Book Image

Hands-On Linux Administration on Azure

By : Frederik Vos
Book Image

Hands-On Linux Administration on Azure

By: Frederik Vos

Overview of this book

Azure’s market share has increased massively and enterprises are adopting it rapidly, while Linux is a widely-used operating system and has proven to be one of the most popular workloads on Azure. It has thus become crucial for Linux administrators and Microsoft professionals to be well versed with managing Linux workloads in an Azure environment. With this guide, system administrators will be able to deploy, automate, and orchestrate containers in Linux on Azure. The book follows a hands-on approach to help you understand DevOps, monitor Linux workloads on Azure and perform advanced system administration. Complete with systematic explanations of concepts, examples and self-assessment questions, the chapters will give you useful insights into Linux and Azure. You’ll explore some of Linux’s advanced features for managing multiple workloads and learn to deploy virtual machines (VMs) in Azure. Dedicated sections will also guide you with managing and extending Azure VMs’ capabilities and understanding automation and orchestration with Ansible and PowerShell DSC. In later chapters, you’ll cover useful Linux troubleshooting and monitoring techniques that will enable you to maintain your workload on Azure. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to make the most out of Azure’s services to efficiently deploy and manage your Linux workloads.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Vagrant and Packer

Until now, we used solutions provided by Microsoft; maybe we should call them native solutions. That's not the only way to deploy your workload in Azure. Many vendors have created solutions to automate deployments in Azure. In this section, I want to cover a solution from a company called HashiCorp (https://www.hashicorp.com). Later on in this chapter, I'll cover another product from this company: Packer. There are several reasons why I have chose these products:

  • The products are very popular and well-known.
  • There is an excellent relationship between Microsoft and HashiCorp; they work very hard together to implement more and more features.
  • And, the most important reason: they have different products that you can use for different implementation scenarios. This will make you think again about what method you want to choose in different use cases.
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