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Chrome OS Guide

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A guide on setting up your Chrome OS with all the essential Applications, Tools, and Games to make your experience with Chrome OS great!

Note: You can easily convert this markdown file to a PDF in VSCode using this handy extension Markdown PDF.


Table of Contents

  1. Getting Started

  2. Getting Software

  3. Gaming

  4. Setting up a macOS workspace

  5. Setting up a Windows 10 Workspace

  6. Android Development

  7. Flutter Development

  8. Machine Learning

  9. Networking

  10. Databases

Getting Started


Chrome OS Desktop

Chrome OS Features is a Linux-based operating system developed by Google, with an emphasis on simplicity and security. As a cloud-based operating system, it uses the Chrome web browser as its primary user interface. In 2016, access to Android apps via the Google Play Store available on select Chrome OS devices. Finally, in 2018 Linux apps are now running natively on select devices via Project Crostini.

Chrome OS Flex is a free and sustainable way to modernize devices you already own. It’s easy to deploy across your fleet or simply try it to see what a cloud-first OS has to offer for PCs and Macs. The easiest way to get ChromeOS Flex is by using the Chromebook Recovery Utility extension.


Chromebook Recovery Utility

Chrome OS Enterprise

Chrome OS VM for Chromium developers

Using LXD(Linux container manager) on your Chromebook

Using VScode on Chrome OS

Chromebook Community - Google Support

Chrome OS Wiki

Crostini Wiki

Crostini KDE Apps Setup is a tool that initializes a Chromebook Linux container to run KDE Apps. It also installs Discover which is an elegant, easy-to-use "app store" for Linux apps and nearly every app.

Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web.

chromeOS.dev is the digital home for all things Chrome OS. Learn how to adapt and optimize your existing apps to work on Chrome OS, the success other companies have had doing so, how to use Chrome OS as your developer machine, and keep up-to-date with the latest on Chrome OS.

Chrome Unboxed is a great website for learning all things Google Chrome. Such as the news, updates, reviews and unboxings.

Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) is a compatibility layer and sandboxing technology for running Android applications on desktop and laptop computers in an isolated environment. It allows applications to be safely run from a web browser, independent of Chrome OS at near native speeds.

CloudReady is a ChromeOS alternative built from the source available in ChromiumOS repositories developed by Neverware. Neverware was acquired by Google in December 2020.

Getting Software

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Chrome WebStore

Google Play Store

Flatpaks

Setting up Flatpaks for Chrome OS

FlatHub is a build and distribution service for Flatpak applications.

FlatHub Forum

Open terminal and run:

sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Snaps

Snap Store is a build and distribution service for Snap applications.

Snapcraft Forum

Open terminal and run:

sudo apt install libsquashfuse0 squashfuse fuse
sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install 'app'

AppImages

AppImageHub is a build and distribution service for AppImage applications.

AppImage Manager is a package manager for AppImages.

AppImage Forum

Open the terminal and run:

chmod a+x Appname.AppImage

Then:

./Appname.AppImage

Setting up GNOME Software Center

The GNOME Software Center is similar to the Google Play Store but mainly developed for Linux desktops running the GNOME Desktop environment.

Open Terminal and Run:

sudo apt install gnome-software gnome-packagekit

CrossOver Chrome® OS

CrossOver Chrome OS let's you run Windows programs that are not available in the Google Play store alongside mobile apps. Scrap remote sessions with multiple users. Run utility software like Quicken and Microsoft Office, or DirectX games. Also, run games from your Steam library will run with CrossOver Chrome OS at native speeds.

Web Apps

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)

Microsoft 365 with Office apps(formerly Office Online)

MATLAB Online allows to users to uilitize MATLAB and Simulink through a web browser such as Google Chrome.

Jitsi Meet is a fully encrypted, 100% open source video conferencing solution.

Cisco Webex Web App is the web based verison of Cisco Webex video conferencing solution.

Apple Music(Web) is the web app version of Apple Music that runs in Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Adobe Lighroom Online photo editor is an online web version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Adobe account required to sign-in to app.

Adobe Spark(Web) is an applications let you make cool Social Graphics, Short Videos, and Web Pages. Adobe account required to sign-in to app.

Photopea is an advanced online image editor supporting PSD, XCF, Sketch, XD and CDR formats. (Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Sketch App, Adobe XD, CorelDRAW).

GitHub provides hosting for software development version control using Git. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.

