Systems

Systems engineering covers the infrastructure layer that applications run on — the servers, services, storage, and tooling that keep things running. This section is deliberately broad: it covers web servers and reverse proxies, storage and filesystems, monitoring and APM tools, job schedulers, configuration management, and more.

Web servers and proxies

NGINX is covered both as a web server and as a reverse proxy and load balancer — NGINX load balancing is a common pattern in front of application servers. Apache is the older alternative, still widely deployed. Both have their place depending on what you’re running.

Storage

Storage at the systems level means more than just disk space. ZFS is a filesystem and volume manager worth understanding — it handles RAID, snapshots, checksumming, and deduplication in a single layer. The site covers replacing a failed disk in ZFS and a real Ubuntu-based ZFS NAS build. Linux RAID covers the mdadm approach if you’re not going the ZFS route. For networked file sharing, Samba handles Windows-compatible SMB shares from Linux.

Monitoring and APM

Several APM and monitoring platforms are covered here, reflecting tools that show up in enterprise environments:

• Datadog — cloud-based infrastructure and APM monitoring
• Dynatrace and AppDynamics — enterprise APM tools with deep application instrumentation; there’s also a direct Dynatrace vs AppDynamics comparison
• Splunk — log aggregation and search at scale

Job scheduling and automation

Enterprise job scheduling is a niche that doesn’t get much coverage elsewhere. The site has material on AutoSys, BMC Control-M, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (including its end-of-life status and alternatives), and IBM Tivoli Workload Automation. These are tools that come up in large financial and enterprise environments.

For infrastructure automation, Ansible and Ansible Tower are covered, as is Rundeck for runbook automation.

Ubuntu Server

Ubuntu Server is a common starting point for self-hosted infrastructure. Covered topics include installation, SSH setup, static IP configuration, adding a GUI, and running Ubuntu Server in VirtualBox for local testing.

Big data and Hadoop

The site has coverage of Hadoop HDFS commands and several HDFS how-to pages for working with the distributed filesystem — listing files, fixing corrupt blocks, managing directories. Apache Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper are also covered in the context of distributed systems infrastructure.

Video

Here is one of our videos showing how you can setup Nginx with Ansible: