October 23, 2015

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I'm an AWS Certified Solutions Architect!

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
I’m pleased to report that as of Wednesday afternoon I’m an AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate. While I’ve been working in/on/around AWS for years now, it’s nice to have the certification that proves I know what I’m doing. Amazon’s testing, unlike a lot of the certifications in tech (I’m looking at you CompTIA A+), is 100% about the real world. While that makes it harder, it makes the testing all the more invaluable.

When I say “real world” I mean that the testing is heavy on the use of situational testing. So rather than having to memorize a bunch of facts and figures (like say the EC2 instance types, something that

anyone could easily google), the testee needs to have a solid grasp of using AWS and what solutions fit best for a particular problem. The certification page recommends “One or more years of hands-on experience” and that is not a suggestion that should be taken lightly. In fact I encountered a question that was almost identical to a problem I experienced when Josh and I re-built www.okta.com into its current extremely-scalable infrastructure.

While I’m not at liberty to share any questions on the test (of course), I do have a few recommendations for others who might be interested in taking the Solutions Architect Associate certification:

2015-10-23 15_06_31-Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator

  • Sign up for CloudAcademy, even if only for a month. Their exam questions are very good and will help you identify your weak points. One area it illuminated for me is Direct Connect — a service I’ve never used, but which is critical to many on-premise to cloud migrations.
  • Study what is AZ vs Region vs Account specific. While you might not get asked directly, knowing what can and can’t be transported across AZ boundaries will be immensely valuable.
  • For any service you’re not an expert on, read the user guides. The Amazon provided docs are great and even though I’ve used EBS volumes a fair amount, I learned several valuable lessons reading the user guide.
  • Run a “production” environment. If you aren’t running a real production load in AWS today, build one. Follow the best practices for a webapp, including a VPC, NAT instances, Web App instances, ELBs, Cloudfront, Route 53, and Multi-AZ RDS. Using just a little data in each and the smallest instance sizes you can run a fully-AZ redundant infrastructure for less than $100 a month. Or you could run it for a few days and it’d only cost you a couple Starbucks.
This testing experience was enjoyable enough to make me want to go out and get more certifications, something I previously never thought I’d say.

Relax, have fun, and enjoy the cloud!

associate level AWS AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification certified cloud disaster recovery dr ha high availability

Truly non-interactive / unattended apt-get install

December 4, 2008

I’ve recently begun tinkering with Amazon Web Services (specifically their EC2 service) and RightScale. The major difference between these “Cloud” computing platforms and others is that the “instance” (i.e A running virtual machine) is temporary. Once it is shut down, all the data is gone. Additionally, the RightScale (and fairly common) way about going things is to use a “clean” machine image and script the install of the specific packages you need on Launch.

AWS re:Invent wrapup

October 12, 2015

AWS re:Play. Yes, the outside is a wall of FEU shipping containers. (From @Werner)As expected, AWS re:Invent had more goodies in store for us after the Day 1 keynotes session. Most of the excitement centered around the new product announcements from the Day 2 keynote. The major difference between the two days is that the second day contained a lot more products that were already accessible to the general public (albeit some in Beta). This meant a lot more hands-on time at re:Invent along with more details emerging on a daily basis. Thursday night was also the re:Play party featuring Zedd and possibly the world’s biggest pun about containers.

Roundup from AWS re:Invent Day 1

October 7, 2015

Today was the first day (sans instructional courses) of the 4th annual AWS re:Invent conference. While I was unable to attend this year, I’ve been eagerly watching the streams and keeping an eye on the news feeds. There have been many product announcements leading up to re:Invent, but the “really good stuff” was kept for today’s keynote. It is my suspicion that tomorrow’s keynote will be even better, so keep an ear to the ground. In the mean time, let’s take a quick look at what was announced today: