Cloud eye for the sysadmin guy: Get tooled up proper, like Like it or not, the cloud in all forms is approaching at great speed, irrespective of your employer's size. All sysadmins need to get onboard or be left behind. Me? After 17 years working in a range of environments, I did at one point believe I had ages before the cloud arrived at large-scale enterprises like the one where I'm …
We have shifted to over to AWS, it turned out the easy part was shifting the servers, the hard part was moving our collective mindsets to leverage what AWS are offering and not code for the LAMP stack on the server / EC2 instance in the traditional way. Luckily I have a very good friend who is a great technical architect and will explain things for the price of a beer and lunch. We are getting there but some of it has made our collective heads spin.
Author here...
Personally (and it is just that) I recommend Pluralsight as they cover a wide range of topics of cloud to a good depth and what's nice is that they package them up so that you know where to start etc etc.
Disclaimer: I do actually get a free sub from them due to being a vExpert. That said, I would (and have) paid for it in the past, Pluralsight that is. ;) I just think they are good, affordable and you can even put the courses on your ipad/whatever for offline viewing (Think journey to work).
People looking to learn Azure however do have a bigger hill to climb because MS is stuck with the old Azure interface and the new and there are some gotchas. Even the experts moan about that :)
Finally, be careful on the docs you read/watch re: Azure. Anything older than mid 2015 is probably plain wrong these days. Not detracting from the platform, just sayin :)
I'm in the same boat as the author - trying to get up to speed following an on-high mandate to move systems up into the cloud.
I've found the "cloud guru" courses to be very good. I paid $69 for a pack of three courses covering Amazon's associate exams.
I've no affiliation with them at all, just a satisfied customer (and it's nice to hear training from an aussie for once!)
Sign up for a trial of PluralSight.. they have some good courses to get your started. I've worked through all of them before starting a Security role with a company which is "completely cloud"..
Its amazing - nearly every company I know using AWS are practisiing security likes its 2005! They have no IPS/IDS or Traffic filtering, very little visibility on traffic, they are solely getting by on Security Groups and AIM, then rely upon Golden AMI images to avoid infection - Apparently this is "best practise", trying to convince them otherwise is impossible.
Why not save yourself a grip of cash over *audible heaving* courseware and get some hands on experience? Sign up for GCE or AWS and use Ansible to start up a six node ElasticSearch cluster, with proper node role assignments, via Docker.
That's 3 marketable skills right there on your resume for the cost of a gas station coffee.
This. And pluralsight or Linux Academy. Even youtube ;-)
Plus AWS and GCE normally have a free period of a year in which you can play around in.
Linux Academy even have "AWS Labs", in which you use short-lived AWS instances. A couple of hours to practice what you learnt in the courses.
"our customers were demanding cloud and cloud is seen as a good way to cut physical footprint and help control costs"
What kind of business needs several thousands servers. Sounds like a serious case of over design. Or more likely a bad design that someone keeps throwing servers at. I suspect your customers aren't really demanding the cloud and moving to the cloud won't really save money. I mean you'll still have to pay for your licenses for your virtual servers in the cloud.
Go on, convince me otherwise, show me a fully worked out example of a company moving to the 'cloud' and saving money.
Any International Business.
Defining Server in the proper sense, as an application that 'serves' requests. Most businesses have not yet managed the trick of making all the teams use the same tools. Finance/Sales etc do not use the same reporting systems (in some places they do, but the general point stands)
You need systems for customer interfacing (support portals), Web sites (various), Reporting, Data Entry, Data Entry on the move (sales/presales teams), Logistics, Stock Control (industry dependant of course), Forecasting, Budgeting.....
I could sit and type for a long time, but you need database servers (lots of), web servers etc to manage each tool. Now let's talk about redundancy and load balancing servers, backups, high-availability, ESBs, Proxies, VPNs, email/phones..... then you have systems management (VMs), antivirus..... blah blah
I don't think a large business would struggle to hit the 1000 server mark - but perhaps I'm jaded by my own experiences.
As for saving money.... I totally agree. But it isn't about ACTUALLY saving money, it's about APPEARING to save money. Get that CapEx 'off the books' into OpEx, and 'earn' yourself a nice bonus. Ta dah. < Look, I AM jaded!
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