In recent years, Linux has become increasingly prevalent across a wide variety of computing platforms, including desktop computers, enterprise servers, smartphones, IoT devices, and on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Consequently, the complexity of related administrative tasks, configuration management, and DevOps workloads has also grown considerably. Now, perhaps more than ever, Linux administration skills are highly relevant.

But there's an evolutionary twist to the making of a modern-day Linux administrator. Tedious manual administrative operations are gradually replaced by orchestrated and automated workflows. One-off magic commands and scripts are replaced by declarative manifests invoked on demand while scaling up or down system configurations based on computing needs. Yesterday's Linux administrator progressively morphs into a DevOps persona.

There are countless books on Linux administration, and some of them will still be relevant for years to come. But Mastering Linux Administration is written with the admin-turned-DevOps in mind. We'll start with the basic concepts and commands addressing the most common areas of everyday Linux administration tasks. You'll learn how to install Linux on a desktop PC and virtual machine. Next, we'll introduce you to the Linux filesystem, package managers, users and groups, processes, and daemons. After a quick primer on networking and application security, we'll make the leap from on-premises to the cloud, exploring containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes. Together, we'll walk in the clouds by deploying Linux in AWS and Azure. You'll work with hands-on application deployments using EKS and AKS, the Kubernetes fabrics of AWS and Azure, respectively. Finally, we conclude our journey with Ansible and configuration management automation, taking us full circle to a DevOps-centric view of Linux.

We can only hope that by the end of the book, you'll be on the path to becoming a proficient Linux administrator with a versatile DevOps mindset.