10 Best DevOps Tools Going Into 2025!
With 2025 sunsetting in a hurry, if you are like me you are thinking about the skills and disciplines you want to gain mastery over. DevOps is definitely an area that has tremendous demand with modern cloud infrastructure and even on-premises infrastructure understanding how to automate and build infrastructure in a way that is smart, efficient, and makes use of modern technologies. What are some of the top DevOps skills going into 2025? Let’s take a look.
Table of contents
- 1. A home lab
- 2. Generative AI
- 3. GitOps Tools FluxCD and ArgoCD
- 4. Observability and monitoring tools
- 5. Container orchestration helper tools
- 6. Infrastructure as code (IaC) automation tools
- 7. CI/CD solutions
- 8. Security-as-Code and DevSecOps tools
- 9. Edge computing and IoT DevOps tools
- 10. Serverless and FaaS
- Wrapping up
1. A home lab
If you ask me, there isn’t a single better tool for learning, testing, playing around, and having fun with DevOps than a home lab. I think this is the best tool you can have as it gives you the opportunity to play around and experiment with different technologies in the realm of an environment you feel comfortable to do that in.
My home lab has been the single best investment for me and my learning path for the past several years and I suspect that will continue to be the case in 2025 and beyond. I highly recommend that you setup some type of lab environment, even on a daily driver workstation or laptop with desktop virtualization.
You can see the example of my home lab here:
2. Generative AI
I seriously think that AI is one of the most significant developments in the IT industry in the past several decades, rivaling the Internet in general. It is going to completely change how things are done, but therein lies the excitement. Rather than taking jobs, I think if you learn how to leverage it to your advantage it can turn all of us into 5X the engineer that we were before generative AI came along.
Understanding, where and when you can use AI for DevOps tasks is going to be one of the most in-demand skills in 2025. I definitely think everyone should start playing around with AI and using AI to help solve problems in their home lab, including helping with infrastructure as code, bouncing ideas off AI, using it to help troubleshoot, etc.
I personally view it like the most talented engineer you know and being able to sit down with them and bounce problems, ideas, designs, etc off of them. It is really like that. There is no limit to what we can build and design with the help of such a powerful tool. Use it and start 5X’ing your skills and workflows.
Examples include:
- ChatGPT, Gemini, etc
- Self-hosted models
3. GitOps Tools FluxCD and ArgoCD
GitOps is a specific area of DevOps which is a more broad application. However, its focus is on the deployment side of things more so with GitOps. You are essentially setting a source of truth with the Git repo and then you have a solution like FluxCD or ArgoCD that watches the repository and it will make sure your Kubernetes cluster is aligned with the repository code that exists there.
This is a great way to have a declarative model of deployments and align your environment with code in your repo. Also, these tools might seem imtimidating, but actually they aren’t too difficult to get started with. Check out my walkthrough of getting FluxCD installed and a simple GitOps example:
Examples include:
4. Observability and monitoring tools
Looking at the next best DevOps tools going into 2025, there are several observability and monitoring tools that you should take note of. Observability is a word that we are hearing more and more about since it goes beyond monitoring and integrates things like metrics, logs and traces to give DevOps engineers a holistic view of the system overall. AI observability will be a big thing moving forward.
Examples include:
- Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Datadog, Dynatrace, Elastic Observability
5. Container orchestration helper tools
Kubernetes is already huge and the defacto standard in container orchestration. But new tools continue to emerge that make managing Kubernetes much easier. There are several great tools out there that make working with Kubernetes a much better experience and help you get things done much faster. Also, it makes troubleshooting easier.
Examples include:
- Lens IDE, K9s for cluster management, Portainer for Docker and Kubernetes, and Openshift for enterprise Kubernetes
6. Infrastructure as code (IaC) automation tools
Most of us are already using infrastructure as code automation tools. However, it is never too late to learn or get better using them. Infrastructure as code is the heart of modern DevOps since this type of code is what drives infrastructure state management and automation in modern enterprise environments.
Examples include:
- Terraform, Pulumi, and Crossplane
7. CI/CD solutions
CI/CD solutions are also a critical core component to modern DevOps and GitOps methodologies. If you haven’t started playing around with CI/CD or code repos in general in your home lab, now is a great time to pick up this skill. You can easily spin up something like Gitea in your home lab or even GitLab. I have both running in my environment and currently use GitLab CI/CD pipelines for most things I automate in the lab environment and as I delve further into GitOps, understanding and having access to a git repo and CI/CD functionality is critical.
Many CI/CD solutions are including AI plugins and other AI functionality to make CI/CD pipelines even more powerful and intelligent.
Examples include:
- Gitlab CI/CD, Circle CI, Jenkins with AI plugins, Drone CI, Gitea actions
8. Security-as-Code and DevSecOps tools
Security is front and center basically everywhere. Development and DevOps environments are not immune to cyberattacks or malware. Security is getting increasingly introduced in DevOps lifecycles. These can now be easily integrated into pipelines and other code workflows.
Examples include:
- Trivy Scanner, Snyk, Checkov, Aqua Security, Prisma Cloud
9. Edge computing and IoT DevOps tools
Edge computing and Iot are becoming huge as organizations need to have processing close to the data or for other reasons such as compliance. Many companies are using distributed edge nodes or placing lightweight Kubernetes installations in the edge environment. What are some of the tools available to use?
Examples include:
- K3s and Microk8s for a lightweight Kubernetes distro, AWS IoT Greengrass, Azure IoT Edge
10. Serverless and FaaS
More organizations are using and investing in serverless technologies and architectures and these are growing for monitoring scaling infrastructure and keeping costs down. Definitely put these tools on your radar for DevOps learning in 2025.
Examples include:
- AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, OpenFaaS, Cloudflare Workers
Wrapping up
Hopefully, this walkthrough of 10 best DevOps tools going into 2025 will help spur along some ideas of things to learn and continue to learn into this next year. Is this an exhaustive list? No, absolutely not. There are so many great technologies out there. These are only a few example of general technologies and areas that are big in the DevOps world and will continue to be. Find your learning path and stick to it. Again, I think a lab environment is one of the best investments you can make. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