GitHub Codespaces is an integrated development environment(IDE) on GitHub. That allows developers to develop entirely in the cloud using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

GitHub Actions will automate, customize, and execute your software development workflows right in your repository with GitHub Actions. You can discover, create, and share actions to perform any job you'd like, including CI/CD, and combine actions in a completely customized workflow.GitHub Actions for Azure you can create workflows that you can set up in your repository to build, test, package, release and deploy to Azure.Learn more about all other integrations with Azure.

GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and CI/CD pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc.

Bitbucket is a web-based version control repository hosting service owned by Atlassian, for source code and development projects that use either Mercurial or Git revision control systems. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts. It offers free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories. Bitbucket integrates with other Atlassian software like Jira, HipChat, Confluence and Bamboo.

Gaming

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Game Streaming

Geforce NOW use the Chromebook version to play all your games in Google Chrome or any Chromium-based web browser such as Brave, Vivaldi, and Microsoft Edge. Also, available as a Electron Desktop App in the Snap store Geforce NOW.

Moonlight Game Streaming is a program that let you stream from your PC games over the Internet with no configuration required. Stream from almost any device, whether you're in another room or miles away from your gaming rig.

Chiaki is a Free and Open Source Software Client for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 Remote Play for Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Android, macOS, Windows, Nintendo Switch and potentially even more platforms.

Xbox Project xCloud is Microsoft's cloud-based Xbox game-streaming technology (currently in Beta). Play games like Forza Horizon 4, Halo 5: Guardians, Gears of War 4, Sea of Thieves, Cuphead, Red Dead Redemption 2, and 100+ other games on your mobile device or Chrome web browser. Microsoft's Xbox Project xCloud does require an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription.

Steam

Get Steam with CrossOver Chrome OS or Steam Flatpak.

Setting up a macOS workspace

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REQUIREMENTS

The recommended hardware specifications are Intel Core i5 and i7, 16 GB Memory, and 128/256 GB HDD/SSD.

  • Chrome OS 85 or later
  • QEMU > 2.11.1
  • A CPU with Intel VT-x / AMD SVM support is required
  • A CPU with SSE4.1 support is required for >= macOS Sierra
  • A CPU with AVX2 support is required for >= macOS Mojave
  • Internet access for the installation process

**Open the terminal and run: **

sudo apt install qemu uml-utilities virt-manager dmg2img git wget libguestfs-tools p7zip

OpenCore for macOS

Setting up a Windows 10 workspace

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Using Parallels Desktop software to create a Windows virtual machine

REQUIREMENTS

Parallels®️ Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise

Set up Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise and Education


Parallels®️ Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise

Using GNOME Boxes to create a Windows virtual machine

REQUIREMENTS

Open the terminal and run:

sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system bridge-utils virtinst libvirt-daemon nano -y

sudo apt install qemu uml-utilities virt-manager gnome-boxes

Then:

cd /etc/libvirt

sudo nano qemu.conf

xhost +

GNOME Boxes is an application that gives you access to virtual machines, running locally or remotely. It also allows you to connect to the display of a remote computer.

Android Development

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Android Studio is the development suite for Google's Android Operating System(OS). It's built on JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA software and designed specifically for Android development. It is available for download on Windows, macOS and Linux.

LineageOS is a free and open-source operating system for various devices, based on the Android mobile platform.

Anbox is an application that provides a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu, Debian Fedora, and openSUSE.

Anbox Cloud is the mobile cloud computing platform delivered by Canonical. Run Android in the cloud, at high scale and on any type of hardware.

Genymotion is a very fast Android emulator. The program itself is based on VirtualBox and is known for its effectively fast speed and is usefulness for running Android apps on a Windows, Mac and Linux desktop.

Desktop

Local virtual devices with high performances.

  • Emulate a wide range of virtual device configurations (Android versions, screen size, hardware capacities, etc.)
  • Simulate multiple scenarios thanks to our full set of hardware sensors (GPS, network, multitouch, etc.)
  • Cross-platform: Windows, Mac and Linux
  • Manipulate easily with ADB
  • $412 per year for employees in a company (BUSINESS). All features, advanced support.
  • $136 per year for freelancers (INDIE). All features, best effort support.
  • Free for personal use only (learning & entertainment). Limited features, no support.

Scrcpy is an application by Genymotion that provides display and control of Android devices connected on USB (or over TCP/IP). It does not require any root access and works on GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS. The Android device requires at least API 21 (Android 5.0).

