Here at Tensure, we love tools that make our lives in tech easy.
Check out the following 5 tools that get our DevOps Engineers raving:
One of the hardest things for a DevOps engineer to do is import manually-created resources (like networks and machines) into an easily digestible pre-written module (like Terraform) that can be used repeatedly within a new, improved, and more automated infrastructure – an infrastructure that works with less overhead from you.
DevOps is all about automating your existing programs and making them run smarter with less work from the human side of things. Gcloud Bulk Export makes that happen.
Pretend you’re a DevOps engineer who is super busy, and quickly created a project without writing everything down along the way. Later, you’re kicking yourself, because you should have used Terraform (or Infrastructure as Code), so you could easily build it again for someone else.
Gcloud Bulk Export is an awesome tool that lets you easily and more quickly extract what you did in the first project into Terraform, so you can do it again for a new project.
From the technical side of things, DevOps Engineer, James Dreier, has this to say:
“Importing resources from the cloud into terraform is a nightmare. There are so many ways to mess it up, and it’s slow to iterate. Bulk Export helps us speed up the process with more reliable results. We use it to build terraformed infrastructure from existing infrastructure. It provides the snippets we need to add the resource and the command to successfully import it.”
KEDA is an open-source framework, driven by custom metrics, that drives application autoscaling. Meaning, if you have KEDA in your Kubernetes cluster, the code will decide when and how much autoscaling your application needs.
Let’s say you have an application that isn’t seeing a lot of action, but suddenly, it goes viral. Once configured, KEDA will see the spike in activity happening, and send extra “worker bees” to compensate and finish the work faster. All with less oversight from you, and your engineers.
David Ramsington, DevOps Expert, adds:
“I love KEDA. It reduces wasting of resources while keeping up with random bursts of activity. It is a much more sensical way of autoscaling than saturating workers with massive amounts of work every time activity spikes.”
Ansible is an open-source software framework, where authors like Jeff Geerling can write epic, out-of-the-box “playbooks” for DevOps and Kubernetes. These “playbooks” make server and configuration management, as well as app deployment automation that much easier on developers.
DevOps Experts, like David and James, use Geerling’s code to automate scripts for one-time, repeatable, multi-step tasks that would otherwise take up loads of time and resources.
“Jeff Geerling is my hero, and I do everything to be like him!” says David. “I’m only sort-of kidding *laughs*. Ansible is a great productivity tool that unifies the tooling needed to automate tasks, and Geerling’s work has made a massive difference in making that happen.”
JSON – or JavaScript Object Notation – is a publicly available, standard way that information is stored in a computer file. It’s a way for human people to easily encode information and exchange data within a computer framework – usually used when data is being sent from a server to a web page.
JSON Incremental Digger is an awesome little tool that allows developers to step through a JSON data set easily, and with less confusion.
JSON data sets can get HUGE, and as James mentions, “it can be very overwhelming to read the data when looking at it all at once. Incremental Digger helps simplify the data, and lets me move through it one step at a time.”
Raindrop.io is basically bookmarking on steroids. You know all those bookmarked pages in your browser that get lost in random folders, and sometimes, you just can’t quite remember where you put that awesome article with that epic idea, but you have the urge to share it like, “right-the-F” now?
Yea, we’ve all been there. Raindrop.io collects everything in one place, so you can stay organized, and actually remember where that awesome idea landed, when you saved it three weeks ago…
James adds,
“There are so many things I read throughout a normal work day, that keeping tabs on 400 pages in Chrome is a giant pain. Raindrop gives me somewhere to put all those tabs, so I can dynamically find them when I need them most!”
Tools that make life easy are key to success in the tech environment. Our DevOps experts at Tensure Consulting are always on the look-out for the next best thing that will make their jobs run smarter.
