Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) is the curator behind Devops Weekly - the incredibly popular email newsletter for all things operations and devops related. We asked Gareth to share his favourite tools of 2014 so hopefully you’ll find something useful to try on your Brightbox instances :)
Socketplane have released a technology preview of their container networking technology. The preview features things like ZeroConf multi-host networking for Docker, support for multiple networks and distributed IP Address Management (IPAM).
Lots of interest at the moment in how to run containers across multiple hosts, and part of that is the network layer. Weave is a router that runs in a container, designed for connecting together docker containers.
osquery, released by Facebook exposes information about your operating system via a SQL interface, allowing for some pretty powerful tooling. Also supports querying across multiple hosts.
Log File Navigator is an advanced log file viewer for the small-scale. It’s only really useful for a single host but provides some impressive command line visualisation tools as well as a powerful SQL query engine.
Sysdig is a new Linux system troubleshooting tool, described as a combination of strace, tcpdump and lsof. The examples are pretty impressive and you can imagine lots of tools you could build on top of this.
Rancher is an attempt to bring AWS-like functions, such as EBS, VPC, ELB and Security Groups, and make them available across any servers, using docker under the hood.
Kubernetes is the open source version of Google’s container cluster manager, including support for docker. The setup instructions are based around Google Compute Engine but the software can run anywhere.
Walter is described as a tiny deployment pipeline. It reminds me of the wercker build file, but can run locally as well as within a CI system. Useful for testing pipelines locally.
Boxstarter is a tool for bootstrapping a new Windows machine. It makes heavy use of Choclately packages and provides a number of very simple ways of getting started. Great documentation too.
Blender is a modular remote command execution framework. It provides a few basic primitives to automate cross server workflows, with those workflows expressed in a ruby DSL and executed using the provided command line tools.
What are some of your favourite devops tools?
