Prerequisites #

To tackle cloud administration, you might want to set up a virtual environment on your Windows computer first. By setting up a virtual machine with Ubuntu, you will have access to the Bash shell in a Linux environment, which will allow you to follow along with this documentation (up to the Cloud Computing section).

Using a virtual machine with Ubuntu is a good way to train for cloud administration, as most real-life cloud administration is done using Linux operating systems through the command line.

Windows #

Follow these steps to install Ubuntu on VMware for Windows:

1. Download the Ubuntu ISO image
2. Install VMware on your computer
3. Open VMware and click on Create a New Virtual Machine
4. Select Installer Disc Image File and choose your Ubuntu ISO image
5. Follow the prompts to create your virtual machine
6. Once the VM is created, select it in the VMware console and click Power on this virtual machine
7. The first time you launch it, follow the Ubuntu setup prompts to install the operating system
8. Open the Ubuntu terminal

macOS #

For the sake of this tutorial, you can skip the local VM setup entirely and simply use the built-in Terminal.app with either:

• ZSH (now the default shell)
• Bash (still available with chsh -s /bin/bash)

All commands of the following sections should work the same either way and the filesystem that macOS also inherited from Unix is very similar to Ubuntu’s.