Book Image

Mastering Linux Administration

By : Alexandru Calcatinge, Julian Balog
Book Image

Mastering Linux Administration

By: Alexandru Calcatinge, Julian Balog

Overview of this book

Linux plays a significant role in modern data center management and provides great versatility in deploying and managing your workloads on-premises and in the cloud. This book covers the important topics you need to know about for your everyday Linux administration tasks. The book starts by helping you understand the Linux command line and how to work with files, packages, and filesystems. You'll then begin administering network services and hardening security, and learn about cloud computing, containers, and orchestration. Once you've learned how to work with the command line, you'll explore the essential Linux commands for managing users, processes, and daemons and discover how to secure your Linux environment using application security frameworks and firewall managers. As you advance through the chapters, you'll work with containers, hypervisors, virtual machines, Ansible, and Kubernetes. You'll also learn how to deploy Linux to the cloud using AWS and Azure. By the end of this Linux book, you'll be well-versed with Linux and have mastered everyday administrative tasks using workflows spanning from on-premises to the cloud. If you also find yourself adopting DevOps practices in the process, we'll consider our mission accomplished.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Linux Basic Administration
7
Section 2: Advanced Linux Server Administration
13
Section 3: Cloud Administration

Introducing Ansible

In the opening paragraph of this chapter, we captured one of the essential aspects of Ansible – it's a tool for automating workflows. Almost any Linux system administration task can be automated using Ansible. Using the Ansible CLI, we can invoke simple commands to change the desired state of a system. Usually, with Ansible, we execute tasks on a remote host or a group of hosts.

Let's use the classic illustration of package management. Suppose you're managing an infrastructure, which includes a group of web servers, and you plan to install the latest version of a web server application (Nginx or Apache) on all of them. One way to accomplish this task is to SSH into each host and run the related shell commands to install the latest web server package. If you have a lot of machines, this will be a big task. You could argue that you can write a script to automate this job. This is possible, but then you'd have yet another job on your hand...