What are the families of DevOps tools?
The DevOps ecosystem, as we call it, has a number of different categories that tools fall into. Some of these tools are designed, developed, and marketed for incredibly specific reasons. There are industry-specific tools that solve unique problems as well.
Of course, you also come across tools that, while specific to a category, also apply across many industries, and some tools are suites of tools that provide services right across the ecosystem.
We can use a traditional diagram that depicts the DevOps loop to talk about the different categories. I like to use the following categories, which closely align to those given in traditional diagrams but have slight differences:
- Collaborating
- Building
- Testing
- Deploying
- Running
You can see a visual depiction of this in the following diagram:
Figure 9.1 – Visual representation of the toolchain phases
Let's have a look at these in...