Miscelaneous

Top 10 DevOps Tools You MUST Use in 2025!

Today is the day I announce which tools I recommend using in 2025.

This is the list of the best of the best.

Creme de la creme.

I’m lying. This is not the list of the best tools but, rather, the list of the tools that made impact in 2024, the tools that matured enough that I recommend as permanent tools in your toolbelt. It’s the list of tools that proved their worth and should be adopted in 2025. Some of them are the best in their respective category, while others made a significant shift in the way we work that I believe deserve to be in the spotlight. Some are small, while others are massive. Some are widely known while others are obscure.

Top 10 DevOps Tools You MUST Use in 2026

2025 was the year agentic AI went from interesting experiment to daily reality. AI agents stopped being autocomplete tools and started understanding entire codebases, refactoring across files, writing tests, debugging their own mistakes, managing infrastructure, and handling operational tasks. For many developers and ops engineers, the way they work fundamentally changed.

2026 is the year to take this seriously. Not just for application developers, but for DevOps engineers, SREs, and platform teams. The tools are mature enough now. The productivity gains are real. If you’re not integrating AI agents into your workflow, you’re leaving significant value on the table.

But here’s the thing: agentic AI doesn’t replace everything else. You still need solid foundations. Internal developer platforms, testing frameworks, scripting languages, development environments. These tools still matter. What’s changed is that AI now intersects with all of them.

So this year’s recommendations cover both: the AI tools that emerged in 2025 and the non-AI tools that remain essential. I spent 2025 testing all of them in real projects, real workflows, real problems. Not quick demos.

Say Goodbye to Direct Communication! Event-Driven Pub/Sub With NATS

Imagine a world where everyone minds their own business. A world where no one tells anyone what to do and where no one is forcing anyone to do something. A world where everyone is focused only and exclusively on their own tasks and nothing else. A world where we work in complete isolation yet a world where everything is done more officiently.

In such a world, each of us would do a task and, when finished, announce to the world that we are done. After that, we would pick another task from the pile that corresponds to our specific skilset instead of being told what to do.

The process would be very simple and apply to everyone. Pick a task, do it, say that you are done, repeat.

Now, that might not be the world we would like to live in, but that might be a perfect world for processes. That might be just the way we should organize our applications.

The Dark Side of Open Source: Are We All Just Selfish?

There’s a lot of talk about open source and about some companies, big and small, taking advantage of it, and about some other companies changing licenses of their projects to be less permissive. Those conversations often end up with people yelling at each other. “Damn MongoDB for changing their license!” “AWS is evil for taking advantage of Elastic!” “Env0 is taking advantage of HashiCorp!” “F**K HashiCorp!” “Long live Elastic!”