Course: Cloud and Containers for the SRE

When deploying a medium to a large-sized cloud solution, there are many factors to consider, such as the numerous cloud environments to choose from and the different levels of management and security they each require. In this course, you'll explore these environments in detail, with a specific focus on their application in SRE.

You'll examine the features, purpose, benefits, and potential drawbacks of services such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Anything as a Service (XaaS). You'll then investigate private, public, hybrid, and community clouds and on and off-premises software.

Moving on, you'll delve into cloud architecture-related topics, such as orchestration, automation, elasticity, and cloud bursting. Lastly, you'll study cloud payment models, resource allocation, and on-demand self-service.

Containers in cloud computing are a form of operating system virtualization that allows users or administrators to deploy and run applications without the need for virtual machines. Containers can be deployed and run virtually anywhere, and support Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems.

In this course, you'll explore the various types of container solutions, including Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS. You'll outline how containers enable a more efficient continuous integration and delivery system and why they're needed for SRE.

You'll also examine container storage, security, and migration. You'll list the high-availability solutions available for containers and investigate the Containers as a Service concept. Lastly, you'll recognize how the container ecosystem is revolutionizing software delivery, and identify the role of Docker and Kubernetes in container orchestration.

Although containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes can function independently, they can also benefit significantly from one another. Furthermore, open source automation tools such as Jenkins can be used to increase resource utilization and efficiency through pipelines.

In this course, you'll explore the many benefits of pipelines, and learn how to use them to build code. You'll outline the benefits of Git and GitHub for revision control and identify the distributed version control tools that can be used to manage source code history. You'll then work with Jenkinsfiles to write pipeline-as-a-code and code to use at the build stage, after the build and test stages, and for recording failures.

Next, you'll use the Jenkins Pipeline to set the environment variables and outline the key steps and factors needed in your code review. Lastly, you'll learn how to use Kubernetes to deploy applications with high availability, scalability, and resilience.