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

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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 12th, continued on Friday November 19th and December 3rd, and completed on December 10th. 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:

A stack of Lamps

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!

100 Days of Cloud — Day 1: Preparing the Environment

Welcome to Day 1 of my 100 Days of Cloud Journey.

I’ve always believed that good preparation is the key to success, and Day 1 is going to be about setting up the environment for use.

I’ve decided to split my 100 days across 3 disciplines:

  • Azure, because it’s what I know
  • AWS, because its what I want to know more about
  • And the rest of it …. This could mean anything: GitOps, CI/CD, Python, Ansible, Terraform, and maybe even a bit of Google Cloud thrown in for good measure. There might even be some Office365 Stuff!

It’s not exactly going to be an exact 3-way split across the disciplines, but let’s see how it goes.

Let’s start the prep. The goal of the 100 Days for me is to try and show how things can be done/created/deleted/modified etc. using both GUI and Command Line. For the former, we’ll be going what it says on the tin and go clicking around the screen of whatever Cloud Portal we are using. For the latter, it’s going to be done in Visual Studio Code:

To download, we go to https://code.visualstudio.com/download , and choose to download the System Installer:

Once the download completes, run the installer (Select all options). Once it completes, launch Visual Studio Code:

After selecting what color theme you want, the first place to go is click on the Source Control button. This is important, we’re going to use Source Control to manage and track any changes we make, while also storing our code centrally in GitHub. You’ll need a GitHub account (or if you’re using Azure GitOps or AWS Code Commit, you can use this instead). For the duration of the 100 Days, I’ll be using GitHub. Once your account is created, you can create a new repository (I’m calling mine 100DaysRepo)

So now, let’s click on the “install git” option. This will redirect us to https://git-scm.com, where we can download the Git installer. When running the setup, we can do defaults for everything EXCEPT this screen, where we say we want Git to use Visual Studio Code as its default editor:

Once the Git install is complete, close and re-open Visual Studio Code. Now, we see we have the option to “Open Folder” or “Clone Repository”. Click the latter option, at the top of the screen we are prompted to provide the URL of the GitHub Repository we just created. Enter the URL, and click “Clone from GitHub”:

We get a prompt to say the extension wants to sign into GitHub — click “Allow”:

Clicking “Allow” redirects us to this page, click “Continue”:

This brings us to the logon prompt for GitHub:

This brings up “Success” message and an Auth Token:

Click on the “Signing in to github.com” message at the bottom of the screen, and then Paste the token from the screen above into the “Uri” at the top:

Once this is done, you will be prompted to select the local location to clone the Repository to. Once this has completed, click “Open Folder” and browse to the local location of the repository to open the repository in Visual Studio Code.

Now, let’s create a new file. It can be anything, we just want to test the commit and make sure it’s working. So let’s click on “File-New File”. Put some text in (it can be anything) and then save the file with whatever name you choose:

My file is now saved. And we can see that we now have an alert over in Source Control:

When we go to Source Control, we see the file is under “Changes”. Right-click on the file for options:

We can choose to do the following:

– Discard Changes — reverts to previous saved state

– Stage Changes — saves a copy in preparation for commit

When we click “Stage Changes”, we can see the file moves from “Changes” to “Staged Changes”. If we click on the file, we can see the editor brings up the file in both states — before and after changes:

From here, click on the menu option (3 dots), and click “Commit”. We can also use the tick mark to Commit:

This then prompts to provide a commit message. Enter something relevant to the changes you’ve made here and hit enter:

And it fails!!!

OK, so we need to configure a Name and Email ID in GitBash. So open GitBash and run the following:

git config — global user.name “your_name”
git config — global user.email “your_email_id”

So let’s try that again. We’ll commit first:

Looks better, so now we’ll do a Push:

And check to see if our file is in VS Code? Yes it is!

OK, so that’s our Repository done and Source Control and cloning with GitHub configured.

That’s the end of Day 1! As we progress along the journey and as we need them, I’ll add some Visual Studio Code extensions which will give us invaluable help along the journey. You can browse these by clicking on the “Extensions” button on the right:

Extensions add languages, tools and debuggers to VS Code which auto-recognize file types and code to enhance the experience.

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!!