Flutter Development

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Flutter is Google's UI toolkit for crafting beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile(Andorid and iOS), web, and desktop(Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Google Fuchsia) from a single codebase. Flutter works with existing code, is used by developers and organizations around the world, and is free and open source.

Flutter Learning Resources

Flutter Gems is a curated package guide for Flutter which functionally categorizes some of the most useful and popular flutter packages available on pub.dev Flutter Gems A Flutter package landscape guide comprising 1500+ neatly categorized useful and popular packages.

Dart is an open-source, scalable programming language, with robust libraries and runtimes, for building web, server, and mobile apps using the Flutter framework.

Flutter documentation

Style Guide for Flutter

Creating your first Flutter app

Build and release an Android app using Flutter

Flutter Tools & techniques

Dart and Flutter: The Complete Developer's Guide on Udemy

Creating an Interactive Story with Flutter on Coursera

Flutter for Beginners course on Pluralsight

Flutter Online Training Courses on LinkedIn Learning

The Complete Flutter App Development Bootcamp with Dart by App Brewery

Adding Firebase to your Flutter app

Using Firebase and Firestore with Flutter

Fuchsia Project

Getting Started with Fuchsia

Fuchsia Reference

Contributing to Fuchsia

Flutter Tools

Firebase is a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) app development platform that provides hosted backend services such as a realtime database, cloud storage, authentication, crash reporting, machine learning, remote configuration, and hosting for your static files.

FlutterFire is a set of Flutter plugins that enable Flutter apps to use Firebase services. You can follow an example that shows how to use these plugins in the Firebase for Flutter codelab.

FlutterBoost is a Flutter plugin which enables hybrid integration of Flutter for your existing native apps with minimum efforts.

Go-flutter is a package that brings Flutter to the desktop. project implements the Flutter's Embedding API using a single code base that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. For rendering, GLFW fits the job because it provides the right abstractions over the OpenGL's Buffer/Mouse/Keyboard for each platform.

Appwrite is a secure end-to-end backend server for Web, Mobile, and Flutter developers that is packaged as a set of Docker containers for easy deployment.

Fluro is a Flutter routing library that adds flexible routing options like wildcards, named parameters and clear route definitions.

Flame is a minimalistic Flutter game engine.

Machine Learning

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The recommended hardware specifications are Intel Core i5 and i7, 16 GB Memory, and 128/256 GB HDD/SSD.

TensorFlow Lite is a set of tools to help developers run TensorFlow models on mobile, embedded, and IoT devices. It enables on-device machine learning inference with low latency and a small binary size.

Keras is a high-level neural networks API, written in Python and capable of running on top of TensorFlow, CNTK, or Theano.It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. It is capable of running on top of TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, R, Theano, or PlaidML.

PyTorch is a library for deep learning on irregular input data such as graphs, point clouds, and manifolds. Primarily developed by Facebook's AI Research lab.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process to make it easier to develop high quality models.

Azure Databricks is a fast and collaborative Apache Spark-based big data analytics service designed for data science and data engineering. Azure Databricks, sets up your Apache Spark environment in minutes, autoscale, and collaborate on shared projects in an interactive workspace. Azure Databricks supports Python, Scala, R, Java, and SQL, as well as data science frameworks and libraries including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn.

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) is an open-source toolkit for commercial-grade distributed deep learning. It describes neural networks as a series of computational steps via a directed graph. CNTK allows the user to easily realize and combine popular model types such as feed-forward DNNs, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs/LSTMs). CNTK implements stochastic gradient descent (SGD, error backpropagation) learning with automatic differentiation and parallelization across multiple GPUs and servers.

Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow management platform created by the community to programmatically author, schedule and monitor workflows. Install. Principles. Scalable. Airflow has a modular architecture and uses a message queue to orchestrate an arbitrary number of workers. Airflow is ready to scale to infinity.

Open Neural Network Exchange(ONNX) is an open ecosystem that empowers AI developers to choose the right tools as their project evolves. ONNX provides an open source format for AI models, both deep learning and traditional ML. It defines an extensible computation graph model, as well as definitions of built-in operators and standard data types.

