Everyone who follows me knows that I’m a fan of XebiaLabs’ Periodic Table of DevOps Tools. It was the first attempt I am aware of to arrange things in a way that helped DevOps teams navigate the increasingly bewildering world of DevOps toolsets. In fact, my friend Colin Walker over at ExtraHop and I have been planning to pick some up for our offices for a year or so.
(Add on note: It sounds like I’ll be getting a copy of the XebiaLabs poster. Woo hoo!)
Visit the interactive version.
So this week when I found out about Automic’s chart—let’s call it “The Spider” because of the way it branches out—I thought I’d let you all know that it is also out there. The cool part about The Spider, in my opinion, is the interactivity (which means I still want the XebiaLabs poster for my office). You can click on a node, get information about the tool and be presented with a link to the tools’ website—and, if they’re integrated with Automic, a link to the integration in their marketplace.
For quick research, this is a nice chart. I wouldn’t want to have to maintain it, at the rate the market is changing, but it’s a useful starting point for “I need a tool that does X” and exploring short one or two paragraph descriptions of each of the options. It’s not complete, but it would be a full-time job to make such a chart complete and keep it up to date, and it’s pretty far along. You won’t miss any major vendors in a space by starting with The Spider.
I clicked around and looked at the writeups for several products, and they read well. Considering that Automic is a vendor (they’re owned by CA, so kind of an über-vendor) in the space, it would not have surprised me to find they were limited or slanted in their writeups, but they weren’t. So I asked Scott Wilson, product marketing director for release automation, about that, and he told me they actually wanted to couch the details in the framing that each vendor used. Considering that Automic has a plug-in architecture that interfaces to many of these products, I suppose that makes sense. And making sense or not, it’s good for us, because we don’t have to pry apart two layers of vendor-speak to figure out how a product can help.
If you’re trying to figure out the CD market, or a subset of that market, this is another good tool to have access to, so thought you all would be interested. The plan is to keep it up to date, so hopefully it is useful for a while moving forward.