Conclusion
So that’s that. Our journey together is just about done. If I’ve done my part and you’ve done yours, then by now you should have picked up some serious Linux skills. In fact, if you’ve practiced enough, you should feel comfortable taking responsibility for many common server administration tasks, and employers should be comfortable hiring you to perform those tasks on their servers. But before we part, let’s spend a couple of minutes covering what you’ve learned and where it might take you next.
Organizing and absorbing all the many steps you took through Linux in Action is going to be a challenge. To make this review more useful, I’ll rearrange much of what you read into a half dozen high-level, in-demand themes:
- Virtualization
- Connectivity
- Encryption
- Networking
- Image management
- System monitoring
By working with virtual machines and containers back in chapter 2, you used virtualization to build sandbox computer environments where you can safely experiment with new tools and technologies. In chapters 6 and 9, you launched chroot sessions to recover broken configurations and file systems or to reset an authentication password. And with your understanding of virtualization technologies, along with the introduction to infrastructure orchestration from chapter 16, you’re just a step away from diving deeply into the worlds of enterprise cloud and container computing.