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Hands-On Linux for Architects
Hands-On Linux for Architects

Hands-On Linux for Architects: Design and implement Linux-based IT solutions

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5 (2 Ratings)
Paperback Apr 2019 380 pages 1st Edition
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Paperback Apr 2019 380 pages 1st Edition
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Paperback
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Hands-On Linux for Architects

Introduction to Design Methodology

These days, IT solutions require increased performance and data availability, and designing a robust implementation that meets these requirements is a challenge that many IT experts have to go through every day.

In this chapter, you will learn the basics, from a bird's-eye view of architecting IT solutions in any type of environment, to virtualized infrastructure, bare metal, and even the public cloud, as basic concepts of solution design apply to any environment.

You will explore the following subjects:

  • Defining the stages of solution design and why they matter
  • Analyzing the problem and asking the right questions
  • Considering possible solutions
  • Implementing the solution

Fully understanding the aspects that you need to consider when architecting a solution is crucial for the success of the project, as this will determine which software...

Defining the stages of solution design and why they matter

Like many things, designing solutions is a step-by-step process that not only involves: technical aspects, nor necessarily technical parties. Usually, you will be engaged by an account manager, project manager, or, if you are lucky, a CTO, who understands the technical part of the requirements. They are looking for an expert who can help them deliver a solution to a customer. These requests usually do not contain all the information you will need to deliver your solution, but it's a start to understand what your goal is.

For example, imagine that you receive an email from a project manager with the following statement.

We require a solution that can sustain at least 10,000 website hits and will stay available during updates as well as survive outages. Our budget is considerably low, so we need to spend as little as...

Analyzing the problem and asking the right questions

After getting the initial premise, you need to break it into smaller pieces in order to understand what is required. Each piece will raise different questions that you will ask your customers later. These questions will help fill in the gaps for your POC, ensuring that your questions cover all business needs from all view standpoints: the business standpoint, the functional standpoint, and, finally, the technical standpoint. One good way to keep track of the questions that arise and which business need they will be resolving is to have a checklist that asks which standpoint the question is being asked from and what is resolved or answered.

It is also important to note that, as questions become answers, they can also come with constraints or other obstacles that will also need to be addressed and mentioned during the POC stage...

Considering possible solutions

Once all the doubts that arose during the initial premise have been cleared, you can move on and construct a more elaborate and specific statement that includes all the information gathered. We will continue working with our previous statement and, assuming that our customer responded to all of our previous questions, we can construct a more detailed statement, as follows.

We require a new web server for our financial application that can sustain at least 10,000 web hits per second from approximately 2,000 users, alongside another three applications that will consume its data. It will be capable of withstanding maintenance and outages through the use of high-availability implementations with a minimum of four nodes. The budget for the project will be $20,000 for the initial implementation, and the project will utilize OSS, which will lower upfront...

Implementing the solution

Once the customer has selected the optimal route based on their business needs, we can start constructing our design. At this stage, you will be facing different obstacles, as implementing the POC in a development or QA environment might vary from production. Things that worked in QA or development may now fail in production, and different variables might be in place; all these things only arise at the implementation stage, and you need to be aware that, in a worst-case scenario, it might mean changing a large amount of the initial design.

This stage requires hands-on work with the customer and the customer's environment, so it is of utmost importance to ensure that the changes you make won't affect the current production. Working with the customer is also important, because this will familiarize their IT team with the new solution; this way...

Summary

Designing a solution requires different approaches. This chapter went through the basics of the design stages and why each of them matters.

The first stage goes through analyzing the problem the design aims to solve, while at the same time asking the right questions. This will help define the actual requirements and narrow the scope to the real business needs. Working with the initial problem statement will impose problems further down the road, making this stage extremely important, as it will prevent unnecessarily going back and forth.

Then, we considered the possible paths or solutions we can take to solve the already defined problem. With the right questions asked in the previous stage, we should be able to construct several options for the customer to select, and can later implement a POC. POCs help both customers and architects understand how the solution will...

