System Administration and Infrastructure Operations (SAIO)
Synopsis
Provide students hands-on experience in tools and techniques to manage hundreds or thousands of Unix/Linux systems, in a repeatable and team-structured way.
Workshop Topics
- Introduction
- SSH key authentication
- Source-of-truth and Git
- Centralized authorization
- System containers with Incus
- ZFS (Zettabyte File System)
- Cloud-init
- Ansible Automation
- Inventory across infrastructure
- Terraform Infrastructure as Cloud (IaC)
- OCI (Open Container Initiative)
- Kubernetes demo
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery or Deployment) using GitOps
- Certificates
- Provisioning and managing hardware
- Monitoring and reporting
- Data management
Target Audience
Unix/Linux system administrators from ISPs, Research and Education Networks (RENs), universities, or companies who use the command line, routinely deal with daily system administration tasks, and now seek skills to more efficiently manage, automate, and maintain larger numbers of Internet systems and services.
Prerequisites
- Medium to advanced knowledge of the UNIX/Linux command line environment
- Basic knowledge of TCP/IP networking
- Participants are required to bring a laptop
- Participant laptops need to allow participants to update core settings
Objectives
At the end of the workshop, students will be able to (Core Goals):
- Manage a large number of devices and items across their infrastructure securely and reliably
- Learn how to make actions testable and repeatable, working with a "source of truth" that a team can use for reference and to recreate work done
- Automate the work process to keep things up to date and to deploy changes in both a test environment, then move approved changes to production
- Ensure the continuity of infrastructure and be able to recover from failures (such as using backups)
- Monitor, report, identify, and resolve issues
At the end of the workshop, students will be able to (Supporting Goals):
- Work with Git to form a "source of truth" for your infrastructure
- Lean how to implement a properly working centralized authorization model
- Work with SSH, keys, configuration, and port forwarding effectively
- Define ZFS filesystems to maintain and move containers across hosts
- Work with Ansible to automate the creation of systems across infrastructure
- Work with Ansible control tools, such as AWX, to automate Ansible system updates from a source of truth (Git)
- Consider methods for creating infrastructure inventory sources
- Use tools like Terraform to help create Virtual Machines within a cluster
- Learn how to use Open Container Initiative (OCI) images with tools like Docker (or Podman, or Incus)
- Use Kubernetes to build small K3s cluster
- Work with the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) concepts to build a simple CI/CD based pipeline
- Understand the core concepts behind how SSL certificates work and are used in web environments
- Understand the core concepts of provisioning hardware effectively and in a protected manner (control plane access only via Out of Band)
- Understand what and why we monitor and how to do this
- Protect data, and explain why data is the most important item to protect, as well as methods for doing this