When we launched the DevOps Dozen in 2015, we wanted to recognize the people, projects and companies helping this community move forward. We saw the work happening across DevOps every day at DevOps.com. The awards gave our readers a chance to tell us who deserved recognition.

Eleven years later, there is a lot more ground to cover. We have platform engineering teams building internal developer platforms, AI agents taking on software delivery tasks and open source maintainers keeping projects healthy that entire industries depend on. Our awards need to keep up with the work.

Nominations for the 2026 DevOps Dozen Awards are now open through Oct 18, 2026 at 5 p.m. ET. This year’s program includes 24 awards across nine Community categories and 15 Tools & Services categories. We have revised the categories and sharpened their definitions to help people find the right place for their contributions.

I hope you will take a look. Chances are you know someone, or use something, that belongs on the list.

Making Room for How DevOps Works Today

One challenge with any awards program is deciding what should have its own category. Make the definitions too broad and very different accomplishments end up competing against each other. Make them too narrow and you lose sight of how people actually work.

AI is a good example. An assistant helping a developer review code is doing something different from an agent working through a failed pipeline. Operating an AI application introduces another set of responsibilities.

This year’s commercial categories make those differences explicit.

Best AI-Assisted Software Development Solution recognizes tools that help developers plan, write, review, document and test software. The developer directs the work, with AI providing assistance.

Best Agentic Software Delivery Solution covers agents that plan and execute multistep work across repositories, pipelines, deployments or operations. Entries should demonstrate what those agents can accomplish across the delivery process.

Best DevOps for AI Systems Solution addresses the systems being built and operated: Deploying models and applications, evaluating their behavior, monitoring production performance and managing governance throughout their lifecycle. That includes MLOps, LLMOps and AgentOps.

There is also a Community award for Best End-User Application of AI in Software Delivery, recognizing what an enterprise team has accomplished using AI internally.

For anyone submitting in these categories, tell us what improved. Did the team deliver better software? Find defects earlier? Reduce recovery time? Give us enough detail to understand the achievement.

Recognizing the People We Depend On

I am particularly glad to see separate recognition for established open source projects, emerging projects and individual maintainers.

A mature project with widespread adoption deserves recognition for its impact. A younger project may introduce an approach worth celebrating while it is still building its community. Separate categories allow us to evaluate each on appropriate terms.

Then there are the maintainers. Reviewing pull requests, triaging issues, supporting contributors and keeping a project moving takes sustained effort. Much of that work happens outside the spotlight, even when thousands of organizations benefit from it. Open Source DevOps Maintainer of the Year gives readers a way to recognize that contribution directly.

The Community awards also recognize people building communities, leading change inside enterprises and working together on successful end-user teams. Independent books, articles, podcasts, videos, courses and research are eligible under Best Independent DevOps Content or Educational Resource. Community programs and events have their own category as well.

Think about who has helped you learn, whose project your team relies on or who made a difficult transformation succeed. Those are good places to start when considering a nomination.

The Full Delivery Process Counts

There is plenty of attention on AI, but our readers still have software to build, secure, release and operate.

The Tools & Services awards cover software delivery platforms, CI/CD, quality assurance, platform engineering and developer productivity. They recognize DevSecOps, software supply chain security and observability, along with infrastructure automation and cloud operations.

FinOps also has a place, reflecting the importance of understanding and managing cloud, engineering and AI costs. Other categories recognize breakthrough solutions and successful customer implementations.

You can find the full category descriptions here. Please read them before submitting. They explain what each award recognizes and what evidence will help judges evaluate an entry.

One point worth making clear: An end-user team describing its own accomplishments belongs in the appropriate Community category. A vendor submitting a customer implementation should use Best Customer DevOps Implementation in Tools & Services.

Vendor employees can also qualify for appropriate Community awards when the contribution being recognized serves the broader community beyond promoting a product.

How to Participate

Anyone in the DevOps community can nominate. You can nominate yourself, your team, your company or someone whose work you admire.

Community nominations are free. Tools & Services entries cost $300 per nomination. You may enter multiple categories, but each submission should explain why the nominee deserves recognition in that particular category.

My advice is straightforward: Tell us what the nominee did, what problem it addressed and what happened as a result. Specific examples and measurable outcomes give judges something useful to evaluate.

Winners will be determined through a combination of 60% expert judging and 40% public voting. Public voting is limited to one vote per person, per category. Judges do not review categories where they have a direct conflict of interest.

Mitch Ashley and I are currently listed on the judging panel, with additional judges to be announced. The process and judging page has more details.

Here are the dates:

• Oct 18, 2026, at 5 p.m. ET: Nominations close.
• Nov 11, 2026: Finalists are announced and public voting opens.
• Dec 31, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. ET: Public voting closes.
• January 2027: Winners are announced at the Predict 2027 virtual summit.

We depend on this community to help us find deserving nominees. You know which colleagues make your team better, which projects you trust and which products have delivered for you. You also know people whose contributions deserve more attention than they receive.

Take a few minutes to put their names forward. And if your own team has done something you are proud of, we want to hear about that too.

Submit your nominations for the 2026 DevOps Dozen Awards. Good luck to everyone participating.