How to handle toolchain complexity creep.

Hi there,

I am a software developer that also does operations from time to time. I am worried about the ever increasing complexity of the tools we use in operations and development. In my office, we now use more than 20 different tools to develop and run our software: Ansible to configure Kubernetes, Kubernetes to run docker containers, docker to encapsulate services, sentry to manage alerts, kibana / ELK to aggregate logs, Hashicorp Vault to manage secrets, gitlab + gitlab runners for CI/CD, JIRA+Confluence for Project Management, Zeplin to share Design / Frontend Ideas, Mattermost and some bots for chat and a couple of other services for other tasks: message brokers, database management, code audits and analysis, dependency management and so on…

All of them are great tools for the task they should do, but I am beginning to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of this whole zoo. I know some of the tools very well, but for others I have to lookup config options, quirks and tricks all over again — even if I’ve done it a thousand times before.

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Do you also perceive this as a problem? Do you have specialized roles in your team for different tool-chains? How do you handle the configuration complexity zoo?