Welcome to the Derek Zoolander Centre For Kids Who Want To Cloud Good

This is essentially a set of working notes on cloud and distributed compute topics that I think are of interest or are important to succeed as a cloud engineer. They've been collected as a response to the questions I receive from time to time, and come from a place of trying to be helpful. It is completely fine to pick and choose which parts of all this you read as your interests guide you.

By definition this work will never be complete. I welcome suggestions (preferably as issues on the git repository at https://github.com/shakenfist/cloudgood), but would also happily accept contributions (as pull requests against the same repository please) for review and discussion. Much of this documentation was co-authored with Claude, an AI assistant. I guided the content and verified technical accuracy. Specific contributions are noted in commit messages.

Note

Please note that unlike the rest of the Shaken Fist projects, this work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, which seemed more appropriate for a "book like" work than the usual Apache2.

This document is also by definition Linux specific, and to a large extent x86 specific. This is because this is where my own experience lies.

First off, we need to discuss some fundamentals.

The technology primer provides a relatively fast paced introduction to many of the fundamentals of modern virtualization and containers. This includes what a process is, fork() and exec(), virtual memory and page tables, context switching between processes, protection rings, virtualization and its costs, containers and their isolation weaknesses, and unikernels. This document is derived from the documentation for a not yet released project, so there are some gaps here but its a reasonable primer. If you've done a computer science degree or whatever more technical YouTube videos than your partner thinks is reasonable, you can probably just dive in right here. It wont harm you to read this part if you don't have a super technical background, you might just not understand everything. That's ok though, because the goal is that by the end of this content you will and that will be cool.

The next set of pages provide a slower paced but much more detailed introduction, while not repeating too much of the content of the technology primer.

Fundamentals discusses some of the fundamentals of computing that we're going to keep coming upon.

Virtualization history takes a slower journey through the history of virtualization and how we got to where we are now. Virtualization has been around in various forms for a lot longer than many people realize, and has seen various iterations along the way. This matters because some of the tooling we use today dates back to the heady days of full system emulation, and understanding the history can help build a mental model for how things work and why.

More fundamentals then circles back to talking through some more fundamental things you would have learned in a university level operating systems class, but without taking six months of your life. There is also no exam, you're welcome.