Questions

  1. What are the stages of a solution design?
  2. Why is it important to ask the right questions when designing a solution?
  3. Why should we deliver several design options?
  4. What questions can be asked to obtain information that can help design a better solution?
  5. What is a POC?
  6. What happens in the implementation stage?
  7. How does the POC helps with the final implementation?

Further reading

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Key benefits

  • Gain a clear understanding of how to design a Linux environment
  • Learn more about the architecture of the modern Linux operating system(OS)
  • Understand infrastructure needs and design a high-performing computing environment

Description

It is very important to understand the ?exibility of an infrastructure when designing an efficient environment. In this book, you will cover everything from Linux components and functionalities through to hardware and software support, which will help you to implement and tune effective Linux-based solutions. This book gets started with an overview of Linux design methodology. Next, you will focus on the core concepts of designing a solution. As you progress, you will gain insights into the kinds of decisions you need to make when deploying a high-performance solution using Gluster File System (GlusterFS). In the next set of chapters, the book will guide you through the technique of using Kubernetes as an orchestrator for deploying and managing containerized applications. In addition to this, you will learn how to apply and configure Kubernetes for your NGINX application. You’ll then learn how to implement an ELK stack, which is composed of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. In the concluding chapters, you will focus on installing and configuring a Saltstack solution to manage different Linux distributions, and explore a variety of design best practices. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with designing a high-performing computing environment for complex applications to run on. By the end of the book, you will have delved inside the most detailed technical conditions of designing a solution, and you will have also dissected every aspect in detail in order to implement and tune open source Linux-based solutions

Who is this book for?

This intermediate-level book is for Linux system administrators, Linux support engineers, DevOps engineers, Linux consultants or any open source technology professional looking to learn or expand their knowledge in architecting, designing and implementing solutions based on Linux and open source software. Prior experience in Linux is required.

What you will learn

  • Study the basics of infrastructure design and the steps involved
  • Expand your current design portfolio with Linux-based solutions
  • Discover open source software-based solutions to optimize your architecture
  • Understand the role of high availability and fault tolerance in a resilient design
  • Identify the role of containers and how they improve your continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines
  • Gain insights into optimizing and making resilient and highly available designs by applying industry best practices

Product Details

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Publication date : Apr 30, 2019
Length: 380 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789534108
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Product Details

Publication date : Apr 30, 2019
Length: 380 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789534108
Concepts :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

21 Chapters
Section 1: High-Performance Storage Solutions with GlusterFS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Introduction to Design Methodology Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Defining GlusterFS Storage Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Architecting a Storage Cluster Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Using GlusterFS on the Cloud Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Analyzing Performance in a Gluster System Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 2: High-Availablility Nginx Web Application Using Kubernetes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating a Highly Available Self-Healing Architecture Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Understanding the Core Components of a Kubernetes Cluster Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Architecting a Kubernetes Cluster Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deploying and Configuring Kubernetes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 3: Elastic Stack Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Monitoring with the ELK Stack Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Designing an ELK Stack Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Using Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana to Manage Logs Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 4: System Management Using Saltstack Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Solving Management Problems with Salty Solutions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Getting Your Hands Salty Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Design Best Practices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Assessments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
(2 Ratings)
5 star 100%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
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1 star 0%
Pankaj Mar 17, 2021
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I enjoyed this book. It was easy to understand and answered a lot of my concerns in chapters which flow naturally from customer requirements, designing the central piece (storage) of the discussed customer requirement, to HA with Kubernetes, monitoring with ELK and when all of this feels too big of an infrastructure to maintain, it has a section on Infrastructure as code to understand how we can automate management of the said infrastructure.Overall, this is a great book to understand what all components are involved in a software solution which is highly scalable and available.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Jaime May 18, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Found this to be an excellent complement to my job as a solutions architect dedicated to CDNs and clouds. Covering from basics on Linux Machines to topics like Elasticsearch, Kibana and a nice intro to DevOps. The concepts covered will endure for years as they are the foundations of most of the IT solutions out there. The book is also written in an easy reading way so it is quick read.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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