Five Principles for Deploying and Managing Linux in the Cloud

Preface

Although it’s common knowledge that the cloud is a cornerstone of computing environments, there’s still an incomplete awareness of the available strategies for maximizing the benefits of a cloud architecture. This book serves as a guide for people who are either contemplating a major move to the cloud or who have already initiated one but aren’t sure how to efficiently use the wide-ranging services and capabilities offered by cloud vendors. The book focuses, where relevant, on using Microsoft Azure, but it also refers to services and products from other cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

When planning a move to the cloud or seeking to optimize your cloud environments, it’s important to understand the key cloud-enabling technologies, such as virtualization, resource replication, cloud storage devices, and object storage. The book starts off by explaining these foundational cloud technologies. On-demand computing resources, dynamic scalability, load balancing, and resiliency are all hallmarks of a cloud-based architecture. As a cloud architect, administrator, or developer, you should know how these features work.

A key reason for an unsatisfactory move to the cloud is the failure to adequately assess an organization’s cloud readiness. More than the pre-deployment and deployment-related tasks, the most critical steps in a successful cloud migration are the analysis of your current architecture, prioritizing the deployment of services, figuring out your cloud ...