September 13, 2017

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Now AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional!

I’m happy to report that just shy of two years after I posted that I’m an AWS Certified Solutions Architect! (Associates level), that I’ve now leveled up to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional level! As my AWS experience has hit the roughly 5 year mark (and my associates was expiring) it turned out to be an opportune time for an upgrade. There isn’t much I can say that I didn’t say in my previous post — other than the professional level test is much more challenging. Once again I used CloudAcademy to help study up on the services (since you need to know them all) and detailed bits I don’t use everyday. I was quite pleased with the information that CloudAcademy had and it did a great job prep’ing me for the test.

Now I feel like I should build some infinitely scalable, inexpensive, highly available, extra secure web service… because I can… just for fun.

AWS AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification cloud costing deployment high availability Professional

I'm an AWS Certified Solutions Architect!

October 23, 2015

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.

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.

CoreOS Fest 2017

June 13, 2017

Just a bit over a week ago I had the opportunity to attend CoreOS Fest 2017 at the lovely Pier 27 in San Francisco. You might remember this same structure from my cruise posts as Pier 27 serves double duty as event center and cruise ship terminal. Now that I’ve had a chance to see both sides of the building, I definitely recommend the cruise terminal portion. Not that I didn’t greatly enjoy CoreOS Fest… but vacation always wins. Anyways, enough about the building, let’s talk about Kubernetes — because it was definitely the highlight of the conference. While I don’t think the Fest is bigger than Kubecon, it certainly was no slouch.