Once upon a time, there lived a system administrator named Henry. He was a dedicated systems manager in a medium-sized company. He took care of his group of servers and knew everything about each of them. However, as the company grew, the number of servers Henry had to work with also increased.
Initially, he managed to handle the maintenance of the growing servers, but when their number exceeded a hundred, he started to encounter problems. He was overwhelmed with work and lost track of what was happening on each server. He decided to bring another system administrator to his team to help him. However, as the number of servers continued to grow, and when it approached a thousand, the workload became unmanageable even for a larger team of system administrators.
One day, while Henry was taking a walk in the forest to recharge his energy, he discovered something glowing among the trees. As he approached, he saw a magical talisman. As soon as he held it in his hand, it began to speak to him: "Henry, I am a magical talisman, and I am here to help you. I can advise you on how to do things better." Henry couldn't believe his ears, but he was curious to hear what the talisman had to say. "Very well, magical talisman, tell me how I can manage many servers with less effort?"
The talisman told Henry about a tool called Ansible, which would help him with server management automation. "Thanks to Ansible, you can manage hundreds of servers on your own," the talisman revealed. "You will be able to manage servers collectively based on their purpose and perform operations on groups of servers with a single command." Henry liked the idea and decided to give Ansible a try.
Everything worked wonderfully. However, the era of the cloud and the need for fast application delivery arrived. Jindřich once again sought advice from the talisman: "I see that you have made great progress in automating server management with Ansible. But remember, modern technologies offer even more possibilities. If you want to be successful in your field, you should focus on containerization." "Containerization?" Henry repeated. "I've heard of it, but I'm not sure how it could help me."
The talisman explained, "Containerization allows you to have applications isolated from each other and from the underlying operating system. This means you can easily deploy, scale, and manage applications independently. By using technologies like Docker, you can create standardized containers that provide a consistent environment for applications from development to production." Henry began to grasp how it could benefit him. "So, Docker could help me save computational resources and simplify administration?" he asked the talisman.
"Yes, exactly," the talisman replied, "but keep in mind that as the number of containerized applications grows, it could become challenging to manage them manually. To solve this problem, you could utilize a technology called Kubernetes." "Kubernetes?" Henry interrupted. The talisman continued, "Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform. It will assist you with automatic control and management of containerized applications across different servers. You can define how applications should be deployed, scaled, and monitored, and Kubernetes will take care of it for you." Henry was thrilled with this new information. "That sounds great! Docker and Kubernetes will help me simplify and automate infrastructure management."
As time went by, Henry succeeded in operating applications in the company more efficiently. Seeing how automation had simplified his work, he wanted to go even further and asked the magical talisman for further advice: "Managing Kubernetes is starting to become overwhelming. Is there a more sophisticated solution?" The talisman replied, "With CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment), you can automate the entire application development cycle. You can create integration and deployment pipelines that automatically test and deploy new versions of applications to servers." "And does that shorten the application delivery time?" Henry pondered. "Yes," the talisman added, "and it minimizes errors associated with manual deployment."
This solution thrilled Henry. He wanted to learn more and improve his skills in this technology. "In that case, I have one last advice for you," the talisman added, "you can join the Academy - IT Evolution, where you will gain best practices on how to operate applications the way large companies and corporations do it today."
Henry returned from the forest with newfound hope. Thanks to tools like Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD, system administrators can simplify and automate their work, allowing them to manage a large number of servers and applications more effectively.
Automation and modern technology not only make the lives of system administrators easier but also bring benefits to the entire organization. Fast application delivery, error minimization, and easy scalability of infrastructure are key factors for the successful operation of modern companies.
