Early system administration required in-depth knowledge of a variety of services on individual systems. Now, the job is increasingly complex and different from one company to the next with an ever-growing list of technologies and third-party services to integrate. How does any one individual stay relevant in systems and services? This practical guide helps anyone in operations - sysadmins, automation engineers, IT professionals, and site reliability engineers - understand the essential concepts of the role today. Collaboration, automation, and the evolution of systems change the fundamentals of operations work. No matter where you are in your journey, this book provides you the information to craft your path to advancing essential system administration skills. Author Jennifer Davis provides examples of modern practices and tools with recommended materials to advance your skills. Topics include: Development and testing: Version control, fundamentals of virtualization and containers, testing, and architecture review Deploying and configuring services: Infrastructure management, networks, security, storage, serverless, and release management Scaling administration: Monitoring and observability, capacity planning, log management and analysis, and security and compliance