The Practice of Cloud System Administration ─ Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems

The Practice of Cloud System Administration, Volume 2 focuses on today's fastest-growing areas of system administration: cloud computing and DevOps. For the first time, it brings together comprehensive knowledge and best practices for administering systems in the age of cloud computing, and for architecting, scaling, and operating services that perform reliably and well. The new companion volume to our best-selling Practice of System and Network Administration, it offers expert coverage of these and many other crucial topics:

• Understanding your ideal cloud system environment, so you can move towards it
• Implementing DevOps principles and cultural changes
• Designing cloud systems for more effective operation and lower costs
• Architecting hosted services: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, physical vs. virtual servers, and more
• Planning for monitoring, security, and data integrity
• Scaling via content distribution, load balancing, caching, and clustering
• Improving reliability via redundancy (including risk/reward and cost/benefit analyses)
• Using automation to scale, save time, avoid mistakes, ensure repeatability, and simplify provisioning
• Managing the deployment lifecycle in a continuous build/test/deploy environment
• Integrating metrics to build data-driven operations
• Running backups and restores in cloud environments
• Identifying and resolving resiliency problems before they surprise you
• Understanding the new software engineering implications of cloud administration
• Documenting cloud systems and ensuring compliance

Note: the third edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration will be released in the spring of 2015; the ISBN will be 9780321919168 .

Thomas A. Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator with more than twenty years of experience at companies like Google, Bell Labs, and StackExchange.com.

Strata R. Chalup has more than twenty-five years of experience in Silicon Valley focusing on IT strategy, best-practices, and scalable infrastructures at firms including Apple, Sun, Cisco, McAfee, and Palm.

Christina J. Hogan has more than twenty years of experience in system administration and network engineering, from Silicon Valley to Italy and Switzerland. She has a master’s degree in computer science, a doctorate in aeronautical engineering, and has been part of a Formula 1 racing team.