100 Days of Cloud – Day 40: Linux Cloud Engineer Bootcamp, Day 3

Its Day 40 of my 100 Days of Cloud Journey, and today I’m back taking Day 3 of the Cloudskills.io Linux Cloud Engineer Bootcamp

This is being run over 4 Fridays by Mike Pfieffer and the folks over at Cloudskills.io, and is focused on the following topics:

• Scripting
• Administration
• Networking
• Web Hosting
• Containers

If you recall, on Day 26 I did Day 1 of the bootcamp, and completed Day 2 on Day 33 after coming back from my AWS studies. Having completed my Terraform learning journey for now, I’m back to look at Day 3.

The bootcamp livestream started on November 12^th, continued on Friday November 19th and December 3^rd, and completed on December 10^th. So I’m a wee bit behind! However, you can sign up for this at any time to watch the lectures to your own pace (which I’m doing here) and get access to the Lab Exercises on demand at this link:

https://cloudskills.io/courses/linux

Week 3 consisted of Mike going through the steps to create a website hosted on Azure using the LAMP Stack:

No, not that type of lamp stack. I had heard the LAMP Stack before but never really paid much attention to it because in reality, it sounded too much like programming and web development to me. The LAMP Stack refers to the following:

• L – Linux Operating System
• A – Apache Web Server
• M -MySQL Database
• P – PHP

The LAMP Stack is used in some of the most popular websites in used on the internet today, as its an OpenSource and low cost alternative to commercial software packages.

At the time of writing this post, the world is in the grip of responding to the Log4j vulnerability, so the word “Apache” might scream out to you as something that we shouldn’t be doing. Follow the advice from your software or hardware vendor, and patch as much as you can and as quickly as you can. There is an excellent GitHub Repository here with full details and updates from all major vendors, its a good one to bookmark to check and see if you or your Customers infrastructure may be affected.

The alternative to the LAMP Stack is the MEAN Stack (I could go for another funny meme here but that would be too predicatable!). MEAN stands for:

• M – MongoDB (data storage)
• E – Express.js (server-side application framework)
• A – AngularJS (client-side application framework)
• N – Node.js (server-side language environment although Express implies Node.js)

Different components, but still open source so essentially trying to achieve the same thing. There is a Microsoft Learn path covering Linux on Azure, which contains a full module on building and running a Web Application with the MEAN Stack on an Azure Linux VM – this is well worth a look.

Conclusion

That’s all for this post – I’ll update as I go through the remaining weeks of the Bootcamp, but to learn more and go through the full content of lectures and labs, sign up at the link above.

I’ll leave you with a quote I heard during the bootcamp that came from the AWS re:Invent 2021 conference – every day there are 60 million EC2 instances spun up around the world. Thats 60 million VMs! And if we look at the Global Market Share across the Cloud providers, AWS has approx 32%. Azure has 21%, GCP has 8%, leaving the rest with 39%. So its safe to say over 100 million VMs daily across the world. It means VMs are still pretty important despite the push to go serverless.

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!