Tools Thoughtworks Technology Radar 56. Clumio Protect Trial We’ve had success with Clumio Protect for backing up AWS data, particularly S3. A commercial SaaS solution, Clumio Protect can also back up a range of other AWS services and stores the data offline where it is not accessible through the internet. Our teams responsible for handling data protection and recovery at massive scale found that Clumio Protect is easy to set up and maintain and far outperforms the native AWS Backup service when S3 buckets are particularly big. 57. Cruft Trial We’ve been talking about tailored service templates ever since we first identified microservices as a thing. If an organization sets out to create a collection of small services that can be developed, built, deployed and operated independently but consistently, it makes sense to give teams a solid starting point that aligns to the standard. However, one of the enduring problems with that approach is that as the template evolves over time in response to changing technical and business requirements, projects based on older versions of the template fall out of date. Retrofitting template improvements into an established project becomes a major pain. Cruft attempts to address this problem by providing tools to identify and patch differences between a local project and the current head of a master template repository. It combines the Cookiecutter templating engine with git hashes to identify and apply changes to the templates. Think of it as a package manager for a project boilerplate. Keeping templates up-to-date is a notoriously difficult and long-standing problem, so to us the solution Cruft provides sounds almost too good to be true. Based on early feedback from our team, however, Cruft actually works and makes life easier for service builders and maintainers. We’re anxious to see how it performs over the long term, but for now it’s worth taking a look at this potentially useful tool. 58. Excalidraw Trial We continue to hear enthusiastic reports about Excalidraw from our teams, but our previous caveat about security remains in place. Excalidraw is a simple yet powerful online drawing tool. Sometimes teams just need a quick picture instead of a formal diagram; for remote teams, Excalidraw provides a quick way to create and share diagrams. Our teams also like the “lo-fi” look of the diagrams it can produce, which is reminiscent of the whiteboard diagrams they would have produced when co- located. Regarding security, at the time of writing, anyone who has the link can see your diagrams; note, though, that the paid version of Excalidraw provides further authentication and options to run a server locally do exist. 59. Hadolint Trial We like spreading the word about linting tools that actually help you find issues rather than just shortcut style disputes in the team. Hadolint is one of those tools — it helps find common issues in Dockerfiles. We find it to be fast, accurate and with good documentation. It explains both how to fix an issue and why it’s an issue in the first place, thus nudging Dockerfile authors toward good practices. Incidentally, Hadolint is built on top of ShellCheck, which we recommend in its own right for checking your shell scripts. © Thoughtworks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 29