Time Management For System Administrators

Provides advice for system administrators on time management, covering such topics as keeping an effective calendar, eliminating time wasters, setting priorities, automating processes, and managing interruptions.

Time is a precious commodity, especially if you're a system administrator. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once. Users interrupt you constantly with requests, preventing you from getting anything done. Your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you with requests for quick-fixes that prevent you from ever getting to those long-term projects. But the pressure is on you to produce and it only increases with time. What do you do? The answer is time management. And not just any time management theory--you want Time Management for System Administrators, to be exact. With keen insights into the challenges you face as a sys admin, bestselling author Thomas Limoncelli has put together a collection of tips and techniques that will help you cultivate the time management skills you need to flourish as a system administrator. Time Management for System Administrators understands that an Sys Admin often has competing goals: the concurrent responsibilities of working on large projects and taking care of a user's needs. That's why it focuses on strategies that help you work through daily tasks, yet still allow you to handle critical situations that inevitably arise. Among other skills, you'll learn how to: Manage interruptions Eliminate timewasters Keep an effective calendar Develop routines for things that occur regularly Use your brain only for what you're currently working on Prioritize based on customer expectations Document and automate processes for faster execution What's more, the book doesn't confine itself to just the work environment, either. It also offers tips on how to apply these time management tools to your social life. It's the first step to a more productive, happier you.

With 28 new chapters, the third edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration innovates yet again! Revised with thousands of updates and clarifications based on reader feedback, this new edition also incorporates DevOps strategies even for non-DevOps environments. Whether you use Linux, Unix, or Windows, this new edition describes the essential practices previously handed down only from mentor to protégé. This wonderfully lucid, often funny cornucopia of information introduces beginners to advanced frameworks valuable for their entire career, yet is structured to help even experts through difficult projects. Other books tell you what commands to type. This book teaches you the cross-platform strategies that are timeless! DevOps techniques: Apply DevOps principles to enterprise IT infrastructure, even in environments without developers Game-changing strategies: New ways to deliver results faster with less stress Fleet management: A comprehensive guide to managing your fleet of desktops, laptops, servers and mobile devices Service management: How to design, launch, upgrade and migrate services Measurable improvement: Assess your operational effectiveness; a forty-page, pain-free assessment system you can start using today to raise the quality of all services Design guides: Best practices for networks, data centers, email, storage, monitoring, backups and more Management skills: Organization design, communication, negotiation, ethics, hiring and firing, and more Have you ever had any of these problems? Have you been surprised to discover your backup tapes are blank? Ever spent a year launching a new service only to be told the users hate it? Do you have more incoming support requests than you can handle? Do you spend more time fixing problems than building the next awesome thing? Have you suffered from a botched migration of thousands of users to a new service? Does your company rely on a computer that, if it died, can’t be rebuilt? Is your network a fragile mess that breaks any time you try to improve it? Is there a periodic “hell month” that happens twice a year? Twelve times a year? Do you find out about problems when your users call you to complain? Does your corporate “Change Review Board” terrify you? Does each division of your company have their own broken way of doing things? Do you fear that automation will replace you, or break more than it fixes? Are you underpaid and overworked? No vague “management speak” or empty platitudes. This comprehensive guide provides real solutions that prevent these problems and more!

“There’s an incredible amount of depth and thinking in the practices described here, and it’s impressive to see it all in one place.” —Win Treese, coauthor of Designing Systems for Internet Commerce The Practice of Cloud System Administration, Volume 2, focuses on “distributed” or “cloud” computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Unsatisfied with books that cover either design or operations in isolation, the authors created this authoritative reference centered on a comprehensive approach. Case studies and examples from Google, Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and other industry giants are explained in practical ways that are useful to all enterprises. The new companion to the best-selling first volume, The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition, this guide offers expert coverage of the following and many other crucial topics: Designing and building modern web and distributed systems Fundamentals of large system design Understand the new software engineering implications of cloud administration Make systems that are resilient to failure and grow and scale dynamically Implement DevOps principles and cultural changes IaaS/PaaS/SaaS and virtual platform selection Operating and running systems using the latest DevOps/SRE strategies Upgrade production systems with zero down-time What and how to automate; how to decide what not to automate On-call best practices that improve uptime Why distributed systems require fundamentally different system administration techniques Identify and resolve resiliency problems before they surprise you Assessing and evaluating your team’s operational effectiveness Manage the scientific process of continuous improvement A forty-page, pain-free assessment system you can start using today

