Compute and Storage Infrastructure

Public cloud providers offer three types of compute resources: virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions.

This section describes the concepts of virtual machines and operating system- and namespace virtualization in Linux (commonly known as containers).

We'll discuss serverless functions during the live sessions.

Containers (including Docker and Kubernettes) are the new buzzword in application development world, so you must understand what their impact on data center infrastructure is. This section (presented by Stephen Foskett) should help you figure out:

• What are containers?
• Do they make sense?
• What can we do with them?
• What's the difference between containers and Docker?
• What are union and overlay file systems and why are they important.

In this section, Howard Marks introduced the three types of cloud storage (object store, block storage, and file systems) and explained how the three major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) implemented them.

In the second part of his presentation, Howard focused on on-premises gateways, data mover solutions, and on-ramps, concluding with a few cautionary tales.

Provisioning scale-out VM sets, or virtual machines without outside SSH access, is one of the more interesting public cloud deployment challenges.

This section describes potential solutions, the tools you could use to generate VM images, and a few hints on using Ansible for cloud VM provisioning.

In this assignment you'll deploy a virtual machine running a web server, and use an object store (S3, Azure Storage...) to host media files.

These webinars describe further topics related to compute virtualization. You might want to watch them to get a wider perspective.