Before we get started, I want to congratulate you on making it to this point in the program. Let's take a moment to think about all the skills you've learned in your journey so far. You've learned the fundamentals of information technology from how binary works, to the importance of user support in IT, to even building your own computer. You've learned the fundamentals of computer networking, and how the internet really works and finally, you've learned how to navigate the Windows and Linux Operating Systems, managing processes and software, in the command line like a true power user. Great work so far. Before we dive deep into systems administrations and infrastructure, I take this opportunity to introduce myself, or re-introduce myself. For those who might remember me from way back in course one, my name is Devan Sri-Tharan. I've been working on IT for 10 years. I'm the corporate operations engineer at Google, where I get to tackle challenging, and complex IT issues. Thinking back, my first experience with tech began when I was about nine years old, when my dad brought home the family's first computer. I remember my dad holding a floppy disk and telling me that there was a game on it. To my dad's amazement. I somehow managed to copy the game from the disk, onto the computer's hard drive. While it may seem like a trivial task now, this device was just so new to us back then. Sure. I loved the different games I could play but, what I really loved was tinkering with the machine, trying to get it to do what I wanted it to do. While that floppy disk and computer might have ignited my passion for technology, it was actually my first few job experiences, that really started to shape my IT career. One job was in retail selling baby furniture, and the other was at a postal store, where I helped customers ship their package and became the one person IT crew. It might sound odd that working in retail inspired my career, but I realized that I really enjoyed communicating with customers trying to understand their needs, and offering a solution. My first experience working directly in IT was in college as an IT support specialist intern. From there, I worked as an IT consultant to decommission an entire environment. This was my first experience working directly with a large IT infrastructure, and pushing myself outside my comfort level as a college student. I bring these first few jobs for a reason. These experiences helped shape my career and IT. I knew at that time that I wanted to go into tech, but I struggled with where I wanted to focus my career. Starting at Google as an IT Generalist, allowed me to experience many different areas of technology. It allowed me to figure out that the jobs I didn't want to do, and before I was able to identify exactly what I did want to do. I'm really passionate about IT infrastructure. This program is designed to help prepare you for roles in tech support, desktop support, or other help desk, but it doesn't stop there. In this course, we're going to open up an even wider net of possibilities and IT by teaching you the skills you need, to manage computers for a whole organization. If you're working in a small organization, you might need to do this from day one. If not, stretching your skill set will make you stand out in the field, and prepare you for potentially taking on this work further on in your career. In this course, we're going to build upon what you learn in the operating systems course, by teaching you system administration skills. At a high level, system administration is the field in IT that is responsible for maintaining reliable computer systems, in a Multi-user environment. While systems administration responsibilities can overlap with other roles in IT, a person who works only in system in ministration is a systems Administrator. Systems administrators have a diverse set of roles, and responsibilities. They can range from configuring servers, monitoring the network, provisioning, or setting up new users in computers and more. Think of system administrator as a tech Generalist. They handle many different things, to keep an organization up and running. It's actually very similar to how IT support specialists work. You need to apply a diverse set of tech skills in different situations, to help solve problems in an organization. As an IT support specialist, doing systems administration tasks might be part of the job. So, we're going to introduce the skills, and knowledge you need to manage organizations and systems, to keep your skills well-rounded. By the end of this course, you'll learn what services are used in infrastructure. You'll also learn about the essential use of software for your organization, and how to manage entire organization's users and computers, using directory services. Finally, you'll learn the skills you need to backup your organization's data, and recover in the case of a disaster. All right. It's time to get started. So, let's dive in.
