In recent years, a number of vendors have begun slapping the "DevOps" label on their products in an attempt to increase sales. It's a move that makes sense because a growing number of enterprise IT organizations are embracing DevOps practices like increased collaboration, continuous delivery and automation. IDC predicts that DevOps will continue to mature so that by 2018, more than 60% of new apps will use "cloud-enabled continuous delivery and cloud-native application architectures to enable faster innovation and business agility."
As organizations increasingly use DevOps to increase their rate of application development and deployment, the market for DevOps tools is expected to grow substantially. According to market research from Technavio, the global market for DevOps solutions will grow at 19% per year (CAGR) through 2020.
But which vendors are truly helping companies embrace DevOps and which are just trying to jump on the DevOps bandwagon?
This slideshow takes a look at 10 vendors making strides in DevOps support. Listed in alphabetical order, they range from small, young startups to large, well-established companies. Some offer open source solutions while others sell proprietary technology. Many of these vendors have rolled out new products or won significant accolades this year. All of them offer tools that enterprises can use to support a DevOps culture.
(Image: TimArbaev/iStockphoto)
Automic Software claims to be the world's largest pure-play automation company with specific expertise in continuous delivery and DevOps. It boasts more than 2600 customers, including Netflix, LinkedIn, Ocean Spray, and the UK's National Health Service.
This year, Automic has earned several accolades from industry analysts. In August, Gartner named Automic a leader in its first ever Magic Quadrant for application release automation. Also this year, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) named the company a leader in workload automation, and Ovum named it a Leader in a report on DevOps.
The company has also recently announced several improvements to its software, adding support for Informatica PowerCenter, Oracle Fusion, Siebel Packaged Applications, and Open Stack. It also announced that its fiscal 2016 was the best financial year ever for the company with new licenses increasing 48%.
One of the best-known DevOps vendors, Chef recently launched a new tool called Automate that brings together two of its most popular products -- Chef Delivery and Chef Compliance -- with a unified interface. Also this year, the company launched a new certification and training program, as well as a new open source project called Habitat that gives applications the ability to self-organize and self-configure.
In 2015, the company reported phenomenal growth with annual recurring revenue increasing 94% over the previous year. Chef is used by more than half of the companies on the Fortune 50, and its roster of approximately 1,000 customers includes Nordstrom, Facebook, Disney, Target, Standard Bank, and Etsy.
This open source containerization technology has quickly become an integral part of the DevOps tool chain. In the three years since its initial release, Docker has been downloaded more than 4 billion times. According to the company, organizations that use Docker are able to ship software an average of seven times faster than they did before deploying containers.
Docker has made several big announcements in 2016. In January, it acquired Unikernel Systems, and in February it launched Docker Datacenter, an integrated, scalable platform for agile application development. In March, it expanded its reach beyond Linux with beta releases of the platform for Mac and Windows. The company also added orchestration and security features to its platform and launched a tiered partner program.
Founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp is probably best known as the company behind Vagrant, an open source tool for configuring development environments. It also maintains several other open source DevOps projects, including Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault and Nomad. It also offers a commercial DevOps Suite called Atlas, which includes enterprise versions of its open source products. In addition, HashiCorp offers enterprise versions of Vault and Terraform. In September of this year the startup announced that it had raised $24 million in Series B funding to help it grow its Vault tool for DevOps security.
New Relic offers cloud-based application performance monitoring services, and it's a favorite with many DevOps teams. In fact, in August, Gartner announced that New Relic had become the fourth largest APM vendor, moving up from eighth place the previous year thanks to a 68% growth rate. According to the company, every minute this service stores more than 2 million analytic events, aggregates more than 600 million metrics, and queries more than 3 billion data points.
This year, New Relic unveiled an infrastructure monitoring solution, added support for the Go programming language and announced an interesting partnership with Major League Baseball.
Launched in 2005, Puppet claims to be the most widely used open source IT management system. Today it's utilized by tens of thousands of companies including NASA, Intel, Salesforce, Verizon, Uber, Sony and others. It's available in both enterprise and open source versions, with more than 40 different projects and 3,100 different pre-built modules in the open source Puppet ecosystem. Puppet Enterprise is designed for use by larger teams and adds features like node management, role-based access control, more advanced orchestration capabilities, improved automated provisioning, and enterprise support. In 2016, EY named Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet, the Entrepreneur of the Year in its Pacific Northwest software category.
Recently, Linux vendor Red Hat has been making a big push to distinguish itself as a supplier of DevOps tools. One of its best-known DevOps tools is Ansible, an open source tool for configuration management that Red Hat acquired in October 2015. The company also offers DevOps consulting services, and this year it launched five new training courses related to DevOps. The Red Hat website provides access to quite a few resources and thought leadership pieces, including links to CEO Jim Whitehurst's book "The Open Organization," which explains the cultural shift necessary to embrace DevOps fully.
SaltStack describes its products as "automation for enterprise IT ops, event-driven data center orchestration and the most flexible configuration management for DevOps at scale." It's the company behind the open source Salt Open tool, and also offers a paid enterprise version of that software.
This year, SaltStack rolled out new support services for both its open source and enterprise solutions. It also won several awards and accolades, such as being named one of seven essential open source DevOps projects by Linux.com.
Shippable offers a cloud-based continuous integration, deployment and testing platform based on Docker. Based in Seattle, this startup was launched in 2013 by Avi Cavale and Manisha Sahasrabudhe. The company claims that its software can be set up in just five minutes and has been deployed by more than 8,000 organizations, including SAP and Cisco.
In August, the company announced a significant update to the platform that included a YAML-based, declarative configuration system for describing the behavior for each lifecycle stage. The solution is available with a freemium pricing model, and a privately hosted version called Shippable Server is currently available as a beta release.
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