Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation on Linux

By : James Freeman
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation on Linux

By: James Freeman

Overview of this book

Automation is paramount if you want to run Linux in your enterprise effectively. It helps you minimize costs by reducing manual operations, ensuring compliance across data centers, and accelerating deployments for your cloud infrastructures. Complete with detailed explanations, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will teach you how to manage your Linux estate and leverage Ansible to achieve effective levels of automation. You'll learn important concepts on standard operating environments that lend themselves to automation, and then build on this knowledge by applying Ansible to achieve standardization throughout your Linux environments. By the end of this Linux automation book, you'll be able to build, deploy, and manage an entire estate of Linux servers with higher reliability and lower overheads than ever before.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Core Concepts
5
Section 2: Standardizing Your Linux Servers
10
Section 3: Day-to-Day Management
16
Section 4: Securing Your Linux Servers

Understanding CIS Benchmarks

Before we delve into what a CIS Benchmark actually consists of, let's take a look at why they exist and, conceptually, what they are.

What is a CIS Benchmark?

Securing servers, regardless of their operating system, is a big task. It requires being constantly up to date with new attack vectors and vulnerabilities as they are discovered (see the mention of the DROWN attack and SSLv2 in the introduction to this chapter). Some things are well-known and considered normal. For example, on Linux, it is generally frowned upon to ever log in as root—instead, it is almost universally recognized that each individual user should have their own user account and should perform all commands requiring...