Summary

The ongoing maintenance and support of cloud deployments is a primary focus for many Cloud+ certified professionals. The world job market has a strong requirement for knowledgeable cloud support personnel as the transfer from private to cloud computing grows year after year. This chapter’s focus was on many of the core topics of cloud maintenance.

The chapter started with a discussion of applying software patches to the most common cloud elements such as the hypervisor, VMs, network systems, applications, storage, and compute clusters. You learned about patching software and the different issues that need to be taken into account when patching production, development, and QA deployments. Patching methodologies were introduced including rolling updates, blue-green, and clusters. Even with the cloud provider being responsible for the maintenance of the cloud infrastructure, you must be aware of its operations and know what your maintenance responsibilities are and what systems...