I recently attended the Velocity Conference and DevOps Days in the Bay Area. While I usually pride myself in being “in the know” of what is available and possible. It never fails that every time I do a search on some aspect of the development process, or attend events like these, I’m shocked to discover at least three new tools I have not heard of. “What’s this… yet another functional testing tool? Let me guess, you do performance monitoring? System alerts by carrier pigeon? Cool, configuration management that also repairs your TV.” There are so many tools and their competitive advantages are usually so specific you really have to work for the company to understand them. So how do you possibly make sense of this space? And what is next?