How close are you to a Linux machine?

Hi,

Quick intro since it's been probably a year since I've written… it's GPS, you probably found this newsletter in one of my YouTube videos or on X. My goal is to send you something (ideally each week) for you to get curious about in the cloud space but that doesn't take up too much time. Ok, let's go.

How close are you to a Linux machine? Some of you may be working directly on a Linux distro (I use Fedora btw) but I think it's safe to say the majority are using either Windows or Mac (not judging lol).

We all know the OS of the cloud is a Linux one, so that's why I ask how close you are to one. And I don't mean physically, I mean if you wanted to play around with something in a Linux environment, or set up some sort of POC infrastructure, how would you do it? I myself have been thinking about this and a few weeks ago I put together a Bicep template that creates one with all the configs I need... now how about you?

Now you may ask... "But GPS, you could just use your laptop if you're working on Fedora or why not use containers?"

Great questions! First of all, I would never use my laptop directly for any POCs because that would get messy very fast.

The second question: containers have revolutionized the field but they are far from the standard. Additionally, they are different skills and you should have both - how to work with containers and how to deploy IaaS.

What I do

My playground VM is about $11 a month so it's very affordable for me.

I use an Azure B1ls or B1s as a simple Linux box playground. It's great as a throwaway machine and I find it powerful enough. I can rebuild it to test different startup scripts, configurations, packages, and it doesn't matter if it blows up. I can access it from any machine I'm working on too.

Sometimes it costs me more, usually when I'm messing around with different IaaS configurations like VPNs and such. It kinda reminds me of my first car which was an '07 Honda Civic coupe, stick shift of course. Not fast, not top of the line, but man is it reliable and FUN.

Whenever my VM is still provisioned, I have it set to auto power off at a certain hour. But it's also just 1 command to power it off/ and on with the Azure CLI, so I don't really ever worry about leaving it on and racking up spend. I usually tear it down anyways, edit configs to play around with something else and redeploy - great way to learn IaC too.

What’s next

The next things I want to really deep dive into are different IaaS configurations change the application performance. I'll probably spend months on this as learning the ins and outs of IaaS is where I see my career going and the future of the field but that's another topic. What are the tradeoffs and when are they worth/not worth it:

• Compare performance with and without a load balancer: what are the tradeoffs and when are they worth it.

• Test the impact of adding a CDN

• Experiment with different caching strategies

• Try out various database configurations (SQL vs NoSQL, single instance vs cluster)

• Implement and test different security measures (firewalls, WAF, etc.)

What you could do:

So here is a list of things I'd like you to explore this weekend:

1. Find your Honda Civic in the cloud: Compare pricing for basic Linux VMs across different cloud providers and pick what you want. If you can't decide pick Azure but I'm biased.

2. Experiment with different IaC tools but stick with one and learn it well (Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates) to automate VM creation

3. Harden the security so you can only SSH from permitted machines

4. Create a script that deploys a webserver and simple site

These are just ideas to get you started. The beauty of having your own Linux playground is that you can tailor it to whatever you want to learn or experiment with.

Other cools things

I’m currently reading The Mountain in the Sea and it’s awesome. My partner got me into reading fiction and I’m so grateful for it. It’s reinvigorated my reading. I have a list of books I recommend here

and of course, I have to plug my latest YouTube video

Focus,

GPS

P.S. Got any cool projects you'd tackle with a cloud Linux box? Hit reply and let me know!