10 New DevOps Tools to Watch in 2023

With less than two months left in 2022, today, I’d like to look at some new (relatively) DevOps tools we might want to follow in the next year because they might boost engineering productivity to the next level.

Author’s note: it’s worth noting that not all of them are “brand new” tools released recently; most of them are probably tried out by the CNCF end-user community. It’s recommended to look at these tools when you have a specific need for the technology in your projects.

Without further adieu, let’s get started.

1 Pulumi

Let’s start with the basics of DevOps: Infrastructure.

First things first, Pulumi is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, just like Terraform, AWS CDK, CDK for Terraform, etc.

Nowadays, although Terraform probably has become the most popular choice for IaC, there are some drawbacks:

• You’d have to learn a new “language” that is HCL(HashiCorp Config Language).
• HCL isn’t precisely a “language”, per se, or at least not a very powerful one. For example, you can’t use a for loop on a module until late 2020.

Enter Pulumi.

What is it, then?

If you are familiar with AWS CDK, it’s easy for you to understand: it’s that. Except it’s universal (at least it tries to be) and compatible with every cloud.

If you don’t know AWS CDK, think this: Pulumi allows you to manage your infrastructure with programming languages that you already know, eliminating the overhead of learning yet another configuration language.

Who’s Pulumi for? Great question.

If you are already familiar with some programming language, like TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java, etc., but you don’t really want to learn yet another language that is HCL, Pulumi might be for you. If you are using AWS, technically, you can use AWS CDK too, but if you plan to orchestrate a hybrid cloud architecture, Pulumi makes more sense.

If you are already using Terraform heavily, but you are tired of the limitations of HCL, and you don’t really like using count and built-in functions that lower the readability of your infrastructure code, you could also give Pulumi a try.

This tool isn’t “new” anymore; it has more than 14k stars on GitHub. But it’s newer than Terraform. If it solves a specific problem you have, give it a try.

2 SOPS

SOPS, short for Secrets OPerationS, is an open-source text file editor that encrypts/decrypts files automagically.

Emphasis on the text editor, encryption, and automation.

Typically, when you want to encrypt a text file, this is what you do:

• Use your favorite editor for writing, editing, and manipulating the text data, and save