A curated list of awesome tools and services for server deployment, management, and operations. Includes both open-source self-hosted projects and cloud services, organized by functionality.
Contributions welcome! Follow the Awesome guidelines.
- Deployment & Provisioning
- Monitoring & Alerting
- Backup & Recovery
- Logging & Tracing
- Load Balancing & Proxying
- Configuration Management
- Security & Firewalls
- Web Servers & Reverse Proxies
- Performance & Optimization
- Remote Access & Terminal Management
- Containers & Virtualization
- Serverless & Cloud Services
- Contributing
- License
- Terraform – IaC for multi-cloud/on-prem.
- AWS CloudFormation – AWS IaC via YAML/JSON templates.
- Pulumi – IaC with real programming languages.
- Packer – Automated VM/container image builds.
- Vagrant – Reproducible dev VMs & environments.
- Capistrano – SSH app deployment (Ruby).
- Fabric – SSH automation (Python).
- Foreman – Lifecycle management & provisioning.
- Cobbler – Network/PXE OS provisioning.
- Spinnaker – Multi-cloud continuous delivery.
- Prometheus – Metrics & alerting (CNCF).
- Grafana – Dashboards & visualization.
- Nagios – Classic host/service monitoring.
- Zabbix – Enterprise infra monitoring.
- Icinga – Modern Nagios fork + API.
- Netdata – Real-time per-second monitoring.
- Datadog – SaaS observability platform.
- New Relic – APM & infra monitoring.
- PagerDuty – Incident & on-call management.
- Checkmk – Comprehensive monitoring suite.
- Bacula – Enterprise backup suite.
- BorgBackup – Deduplicating encrypted backups.
- Restic – Fast, secure backups to many backends.
- Duplicati – Encrypted backups with web UI.
- rsnapshot – rsync-based snapshot backups.
- UrBackup – Client/server file & image backups.
- Rclone – Sync/backup to cloud storage.
- Velero – Kubernetes backups & DR.
- Elastic Stack (ELK) – Elasticsearch, Logstash/Beats, Kibana.
- Graylog – Centralized log management.
- Grafana Loki – Cost-effective log aggregation.
- Splunk – Enterprise log analytics (commercial).
- Sentry – Error tracking & performance.
- Jaeger – Distributed tracing (CNCF).
- Zipkin – Distributed tracing.
- Fluentd – Unified log data collector.
- HAProxy – High-performance L4/L7 load balancer.
- Traefik – Cloud-native reverse proxy/ingress.
- Envoy – High-performance service proxy.
- Nginx – Web server & reverse proxy.
- Apache Traffic Server – Caching proxy/LB.
- NGINX Plus – Nginx with enterprise features.
- AWS Elastic Load Balancing – Managed L4/L7 load balancers.
- Cloudflare – Edge proxy, CDN, LB, security.
- Kong – API gateway on Nginx.
- Ansible – Agentless automation with YAML playbooks.
- Puppet – Declarative CM with agent/master.
- Chef – Ruby-based recipes & cookbooks.
- Salt Project – Event-driven CM & remote exec.
- CFEngine – Lightweight, scalable CM.
- cloud-init – First-boot cloud instance config.
- Fail2ban – Ban abusive IPs via logs.
- Wazuh – HIDS/SIEM (OSSEC-based).
- Snort – Network IDS/IPS.
- Suricata – High-performance IDS/IPS/NSM.
- ClamAV – Open-source antivirus.
- HashiCorp Vault – Secrets management.
- pfSense – FreeBSD-based firewall/router.
- OPNsense – Modern FreeBSD firewall.
- Certbot – Let’s Encrypt certificates.
- OpenSCAP – Compliance & vulnerability scanning.
- Apache HTTP Server – Ubiquitous web server.
- Nginx – High-perf web server & proxy.
- Caddy – Automatic HTTPS by default.
- Lighttpd – Lightweight web server.
- Microsoft IIS – Windows web server.
- Apache Tomcat – Java Servlet/JSP container.
- Node.js / Express – JS runtime + web framework.
- Varnish Cache – HTTP accelerator/cache.
- Memcached – Simple distributed cache.
- Redis – In-memory data store & cache.
- Apache JMeter – Load testing.
- Gatling – High-load testing with reports.
- Locust – Python-based load testing.
- wrk – Modern HTTP benchmarking.
- k6 – Scriptable load testing (OSS).
- OpenSSH – Secure shell suite.
- PuTTY – SSH/Telnet client for Windows.
- Mosh – Roaming, robust SSH alternative.
- tmux – Terminal multiplexer.
- GNU Screen – Terminal multiplexer.
- Apache Guacamole – Clientless RDP/VNC/SSH in browser.
- Remmina – Remote desktop client (Linux).
- Teleport – Unified access plane (SSH/K8s/DBs).
- MeshCentral – Web-based remote management.
- NoMachine – High-perf remote desktop.
- Docker – Standard container platform.
- Docker Compose – Multi-container apps.
- Kubernetes – Container orchestration (CNCF).
- Minikube / Kind – Local K8s.
- Helm – K8s package manager.
- Podman – Daemonless/rootless containers.
- LXC / LXD – System containers.
- KVM – Linux hypervisor.
- QEMU – Emulator/virtualizer.
- VirtualBox – Desktop virtualization.
- Proxmox VE – VM+container platform.
- VMware vSphere – Enterprise virtualization.
- XCP-ng – Xen-based virtualization platform.
- Nomad – Workload orchestrator (containers & more).
- OpenStack – Private cloud IaaS.
-
Functions / FaaS
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Platforms / PaaS
-
Containers on Cloud
- Amazon EKS / ECS
- Google Cloud Run
- Azure Container Apps
- AWS CDK – IaC for AWS in code.
Pull requests are welcome! Please:
- Add one link per bullet, keep descriptions short, clear, and unbiased.
- Use the format:
[Name](link) – short description. - Ensure the project is actively maintained and relevant.
- Sort items alphabetically within each section when adding new entries.
Released under CC0 1.0 – do whatever you want with it.
