads
Consul is available in open-source and enterprise editions and integrates naturally with other HashiCorp tools such as Vault (secrets management) and Terraform (infrastructure provisioning).
Note: The original source mentions “automatic TLC encryption” — this appears to be a typo for TLS (Transport Layer Security).
5. Netflix OSS
Netflix open-sourced a suite of tools and frameworks that emerged from solving the extreme scalability and reliability challenges of streaming video to hundreds of millions of users. Collectively known as Netflix OSS, these components address common distributed systems problems:
- Eureka — Client-side service discovery and registration
- Hystrix — Circuit breaker library for fault tolerance (now in maintenance mode; Resilience4j is the recommended successor)
- Zuul — Edge service / API gateway for dynamic routing
- Archaius — Dynamic configuration management library
- Ribbon — Client-side load balancing
Many of these components were incorporated into the Spring Cloud framework, making the Netflix patterns accessible to the broader Java enterprise community. Teams building distributed systems with Spring Boot could adopt battle-tested Netflix infrastructure patterns with minimal configuration.
6. BOSH
BOSH is an open-source tool chain for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of distributed systems. Originally developed by VMware for Cloud Foundry deployments, BOSH has since been adopted more broadly for managing complex software deployments at scale.
BOSH introduces several key concepts:
- Stemcells — Versioned, minimal OS images used as the base for VMs
- Releases — Versioned packages of source code, scripts, and configuration
- Deployment manifests — YAML files declaring the desired state of an environment
BOSH supports deployments on AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, and CloudStack. It handles both Linux and Windows environments and is capable of managing rolling upgrades, health monitoring, and automatic VM resurrection.
7. Istio
Istio is an open-source service mesh that layers observability, traffic management, and security on top of existing micro-services without requiring changes to application code. It was developed collaboratively by Google, IBM, and Lyft, with contributions from Cisco, Pivotal, Red Hat, and others.
Istio typically uses Envoy as its data plane proxy and provides a control plane that manages:
- Fine-grained traffic routing (canary releases, A/B testing, traffic mirroring)
- Load balancing and circuit breaking
- Mutual TLS for service-to-service authentication
- Role-based access control (RBAC) policies
- Distributed tracing, metrics collection, and access logging
Istio 1.0 was released in mid-2018, marking it as production-ready. Subsequent versions significantly simplified the control plane architecture. Istio is now a CNCF graduated project.
8. Drone CI
Drone is a container-native CI/CD platform where every pipeline step runs inside a Docker container. This design ensures build environment consistency and strong isolation between jobs — issues that plagued earlier CI systems running builds directly on shared agents.
Key characteristics of Drone:
- Pipelines defined in a
.drone.ymlfile stored in the repository (pipeline-as-code) - Every build step runs in an isolated, ephemeral Docker container
- A plugin ecosystem where each plugin is itself a Docker image
- Supports multiple source control providers (GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket)
- Cloud-native horizontal scaling of build runners
Drone’s architecture makes it straightforward to self-host and scale, which appeals to teams that want full control over their CI infrastructure without the overhead of managing a Jenkins cluster.
9. Helm
Helm is the de facto package manager for Kubernetes. It addresses a core operational challenge: deploying and managing complex applications on Kubernetes requires coordinating many YAML manifests across multiple resource types. Helm simplifies this with a packaging format called charts.
A Helm chart is a collection of templated Kubernetes manifests, a Chart.yaml metadata file, and a values.yaml file containing default configuration. Charts can be versioned, shared via repositories, and installed with a single command:
helm install my-release stable/nginx-ingressHelm capabilities include:
- Templated manifests with override values per environment
- Upgrade and rollback of releases
- Dependency management between charts
- Hooks for pre- and post-install/upgrade jobs
Helm is now a CNCF graduated project. Major contributors include Microsoft, Google, and Bitnami (now part of VMware). Helm 3, released after the original article’s publication date, removed the server-side Tiller component, addressing previous security concerns around cluster-wide permissions.
10. Jira
DevOps is as much about culture and collaboration as it is about tooling. Atlassian’s Jira is the issue and project tracking tool most widely adopted by agile software teams, making it a common backbone for DevOps workflows.
Jira supports DevOps teams through:
- Sprint planning with story point estimation
- Kanban boards for visualising work in progress
- Bug and incident tracking linked to code commits
- Customisable workflows reflecting real team processes
- Release tracking and version management
- Real-time burndown charts and velocity reporting
- Deep integrations with Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, and CI/CD tools
The ability to link Jira issues directly to branches, commits, pull requests, and deployments gives teams end-to-end traceability from business requirement to production release — a key DevOps capability.
Choosing the Right Tools for Your Stack
No single tool solves all DevOps challenges. Effective toolchains are assembled based on team size, existing infrastructure, target environments, and organisational maturity. The tools above often work together: GitLab drives commits that trigger Drone pipelines, Helm deploys artefacts to Kubernetes clusters managed by BOSH or similar, Consul or Istio handles service communication, and Jira tracks the work throughout.
When evaluating any DevOps tool, consider:
- Community and ecosystem health — Active CNCF projects and large contributor bases reduce long-term risk
- Operational overhead — Self-hosted tools require dedicated maintenance capacity
- Integration surface — How well does the tool fit into your existing pipeline?
- Security posture — Does the tool support secrets management, RBAC, and audit logging?
- Open-source vs. commercial licensing — Understand what capabilities are gated behind paid tiers
The DevOps tooling landscape continues to evolve rapidly. Staying current with CNCF project statuses, vendor release notes, and community benchmarks is essential for making sound architectural decisions.