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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about Linux distributions, with a practical emphasis on choosing the right platform for our needs and performing the related installation procedures. Along the way, we showcased some hands-on, real-world scenarios that we thought are relevant for the topics covered, and to better capture the why or how of what we learned.

Throughout the chapter, the main emphasis has been on the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux distributions. In the spirit of the practical approach, we covered both physical and VM environments running Linux. We also took a short route through the Windows realm, where we touched upon WSL, a modern-day abstraction of Linux as a native Windows application.

We took the exercise of building a Linux workstation with some hands-on examples of how to customize the applications and tools we need for our everyday work.

With the skills learned in this chapter, we hope you'll have a better understanding of how to choose different flavors of Linux distros based on your needs. You've learned how to install and configure Linux on a variety of platforms: server, desktop, VM, and WSL. We also started exploring using the Linux command-line terminal for some of the tasks described in our case studies. You will use some of these skills throughout the rest of the book, but most importantly, you'll now be comfortable quickly deploying the Linux distribution of your choice and testing with it.

In today's increasingly rapid and agile development environments, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) infrastructures make heavy use of Linux distros. Future chapters will introduce you to containerized workflows, and the knowledge gained in this chapter will help you with the design and deployment efforts of Linux containers.

Starting with the next chapter, we'll take a closer look at the various Linux subsystems, components, services, and applications. Chapter 2, The Linux Filesystem, will familiarize you with the Linux filesystem internals and related tools.