Technologies to look into as a sysadmin

These are some of the technologies that I think are either established, or new and promising, but all useful for sysadmins, no matter what their level of expertise is. Some of them I am already familiar with, some are on my TODO list, some I am exploring currently. They all reflect my own taste, so YMMV.

Operating systems

• Ubuntu

Programming/scripting languages

• Go
• Python/Ruby

Configuration management

• Chef
• Ansible

Monitoring/graphing/logging/searching

• Sensu
• Graphite
• Logstash
• ElasticSearch

Load balancer/Web server

• HAProxy
• Nginx

Relational databases

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

Non-relational distributed databases

• Riak
• Cassandra

Service discovery

• etcd
• consul

Virtualization

• KVM
• Vagrant
• Docker

Software defined networking (SDN)

• Open vSwitch

IaaS

• OpenStack

PaaS

• CloudFoundry

This should keep most people in the industry busy for a while ;-)