Apache MXNet is a deep learning framework designed for both efficiency and flexibility. It allows you to mix symbolic and imperative programming to maximize efficiency and productivity. At its core, MXNet contains a dynamic dependency scheduler that automatically parallelizes both symbolic and imperative operations on the fly. A graph optimization layer on top of that makes symbolic execution fast and memory efficient. MXNet is portable and lightweight, scaling effectively to multiple GPUs and multiple machines. Support for Python, R, Julia, Scala, Go, Javascript and more.

AutoGluon is toolkit for Deep learning that automates machine learning tasks enabling you to easily achieve strong predictive performance in your applications. With just a few lines of code, you can train and deploy high-accuracy deep learning models on tabular, image, and text data.

Anaconda is a very popular Data Science platform for machine learning and deep learning that enables users to develop models, train them, and deploy them.

PlaidML is an advanced and portable tensor compiler for enabling deep learning on laptops, embedded devices, or other devices where the available computing hardware is not well supported or the available software stack contains unpalatable license restrictions.

OpenCV is a highly optimized library with focus on real-time computer vision applications. The C++, Python, and Java interfaces support Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Scikit-Learn is a Python module for machine learning built on top of SciPy, NumPy, and matplotlib, making it easier to apply robust and simple implementations of many popular machine learning algorithms.

Weka is an open source machine learning software that can be accessed through a graphical user interface, standard terminal applications, or a Java API. It is widely used for teaching, research, and industrial applications, contains a plethora of built-in tools for standard machine learning tasks, and additionally gives transparent access to well-known toolboxes such as scikit-learn, R, and Deeplearning4j.

Caffe is a deep learning framework made with expression, speed, and modularity in mind. It is developed by Berkeley AI Research (BAIR)/The Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC) and community contributors.

Theano is a Python library that allows you to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficiently including tight integration with NumPy.

nGraph is an open source C++ library, compiler and runtime for Deep Learning. The nGraph Compiler aims to accelerate developing AI workloads using any deep learning framework and deploying to a variety of hardware targets.It provides the freedom, performance, and ease-of-use to AI developers.

Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Jupyter is used widely in industries that do data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, data science, and machine learning.

Cluster Manager for Apache Kafka(CMAK) is a tool for managing Apache Kafka clusters.

BigDL is a distributed deep learning library for Apache Spark. With BigDL, users can write their deep learning applications as standard Spark programs, which can directly run on top of existing Spark or Hadoop clusters.

Eclipse Deeplearning4J (DL4J) is a set of projects intended to support all the needs of a JVM-based(Scala, Kotlin, Clojure, and Groovy) deep learning application. This means starting with the raw data, loading and preprocessing it from wherever and whatever format it is in to building and tuning a wide variety of simple and complex deep learning networks.

Numba is an open source, NumPy-aware optimizing compiler for Python sponsored by Anaconda, Inc. It uses the LLVM compiler project to generate machine code from Python syntax. Numba can compile a large subset of numerically-focused Python, including many NumPy functions. Additionally, Numba has support for automatic parallelization of loops, generation of GPU-accelerated code, and creation of ufuncs and C callbacks.

Chainer is a Python-based deep learning framework aiming at flexibility. It provides automatic differentiation APIs based on the define-by-run approach (dynamic computational graphs) as well as object-oriented high-level APIs to build and train neural networks. It also supports CUDA/cuDNN using CuPy for high performance training and inference.

Networking

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Networking Learning Resources

AWS Certified Security - Specialty Certification

Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate

Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Security Engineer

Cisco Security Certifications

The Red Hat Certified Specialist in Security: Linux

Linux Professional Institute LPIC-3 Enterprise Security Certification

Cybersecurity Training and Courses from IBM Skills

Cybersecurity Courses and Certifications by Offensive Security

Citrix Certified Associate – Networking(CCA-N)

Citrix Certified Professional – Virtualization(CCP-V)

CCNP Routing and Switching

Certified Information Security Manager(CISM)

Wireshark Certified Network Analyst (WCNA)

Juniper Networks Certification Program Enterprise (JNCP)

Networking courses and specializations from Coursera

Network & Security Courses from Udemy

Network & Security Courses from edX

Tools & Networking Concepts

• Connection: In networking, a connection refers to pieces of related information that are transferred through a network. This generally infers that a connection is built before the data transfer (by following the procedures laid out in a protocol) and then is deconstructed at the at the end of the data transfer.

• Packet: A packet is, generally speaking, the most basic unit that is transferred over a network. When communicating over a network, packets are the envelopes that carry your data (in pieces) from one end point to the other.

