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

Understanding Linux containers

As has already been demonstrated by now, there are two major types of virtualization: VM-based and container-based. We discussed VM-based virtualization in the previous section, and now it is time to explain what containers are. At a very basic, conceptual level, containers are similar to VMs. They have similar purposes – allowing an isolated environment to run, only that they are different in so many ways that they can hardly be called similar.

Containers versus VMs

As you already know, a VM emulates the machine's hardware and uses it as if there were several different machines available. By comparison, containers do not replicate the physical machine's hardware. They do not emulate anything.

A container shares the base OS kernel together with shared libraries and binaries needed for certain applications to run. The applications are contained inside the container, isolated from the rest of the system. They also share a network...