Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
https://www.packtpub.com/product/the-linux-devops-handbook/9781803245669
Price: $39-49 USD
Blurb: “This book is designed to be a comprehensive guide to DevOps, covering everything from choosing the right Linux distribution to avoiding pitfalls in DevOps. Each chapter in this book provides detailed information and practical examples to help you understand the concepts and apply them to real-world scenarios.“
I was looking for a book to bind what I knew about “devops”. Instead of being unconnected pieces of information, I was hoping to find how some stuff ties together, but on a practical level. I had the 1000ft overview, OK, I wasn’t too concrete on that either, but I was planning on clearing up my picture. I settled on this Packt title. I knew what docker and kubernetes, etc, were, but not coming from that side of the IT world, I decided everything I knew needed polish. Luckily for me, this title was authored by two Polish gentlemen. OK, I’ll see myself out.
We start out with “Linux Basics”, explaining distributions, but it is not hard to realise these polish gentlemen are biased. RHEL stuff is in bold, but Debian and Ubuntu are not treated the same. I will put an example in. Luckily, none of the examples or homework in the book is distribution-specific, so you can use whatever distribution you like. I just thought that was interesting and wanted to point it out.
Luckily, the chapter is concise and to the point, and an easy read for any devops newbie.
We then move to “command-line basics”, and again we are given information in concise, easy to assimilate, chunks. Instead of faffing with bash or zsh, you are told which directories you should familiarise yourself with, and the importance thereof. They touch on a few commands, but sort of funnel you to the man pages. They touch on permissions and processes, and then how to manipulate files, before giving you some basic homework. Up until this point, anyone with zero Linux experience, should be comfortable.
As we move into “Intermediate Linux”, you would need some Linux knowledge. Though the concepts are explained well, if you have not dipped your toes into the Linux ecosystem, some of the concepts may be lost to you. The authors did, however, specify in the beginning of the book that: “This book is designed for individuals who have already gained some knowledge and experience in the field of software development and IT operations, and are now seeking to further expand their knowledge of DevOps and Linux systems.” That said, I would still recommend this book to any newbie wanting to learn devops. You just need to fire up a virtual machine with Linux and follow along. Everything you need is touched upon, with just enough to get you going. The part on ssh is thorough enough to keep you safe and do your job.
It starts to get interesting with “Automating with shell scripts”. In each chapter, the difficulty level is raised another step, but not at the expense of the newbie reader. It is just enough to keep you coming back for more and keeping the book interesting. You are not just shown basic shell scripting and kicked from the nest, this section covers right up to debugging your scripts, something I find invaluable. You can see the authors’ field is Linux troubleshooting, this is the chapter it shines through.
Though the chapter covering automation came before and only covered cron, I would have preferred if it came after (the automation part), and joined shell scripting automation recipes and real world examples. I mean it would be a “nice to have” and not crucial.
Part 2 covers the day-to-day part of devops. Because almost all the modern distributions have systemd, we fall in the door with managing services. We even get to learn about other init systems, but we all know that, in production, with your RHEL or Ubuntu servers, we never use the others. The level of detail is amazing for the compactness and I dare say, newbies should also not have an issue here, but as a newbie, you cannot skim this chapter. Even I learned something new here, not that I know everything, not by a long shot, but it was refreshing.
In chapter 6 we move onto “networking” where we cover ground with the basics again, and because the book is new, netplan is also covered. Since a lot of your time will be checking ingress and egress ports on containers, etc, I do suggest you give this chapter another go. The reason I say this is because I was told by a mid-level dev that “all that old stuff you learned about networking is now out the window” – when we were talking about containers. It most certainly is not. In fact I would say it is even more prudent that you know this. The problem with IT today is that lots of stuff gets abstracted away to make the development cycle faster, making it easier to get more fingers on more keyboards coding, lowering that bar to entry.
Then, in Chapter 7, “Git” is the focus. Not an old git like me, but version management. Now this is where I currently am in the book, the next chapter being “Docker”, that I have skimmed over. Not skimming to skip, but skimming to judge content. I’m not going to lie to you, so far, I’m loving this book. It took a longer run up to get to the devops stuff than I expected, but that time you spend on the first six chapters will not be wasted.
After “docker” and the “deep dive into docker”, there is the “cloud kit” chapter that I’m looking forward to. I thought I would write this impression of the book now, while it is still fresh (it is a Christmas release as far as I can tell), even though I have not completed it 100%, as I have to put it down for a month or two as there are some work-related things that take precedence. I am really excited for this book, and I hope I have transferred that excitement to you. This needs to be on your desk, right now.
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