Packets have a header portion that contains information about the packet including the source and destination, timestamps, network hops. The main portion of a packet contains the actual data being transferred. It is sometimes called the body or the payload.

• Network Interface: A network interface can refer to any kind of software interface to networking hardware. For instance, if you have two network cards in your computer, you can control and configure each network interface associated with them individually.

A network interface may be associated with a physical device, or it may be a representation of a virtual interface. The "loop-back" device, which is a virtual interface to the local machine, is an example of this.

• LAN: LAN stands for "local area network". It refers to a network or a portion of a network that is not publicly accessible to the greater internet. A home or office network is an example of a LAN.

• WAN: WAN stands for "wide area network". It means a network that is much more extensive than a LAN. While WAN is the relevant term to use to describe large, dispersed networks in general, it is usually meant to mean the internet, as a whole.

If an interface is connected to the WAN, it is generally assumed that it is reachable through the internet.

• Protocol: A protocol is a set of rules and standards that basically define a language that devices can use to communicate. There are a great number of protocols in use extensively in networking, and they are often implemented in different layers. 

Some low level protocols are TCP, UDP, IP, and ICMP. Some familiar examples of application layer protocols, built on these lower protocols, are HTTP (for accessing web content), SSH, TLS/SSL, and FTP.

• Port: A port is an address on a single machine that can be tied to a specific piece of software. It is not a physical interface or location, but it allows your server to be able to communicate using more than one application.

• Firewall: A firewall is a program that decides whether traffic coming into a server or going out should be allowed. A firewall usually works by creating rules for which type of traffic is acceptable on which ports. Generally, firewalls block ports that are not used by a specific application on a server.

• NAT: Network address translation is a way to translate requests that are incoming into a routing server to the relevant devices or servers that it knows about in the LAN. This is usually implemented in physical LANs as a way to route requests through one IP address to the necessary backend servers.

• VPN: Virtual private network is a means of connecting separate LANs through the internet, while maintaining privacy. This is used as a means of connecting remote systems as if they were on a local network, often for security reasons.

Network Layers

While networking is often discussed in terms of topology in a horizontal way, between hosts, its implementation is layered in a vertical fashion throughout a computer or network. This means is that there are multiple technologies and protocols that are built on top of each other in order for communication to function more easily. Each successive, higher layer abstracts the raw data a little bit more, and makes it simpler to use for applications and users. It also allows you to leverage lower layers in new ways without having to invest the time and energy to develop the protocols and applications that handle those types of traffic.

As data is sent out of one machine, it begins at the top of the stack and filters downwards. At the lowest level, actual transmission to another machine takes place. At this point, the data travels back up through the layers of the other computer. Each layer has the ability to add its own "wrapper" around the data that it receives from the adjacent layer, which will help the layers that come after decide what to do with the data when it is passed off.

One method of talking about the different layers of network communication is the OSI model. OSI stands for Open Systems Interconnect.This model defines seven separate layers. The layers in this model are:

• Application: The application layer is the layer that the users and user-applications most often interact with. Network communication is discussed in terms of availability of resources, partners to communicate with, and data synchronization.

• Presentation: The presentation layer is responsible for mapping resources and creating context. It is used to translate lower level networking data into data that applications expect to see.

• Session: The session layer is a connection handler. It creates, maintains, and destroys connections between nodes in a persistent way.

• Transport: The transport layer is responsible for handing the layers above it a reliable connection. In this context, reliable refers to the ability to verify that a piece of data was received intact at the other end of the connection. This layer can resend information that has been dropped or corrupted and can acknowledge the receipt of data to remote computers.

• Network: The network layer is used to route data between different nodes on the network. It uses addresses to be able to tell which computer to send information to. This layer can also break apart larger messages into smaller chunks to be reassembled on the opposite end.

• Data Link: This layer is implemented as a method of establishing and maintaining reliable links between different nodes or devices on a network using existing physical connections.

• Physical: The physical layer is responsible for handling the actual physical devices that are used to make a connection. This layer involves the bare software that manages physical connections as well as the hardware itself (like Ethernet).

The TCP/IP model, more commonly known as the Internet protocol suite, is another layering model that is simpler and has been widely adopted.It defines the four separate layers, some of which overlap with the OSI model:

• Application: In this model, the application layer is responsible for creating and transmitting user data between applications. The applications can be on remote systems, and should appear to operate as if locally to the end user. 

The communication takes place between peers network.

