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

Knowing when to deviate from standards

It would be easy to oversell the benefits of standardization, and they are certainly a requirement for automation to be effective. However, like anything, it can be taken too far. There is no point, for example, building servers on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 in 2019 simply because this was once defined as a standard (it is now End of Life and no longer supported or updated). Similarly, from time to time, software vendors will have qualified their product on certain specific Linux distributions or application stacks and will not provide support unless their software is run within that ecosystem.

These are cases when deviations from the SOE are necessary, but they should be performed in a controlled manner. For example, if a business has built up its Linux server estate on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and then a new software stack is purchased...