Time is one of the most precious commodities, especially if you're the system administrator of a 'unicorn company' (a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion). In the2018 year alone, more than 50 startups around the world attained unicorn status with a valuation of $1 billion or more, according to data from venture capital trackers like PitchBook. In this book you will find time and resource management lessons from senior system administrator Giulio D'Agostino; learn from more than 20 years experience in project management working for companies like Google, Apple, Salesforce.com and Hewlett Packard.

“As an author, editor, and publisher, I never paid much attention to the competition—except in a few cases. This is one of those cases. The UNIX System Administration Handbook is one of the few books we ever measured ourselves against.” —Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media “This edition is for those whose systems live in the cloud or in virtualized data centers; those whose administrative work largely takes the form of automation and configuration source code; those who collaborate closely with developers, network engineers, compliance officers, and all the other worker bees who inhabit the modern hive.” —Paul Vixie, Internet Hall of Fame-recognized innovator and founder of ISC and Farsight Security “This book is fun and functional as a desktop reference. If you use UNIX and Linux systems, you need this book in your short-reach library. It covers a bit of the systems’ history but doesn’t bloviate. It’s just straight-forward information delivered in a colorful and memorable fashion.” —Jason A. Nunnelley UNIX® and Linux® System Administration Handbook, Fifth Edition, is today’s definitive guide to installing, configuring, and maintaining any UNIX or Linux system, including systems that supply core Internet and cloud infrastructure. Updated for new distributions and cloud environments, this comprehensive guide covers best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, security, web hosting, automation, configuration management, performance analysis, virtualization, DNS, security, and the management of IT service organizations. The authors—world-class, hands-on technologists—offer indispensable new coverage of cloud platforms, the DevOps philosophy, continuous deployment, containerization, monitoring, and many other essential topics. Whatever your role in running systems and networks built on UNIX or Linux, this conversational, well-written ¿guide will improve your efficiency and help solve your knottiest problems.

Take your AWS SysOps skills to the next level by learning infrastructure automation techniques using CloudFormation, Terraform, and Boto3 Key FeaturesExplore AWS automation using CloudFormation, Terraform, and Boto3Leverage AWS to make your infrastructure flexible and highly availableDiscover various AWS features for building a secure and reliable environment to host your applicationBook Description Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular and efficient cloud platforms for administering and deploying your applications to make them resilient and robust. AWS for System Administrators will help you to learn several advanced cloud administration concepts for deploying, managing, and operating highly available systems on AWS. Starting with the fundamentals of identity and access management (IAM) for securing your environment, this book will gradually take you through AWS networking and monitoring tools. As you make your way through the chapters, you'll get to grips with VPC, EC2, load balancer, Auto Scaling, RDS database, and data management. The book will also show you how to initiate AWS automated backups and store and keep track of log files. Later, you'll work with AWS APIs and understand how to use them along with CloudFormation, Python Boto3 Script, and Terraform to automate infrastructure. By the end of this AWS book, you'll be ready to build your two-tier startup with all the necessary infrastructure, monitoring, and logging components in place. What you will learnAdopt a security-first approach by giving users minimum access using IAM policiesBuild your first Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance using the AWS CLI, Boto3, and TerraformSet up your datacenter in AWS Cloud using VPCScale your application based on demand using Auto ScalingMonitor services using CloudWatch and SNSWork with centralized logs for analysis (CloudWatch Logs)Back up your data using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Data Lifecycle Manager, and AWS BackupWho this book is for This Amazon Web Services book is for system administrators and solution architects who want to build highly available and flexible AWS Cloud platforms for their applications. Software engineers and programmers looking to deploy their applications to AWS Cloud will also find this book useful. Basic knowledge of Linux and AWS is necessary to get started.

"It's a relief just to talk about it. It's heaven to fix it: "admin," the administrative chores that have exploded in our busy lives. Here's the book that will give you many hours of your life back"--