• Transport: The transport layer is responsible for communication between processes. This level of networking utilizes ports to address different services. It can build up unreliable or reliable connections depending on the type of protocol used.

• Internet: The internet layer is used to transport data from node to node in a network. This layer is aware of the endpoints of the connections, but does not worry about the actual connection needed to get from one place to another. IP addresses are defined in this layer as a way of reaching remote systems in an addressable manner.

• Link: The link layer implements the actual topology of the local network that allows the internet layer to present an addressable interface. It establishes connections between neighboring nodes to send data.

Interfaces

Interfaces are networking communication points for your computer. Each interface is associated with a physical or virtual networking device. Typically, your server will have one configurable network interface for each Ethernet or wireless internet card you have. In addition, it will define a virtual network interface called the "loopback" or localhost interface. This is used as an interface to connect applications and processes on a single computer to other applications and processes. You can see this referenced as the "lo" interface in many tools.

Protocols

Networking works by piggybacks on a number of different protocols on top of each other. In this way, one piece of data can be transmitted using multiple protocols encapsulated within one another.

Media access control is a communications protocol that is used to distinguish specific devices. Each device is supposed to get a unique MAC address during the manufacturing process that differentiates it from every other device on the internet. Addressing hardware by the MAC address allows you to reference a device by a unique value even when the software on top may change the name for that specific device during operation. Media access control is one of the only protocols from the link layer that you are likely to interact with on a regular basis.

The IP protocol is one of the fundamental protocols that allow the internet to work. IP addresses are unique on each network and they allow machines to address each other across a network. It is implemented on the internet layer in the IP/TCP model. Networks can be linked together, but traffic must be routed when crossing network boundaries. This protocol assumes an unreliable network and multiple paths to the same destination that it can dynamically change between. There are a number of different implementations of the protocol. The most common implementation today is IPv4, although IPv6 is growing in popularity as an alternative due to the scarcity of IPv4 addresses available and improvements in the protocols capabilities.

ICMP: internet control message protocol is used to send messages between devices to indicate the availability or error conditions. These packets are used in a variety of network diagnostic tools, such as ping and traceroute. Usually ICMP packets are transmitted when a packet of a different kind meets some kind of a problem. Basically, they are used as a feedback mechanism for network communications.

TCP: Transmission control protocol is implemented in the transport layer of the IP/TCP model and is used to establish reliable connections. TCP is one of the protocols that encapsulates data into packets. It then transfers these to the remote end of the connection using the methods available on the lower layers. On the other end, it can check for errors, request certain pieces to be resent, and reassemble the information into one logical piece to send to the application layer. The protocol builds up a connection prior to data transfer using a system called a three-way handshake. This is a way for the two ends of the communication to acknowledge the request and agree upon a method of ensuring data reliability. After the data has been sent, the connection is torn down using a similar four-way handshake. TCP is the protocol of choice for many of the most popular uses for the internet, including WWW, FTP, SSH, and email. It is safe to say that the internet we know today would not be here without TCP.

UDP: User datagram protocol is a popular companion protocol to TCP and is also implemented in the transport layer. The fundamental difference between UDP and TCP is that UDP offers unreliable data transfer. It does not verify that data has been received on the other end of the connection. This might sound like a bad thing, and for many purposes, it is. However, it is also extremely important for some functions. It’s not required to wait for confirmation that the data was received and forced to resend data, UDP is much faster than TCP. It does not establish a connection with the remote host, it simply fires off the data to that host and doesn't care if it is accepted or not. Since UDP is a simple transaction, it is useful for simple communications like querying for network resources. It also doesn't maintain a state, which makes it great for transmitting data from one machine to many real-time clients. This makes it ideal for VOIP, games, and other applications that cannot afford delays.

HTTP: Hypertext transfer protocol is a protocol defined in the application layer that forms the basis for communication on the web. HTTP defines a number of functions that tell the remote system what you are requesting. For instance, GET, POST, and DELETE all interact with the requested data in a different way.

JSON Web Token (JWT) is a compact URL-safe means of representing claims to be transferred between two parties. The claims in a JWT are encoded as a JSON object that is digitally signed using JSON Web Signature (JWS).

OAuth 2.0 is an open source authorization framework that enables applications to obtain limited access to user accounts on an HTTP service, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter GitHub, and DigitalOcean. It works by delegating user authentication to the service that hosts the user account, and authorizing third-party applications to access the user account.

