The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the launch of the Agent2Agent (A2A) project, an open protocol created by Google for secure agent-to-agent communication and collaboration.
DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry for their recommendation on a key technology required for DevOps. Part 2 of the list covers automation and continuous integration.
Start with 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 1
9. AUTOMATION
DevOps relies, technologically, on automation and socially, on collaboration. You can't empower development and operations to collaborate and move faster until the manual scripting and configuration tasks are automated. So automation truly is the tooling foundation of DevOps. In short, automation supports a workflow that provides speed, scale and consistency – the end-state anyone practicing DevOps is trying to achieve.
Lucas A. Welch
Director of Communications, Chef
The single most important tool for DevOps success is an automation tool that is capable of supporting a variety of technologies. Our customer base needs a complete big data stack automation tool that speeds the creation of big data clusters for hard-to-system-engineer, distributed processing applications. With this type of tool developers can gain access to a Hadoop cluster almost immediately – as opposed to the weeks or months it might take through conventional channels. This allows developers and data scientists to experiment and innovate rapidly.
Brad Kolarov
Managing Partner, B23
The true must-have tool to enable DevOps is a culture of collaboration. Without trusted and transparent interaction between Development and Operations, you can't enable DevOps. Concurrent with a shift in culture is the need for automated tooling at all levels: build, test, deploy, monitor and remediate.
Bill Berutti
President of the Cloud, Data Center and Performance Businesses at BMC Software
10. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
A continuous integration tool is vital to enabling DevOps. With the help of other tools, they form the automation backbone that consolidates developers’ code submissions, packages and tests releases, and deploys releases into production.
Krishnan Badrinarayanan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Riverbed
Tools alone will not drive DevOps transformations; however, if I had to pick one critical tool to DevOps, I would say it is the CI Server. If the service delivery pipeline is the blood of DevOps, then the CI Server is the heart.
John Willis
Director of Ecosystem Development, Docker
Continuous integration is the best way to tie your development, testing and deployment into a single end-to-end process that “just works”, allowing Development and Ops to focus on what they do best and deliver quality code to your users faster
Matt Solnit
CTO, SOASTA
11. BUILD AUTOMATION
Silicon Valley software teams increasingly look to Build Automation as the key to developer productivity – because it empowers developers to define the behavior of all the other downstream DevOps toolchain.
Miko Matsumura
CMO, Gradle
12. AUTOMATED CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
In my opinion, integration testing is the most important phase of software development. This makes automated configuration management a must-have in the DevOps toolbox. The growth of containers and microservices makes it all the more critical to track components and ensure that the right version of components are being tested.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors
Read Gabe Lowy's latest blog on DEVOPSdigest: The DevOps Payoff
13. SELENIUM GRID
One must-have tool to enable DevOps is a Selenium (or Appium) grid to support automated unit and functional tests that run whenever a new code is checked in via the CI server. Ideally, this grid is on a 3rd-party cloud service so that the DevOps team does not have to deal with maintaining an image library of the latest browser, OS, and device combinations, or the delays associated with false positives that may be introduced as the result of a testing infrastructure unreliability.
Lubos Parobek
VP of Products, Sauce Labs
Read 30 Must-Have Tools to Support DevOps - Part 3, covering continuous delivery.
Industry News
Salesforce announced Agentforce 3: a major upgrade to its digital labor platform that gives companies the visibility and control to scale AI agents without compromise.
Wix.com Ltd. announced its acquisition of Base44, an AI-powered platform that enables anyone to create fully-functional, custom software solutions and applications using natural language, without the need for traditional coding.
Code Platoon, a nonprofit coding bootcamp for Veterans, active duty Servicemembers, and military families, is proud to announce the launch of its newly revamped AI Cloud and DevOps Engineering program.
Salt Security announced the launch of Salt Cloud Connect for AWS, an API security solution to deliver full API visibility and posture governance without the need for traffic data or agents.
CoreWeave announced the launch of three new AI cloud software products and capabilities to help customers develop, deploy, and iterate AI faster.
BrowserStack announced support for Playwright tests on real iOS devices with Safari.
JFrog announced a partnership with TL Consulting, an Australian-based professional services organization specializing in cloud-native, GitHub and Microsoft DevSecOps implementations.
Kusari unveiled Kusari Inspector, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based pull request security tool that brings cutting-edge security risk analysis directly into developers’ daily workflows.
Secure Code Warrior announced the availability of AI Security Rules on GitHub – a free resource to help developers generate more secure code when working with AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot, Cline, Roo, Cursor, Aider and Windsurf.
Mirantis announced a comprehensive reference architecture for IT infrastructure to support AI workloads.
Operant AI announced the launch of MCP Gateway, an expansion of its flagship AI Gatekeeper™ platform, that delivers comprehensive security for Model Context Protocol (MCP) applications.
Oracle has expanded its collaboration with NVIDIA to help customers streamline the development and deployment of production-ready AI, develop and run next-generation reasoning models and AI agents, and access the computing resources needed to further accelerate AI innovation.
Datadog launched its Internal Developer Portal (IDP) built on live observability data.
Azul and Chainguard announced a strategic partnership that will unite Azul’s commercial support and curated OpenJDK distributions with Chainguard’s Linux distro, software factory and container images.