Jonathon Thurman

When I first started as a sysadmin many years ago, I quickly realized what a daunting task was before me. Like any good engineer, I took to finding the right tools to keep at hand to make light work out of the most difficult situations. This in itself was quite an endeavor, as over the years there has been a proliferation of tools and scripts. Many are of the artisanal, organic, hand-crafted variety, forged out of bash pipelines by our forefathers.

Much of that has changed now as the DevOps movement strengthens. With closer interaction between developers and operations, or even operations teams composed of developers, the tools have significantly improved. Treating infrastructure as code with automated configuration management and provisioning tools have freed many from the menial tasks of creating snowflake systems, and we’ve turned our attention to the more important matters of scaling and optimizing our systems.

In my Velocity report, 5 Unsung Tools of DevOps, I highlight a few of the tools that have gone unnoticed—or at least unrecognized—for some time. These are but a few of the tools that recognized needs early on and that successfully solve real-world problems that you’re likely to encounter today. Here is a brief synopsis:

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