FTP: File transfer protocol is in the application layer and provides a way of transferring complete files from one host to another. It is inherently insecure, so it is not recommended for any externally facing network unless it is implemented as a public, download-only resource.

DNS: Domain name system is an application layer protocol used to provide a human-friendly naming mechanism for internet resources. It is what ties a domain name to an IP address and allows you to access sites by name in your browser.

SSH: Secure shell is an encrypted protocol implemented in the application layer that can be used to communicate with a remote server in a secure way. Many additional technologies are built around this protocol because of its end-to-end encryption and ubiquity. There are many other protocols that we haven't covered that are equally important. However, this should give you a good overview of some of the fundamental technologies that make the internet and networking possible.

Virtualization

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko.

QEMU is a fast processor emulator using a portable dynamic translator. QEMU emulates a full system, including a processor and various peripherals. It can be used to launch a different Operating System without rebooting the PC or to debug system code.

Hyper-V enables running virtualized computer systems on top of a physical host. These virtualized systems can be used and managed just as if they were physical computer systems, however they exist in virtualized and isolated environment. Special software called a hypervisor manages access between the virtual systems and the physical hardware resources. Virtualization enables quick deployment of computer systems, a way to quickly restore systems to a previously known good state, and the ability to migrate systems between physical hosts.

VirtManager is a graphical tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt. Most usage is with QEMU/KVM virtual machines, but Xen and libvirt LXC containers are well supported. Common operations for any libvirt driver should work.

oVirt is an open-source distributed virtualization solution, designed to manage your entire enterprise infrastructure. oVirt uses the trusted KVM hypervisor and is built upon several other community projects, including libvirt, Gluster, PatternFly, and Ansible.Founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is based allowing for centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access.

Xen is focused on advancing virtualization in a number of different commercial and open source applications, including server virtualization, Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), desktop virtualization, security applications, embedded and hardware appliances, and automotive/aviation.

Ganeti is a virtual machine cluster management tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other open source software. Once installed, the tool assumes management of the virtual instances (Xen DomU).

Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is lightweight, runs on every major operating system, and is highly performant, creating machine images for multiple platforms in parallel. Packer does not replace configuration management like Chef or Puppet. In fact, when building images, Packer is able to use tools like Chef or Puppet to install software onto the image.

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity, and makes the "works on my machine" excuse a relic of the past. It provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team.

VMware Workstation is a hosted hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems; it enables users to set up virtual machines on a single physical machine, and use them simultaneously along with the actual machine.

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers.

Databases

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Database Learning Resources

SQL is a standard language for storing, manipulating and retrieving data in relational databases.

SQL Tutorial by W3Schools

Learn SQL Skills Online from Coursera

SQL Courses Online from Udemy

SQL Online Training Courses from LinkedIn Learning

Learn SQL For Free from Codecademy

GitLab's SQL Style Guide

OracleDB SQL Style Guide Basics

Tableau CRM: BI Software and Tools

Databases on AWS

Best Practices and Recommendations for SQL Server Clustering in AWS EC2.

Connecting from Google Kubernetes Engine to a Cloud SQL instance.

Educational Microsoft Azure SQL resources

MySQL Certifications

SQL vs. NoSQL Databases: What's the Difference?

What is NoSQL?

Databases and Tools

Azure Data Studio is an open source data management tool that enables working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB and SQL DW from Windows, macOS and Linux.

Azure SQL Database is the intelligent, scalable, relational database service built for the cloud. It’s evergreen and always up to date, with AI-powered and automated features that optimize performance and durability for you. Serverless compute and Hyperscale storage options automatically scale resources on demand, so you can focus on building new applications without worrying about storage size or resource management.

Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed SQL Server Database engine instance that's hosted in Azure and placed in your network. This deployment model makes it easy to lift and shift your on-premises applications to the cloud with very few application and database changes. Managed instance has split compute and storage components.

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or provisioned resources at scale. It brings together the best of the SQL technologies used in enterprise data warehousing, Spark technologies used in big data analytics, and Pipelines for data integration and ETL/ELT.

MSSQL for Visual Studio Code is an extension for developing Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse everywhere with a rich set of functionalities.

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is a development tool for building SQL Server relational databases, Azure SQL Databases, Analysis Services (AS) data models, Integration Services (IS) packages, and Reporting Services (RS) reports. With SSDT, a developer can design and deploy any SQL Server content type with the same ease as they would develop an application in Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.

