Tuesday, May 20, 2014

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 ;-)

Modifying EC2 security groups via AWS Lambda functions

One task that comes up again and again is adding, removing or updating source CIDR blocks in various security groups in an EC2 infrastructur...