The Toolkit

Below are the different tools and resources that I use and recommend from time to time.

Learning/Training

Books

• Google’s SRE Books
• The DevOps Handbook
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• The Phoenix Project / The Unicorn Project
• O’Reilly press books
• Microsoft press books
• Packt Publishing

Podcasts

• This Week in Tech, TWiT
• A16z Podcast - Andreessen Horowitz
• TED Talks Technology
• The Verge, Vergecast
• Random Tech Chat
• Joe Rogan Experience
• Peter Schiff Podcast
• Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Online Training

Free

• Instruqt
• Linux Foundation
• Microsoft Learn
• Y Combinator Hacker News
• www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/wiki/bootcamp
• Spiceworks Community
• Couchbase Academy
• Elastic.co
• HashiCorp Learn

Paid

• Pluralsight
• LinkedIn Training / Lynda.com
• Udemy
• ITPro.tv
• Coursera
• New Horizons

Tools / Services

Operating Systems

• Microsoft Windows
• Apple MacOS
• Ubuntu
• Linux Mint
• Debian
• RedHat Enterprise Linux
• CentOS
• Fedora

Hypervisors and Virtual Environments

• VirtualBox
• VMware Workstation
• VMware Fusion (MacOS)

DevOps

• PuTTY
• Git, Github, and Gitlab
• Docker
• Vagrant
• VirtualBox
• Go
• Python
• Cygwin
• REST clients - Postman, Insomnia, Fiddler
• IDEs - Visual Studio Code, XCode, pyCharm, Eclipse

Configuration Management

• Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Management (formerly System Center Configuration Manager)
• Microsoft Intune
• Microsoft PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)
• Ansible
• Salt (a.k.a. Salt Stack)
• Puppet
• Chef

Data Science and Database (Tools only)

• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
• Azure Data Studio
• MySQL Workbench
• R Studio
• Jupyter Notebooks

Troubleshooting / Datacenter Tools

• Netbox
• Wireshark
• Cisco Utilities
• nMap

Monitoring / Uptime

• Elastic Stack (ELK Stack)
• Nagios
• Prometheus & Grafana
• Icinga
• Spiceworks

Cloud Hosted Providers

• Rackspace
• Microsoft Azure (Azure)
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Digital Ocean
• Linode

Text Editors

• Visual Studio Code
• Notepad++
• Atom.io
• Sublime Text

Knowledge Sharing, Note taking, Collaboration

• Microsoft OneNote
• Evernote
• Google Keep
• Confluence
• Trello
• Jira
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams

Other helpful tools and general stuff

• Firefox, Chrome
• Windows Terminal
• mRemoteNG
• 7-zip
• AdoptOpenJDK
• Chocolatey
• Greenshot
• Paint.NET
• WinSCP
• Windows Sysinternals

Web Utilities

• https://mockaroo.com/ - Data generator for databases
• http://www.yamllint.com/ - YAML validator
• https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/ - Markdown Guide
• https://regex101.com/ - Test out and write your regular expressions
• Grok Constructor (for Logstash filter testing)
• Grok Debugger (for Logstash filter testing)