Bulk Copy Program is a command-line tool that comes with Microsoft SQL Server. BCP, allows you to import and export large amounts of data in and out of SQL Server databases quickly snd efficeiently.

SQL Server Migration Assistant is a tool from Microsoft that simplifies database migration process from Oracle to SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

SQL Server Integration Services is a development platform for building enterprise-level data integration and data transformations solutions. Use Integration Services to solve complex business problems by copying or downloading files, loading data warehouses, cleansing and mining data, and managing SQL Server objects and data.

SQL Server Business Intelligence(BI) is a collection of tools in Microsoft's SQL Server for transforming raw data into information businesses can use to make decisions.

Tableau is a Data Visualization software used in relational databases, cloud databases, and spreadsheets. Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in August 2019.

DataGrip is a professional DataBase IDE developed by Jet Brains that provides context-sensitive code completion, helping you to write SQL code faster. Completion is aware of the tables structure, foreign keys, and even database objects created in code you're editing.

RStudio is an integrated development environment for R and Python, with a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, and tools for plotting, history, debugging and workspace management.

MySQL is a fully managed database service to deploy cloud-native applications using the world's most popular open source database.

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance.

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It is a fully managed, multiregion, multimaster, durable database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications.

FoundationDB is an open source distributed database designed to handle large volumes of structured data across clusters of commodity servers. It organizes data as an ordered key-value store and employs ACID transactions for all operations. It is especially well-suited for read/write workloads but also has excellent performance for write-intensive workloads. FoundationDB was acquired by Apple in 2015.

CouchbaseDB is an open source distributed multi-model NoSQL document-oriented database. It creates a key-value store with managed cache for sub-millisecond data operations, with purpose-built indexers for efficient queries and a powerful query engine for executing SQL queries.

IBM DB2 is a collection of hybrid data management products offering a complete suite of AI-empowered capabilities designed to help you manage both structured and unstructured data on premises as well as in private and public cloud environments. Db2 is built on an intelligent common SQL engine designed for scalability and flexibility.

MongoDB is a document database meaning it stores data in JSON-like documents.

OracleDB is a powerful fully managed database helps developers manage business-critical data with the highest availability, reliability, and security.

MariaDB is an enterprise open source database solution for modern, mission-critical applications.

SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine.SQLite is the most used database engine in the world. SQLite is built into all mobile phones and most computers and comes bundled inside countless other applications that people use every day.

SQLite Database Browser is an open source SQL tool that allows users to create, design and edits SQLite database files. It lets users show a log of all the SQL commands that have been issued by them and by the application itself.

dbWatch is a complete database monitoring/management solution for SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase, MySQL and Azure. Designed for proactive management and automation of routine maintenance in large scale on-premise, hybrid/cloud database environments.

Cosmos DB Profiler is a real-time visual debugger allowing a development team to gain valuable insight and perspective into their usage of Cosmos DB database. It identifies over a dozen suspicious behaviors from your application’s interaction with Cosmos DB.

Adminer is an SQL management client tool for managing databases, tables, relations, indexes, users. Adminer has support for all the popular database management systems such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, Firebird, SimpleDB, Elasticsearch and MongoDB.

DBeaver is an open source database tool for developers and database administrators. It offers supports for JDBC compliant databases such as MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, SQL Server, Firebird, SQLite, Sybase, Teradata, Firebird, Apache Hive, Phoenix, and Presto.

DbVisualizer is a SQL management tool that allows users to manage a wide range of databases such as Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, MySQL, H3, and SQLite.

AppDynamics Database is a management product for Microsoft SQL Server. With AppDynamics you can monitor and trend key performance metrics such as resource consumption, database objects, schema statistics and more, allowing you to proactively tune and fix issues in a High-Volume Production Environment.

Toad is a SQL Server DBMS toolset developed by Quest. It increases productivity by using extensive automation, intuitive workflows, and built-in expertise. This SQL management tool resolve issues, manage change and promote the highest levels of code quality for both relational and non-relational databases.

Lepide SQL Server is an open source storage manager utility to analyse the performance of SQL Servers. It provides a complete overview of all configuration and permission changes being made to your SQL Server environment through an easy-to-use, graphical user interface.

Sequel Pro is a fast MacOS database management tool for working with MySQL. This SQL management tool helpful for interacting with your database by easily to adding new databases, new tables, and new rows.

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License

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