You're reading from Linux Administration Best Practices Practical solutions to approaching the design and management of Linux systems

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2022

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781800568792

Length 404 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

Linux

Concepts

System Administration

Author (1):

Scott Alan Miller

View More author details

Table of Contents (16) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Understanding the Role of Linux System Administrator

2. Chapter 1: What Is the Role of a System Administrator? FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Choosing Your Distribution and Release Model

4. Section 2: Best Practices for Linux Technologies

5. Chapter 3: System Storage Best Practices

6. Chapter 4: Designing System Deployment Architectures

7. Chapter 5: Patch Management Strategies

8. Chapter 6: Databases

9. Section 3: Approaches to Effective System Administration

10. Chapter 7: Documentation, Monitoring, and Logging Techniques

11. Chapter 8: Improving Administration Maturation with Automation through Scripting and DevOps

12. Chapter 9: Backup and Disaster Recovery Approaches

13. Chapter 10: User and Access Management Strategies

14. Chapter 11: Troubleshooting

15. Other Books You May Enjoy

Infrastructure as code

Taking concepts that we have discussed here and looking at them another way, we discover the concept of infrastructure as code. Meaning that we can write code or configuration files that represent the entirety of our infrastructure. This is powerful and liberating.

It is easy to confuse infrastructure as code concepts with state machine concepts because they will, in many cases, overlap quite extensively. There are critical differences, however.

Infrastructure as code can go hand in hand with state machines, but state machines do not allow for imperative system definitions. Infrastructure as code can be used to define state, also known as a declarative approach to infrastructure as code, or an imperative approach by which operations are defined rather than final state, making it feel much more like traditional systems administration where we focus on the means rather than the ends or the how rather than the goal.