Unix/Linux Infrastructure Operations (ULIO)

Synopsis

Return to Outlines

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

Students are expected to be competent Unix/Linux system admins and engineers from ISPs, Research and Education Networks (RENs), universities, or companies who are responsible for local system infrastructure in their organizations.

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

Return to Outlines