I.INTRODUCTION.txt

I. Introduction to The Eucalyptus Production Operations Guide

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For every complex software installation, there's ultimately one desperate person who's responsible for keeping the whole thing running.  

Sure, there may be a team of sysadmins on call night and day.  But there's always one person whose job is to sit down with the big boss to explain why a key piece of infrastructure fell over on the most important business day of the year.

The purpose of this guide is to help ensure that such a conversation never happens.  

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Eucalyptus installations run the gamut in size, from very small (a single system) to very large (100,000+ cores).  As the system grows in scale, it also grows in complexity.  This guide is intended to help administrators manage very large and complex Eucalyptus installations, with a very high degree of expected uptime.  

The guide covers the following topics: 

* <strong>Pre-production</strong>, in which we will discuss how to build a strong foundation beneath the Eucalyptus cloud;  

* <strong>Production</strong>, in which we will discuss how to monitor the Eucalyptus cloud, how to diagnose small problems, and how to prevent those small problems from turning into large problems;

* <strong>Troubleshooting</strong>, in which we will discuss, in detail, how to track down complex operational problems that may arise;

* and <strong>Recovery</strong>, in which we will discuss the best way of bringing the Eucalyptus cloud back to life after failures.

This guide represents the hard-won wisdom of Eucalyptus administrators around the world, who collectively have run millions of Eucalyptus instances successfully (and not-so-successfully). Disregard its lessons at your peril.

That's enough for introductions. Let's dig in.