I had a goal 4 weeks ago, to pass 5 AWS certifications in 4 weeks.      I completed this goal:

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate

• AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional

For the time being,  I’m going to be done with AWS certifications, unless I get a position which leverages AWS.      This week I made a list of the certifications that I will look at over the coming year with a goal to complete all of them by August of 2019.    I still have a fall semester to finish, so I’ll stop certifications at the end of August until December to focus on finishing my masters.

The list of Certifications I made.

• Azure

• GCP

• CISSP

• CISM

• Cisco

  • CCNA

  • CCDA

  • CCNP

  • CCDP

• TOGAF

• ITIL

• Linux Certification

Anyone know of any other ones to pursue?    Think it’s a good list for a Solution Architect as it has a broad range of cloud technologies, networking, and security.

I have decided, that my next challenge will be 2 Cisco Certifications in the next 2 weeks.     After that, we’ll see what is next on the list.

I sat the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam this morning.   This exam is hard, probably the hardest of the AWS exams I have taken to date.    I did it in about half the allowed time.   Generally, the test is challenging as it covers a lot of topics and each answer always had two correct choices.   The entire exam is a challenge to pick the more correct answer based on the scenario and question with a driving factor of one more or more of the following,  scalability, cost, recovery time, performance or security.

I felt like I passed the exam while doing it, but its always a relief to see:

Congratulations! You have successfully completed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam and you are now AWS Certified.

Here is my score breakdown from the exam.

Topic Level Scoring:

The best part of interviewing is when you spend a day with people who are skilled, interested and have great discussions.    I spent Friday in 5 one hour interviews which were great.   The people genuinely liked the company and their contributions to the company and looking to add talented people to their team.   I felt like I fit in, and would be a great place to work.

Never know what happens, but looking forward to the next steps.

Wrote about Employers Ghosting before, seems like now employees or candidates are doing it too.

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/what-is-employee-ghosting-how-companies-created-their-own-worst-nightmare.html

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/people-ghosting-work-its-driving-companies-crazy-chip-cutter/

What happened to decorum?

I sat the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate this morning.   That makes two exams this week in 3 days.

The exam was a little bit harder than the two other Associate exams as it went a level deeper.   It focused on CloudFormation, CloudWatch, and deployment strategies.      There were nine questions I struggled with the right answer, as all nine had two good answers.     There were about 35 questions I knew cold.    There were three questions duplicated on the other associate exams.   All of the network questions I was over-thinking, probably based on the networking exam this week.    Given this, I wasn’t worried when I ended the test.   However,  it’s always a relief when you get the Congratulations! You have successfully completed the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate.

Within 10 minutes I got my score email:

Congratulations again on your achievement!

Overall Score: 84%

Topic Level Scoring:

The score reflected over thinking the networking questions.    I wouldn’t recommend sitting two different exams in the same few days.

That make 4 AWS certifications in 3 weeks:

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate
• AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty
• AWS Certified Developer - Associate
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (Released February 2018)

Guess now it’s time to focus on the last of the Amazon Certifications I’ll work on for now which is the  AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.

Is DevOps the most overused word in technology right now?

The full definition from Wikipedia.  Here what DevOps really is about.   It about taking monolithic code with complex infrastructure supported by developers, operational personnel, testers, system administrators and simplifying it, monitoring it and taking automated corrective actions or notification.

It’s really about reducing resources who aren’t helping the business grow and using that headcount toward a position which can help revenue growth.

It’s done in 3 pieces.

Piece 1. The Infrastructure

It starts by simplifying the infrastructure build-out, whether it in the cloud where environments can be spun up and down instantly based on some known configuration like AWS CloudFormation,  using Docker or Kubernettes.   Recently, Function as a Service (FaaS), AWS Lambda,  Google Cloud Functions or Azure Functions. This reduces reliance on a DBA, Unix or Windows System Administrator and Network Engineers.   Now the developer has the space they need instantly.   The developer can deploy their code quicker, which speeds time to market.

Piece 2.  Re-use and Buy vs. Build

Piece 2 of this is the Re-use and Buy vs. Build.   Meaning if someone has a service re-use it, don’t go building your own.    An example is Auth0 for authentication and Google Maps for mapping locations or directions.

Piece 3.  When building or creating software do it as Microservices.

To simplify it you are going to implement microservices.   Basically, you create code that does one thing well.  It’s small, efficient and manageable.    It outputs JSON which can be parsed by upstream Services.   The JSON can extend without causing issues to upstream Services.   This now reduces the size of the code base a developer is touching, as it one service.   It reduces regression testing footprint.      So now the number of testers, unit tests, regression tests and integration tests have been shrunk.   This means faster releases to production, and also means a reduction in resources.

You’re not doing DevOps if any of these conditions apply?

1. You have monolithic software you’ve put some web services in front of.

2. Developers are still asking to provision environments to work.

3. People are still doing capacity planning and analysis.

4. NewRelic (or any other system)  is monitoring the environment, but no one is aware of what is happening.

5. Production pushes happen at most once a month because of the effort and amount of things which break.

Doing DevOps

1. Take the monolithic software and break it into web services.

2. Developers can provision environments per a Service Catalog as required.

3. Automate capacity analysis.

4. Automatic SLAs which trigger notifications and tickets.

5. NewRelic is monitoring the environment, and it providing data to systems which are self-correcting issues, and there are feedback loops on releases.

6. Consistently (multiple times a week)  pushing to production to enhance the customer experience.

The material for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate seems to be a lot of the material cover under the Associate Architect and Associate Developer.   I would have thought the material more focus on setting up and troubleshooting issues with EC2, RDS, ELB, VPC etc.    It also spends a lot of time looking at CloudWatch, but doesn’t really provide strategies for leveraging the logs.  Studying was a combination of the acloud.guru and the official study guide, and the Amazon Whitepapers.

I took the AWS supplied practice test using a free test voucher and score the following:

It interesting the networking score was so low as I just passed the Network Speciality.

This is the last Associate exam to pass for me.    If I successfully pass it, I will begin the process of studying for the Certified Solution Architect - Professional.    That will probably be my last AWS certification as I’ll look at either starting on something like  TOGAF certification,  Redhat or Linux Institute, Cisco, GCP  or Azure, depending on where my interest lies in a few weeks.

I passed the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty Exam this morning.    The exam is hard.   My career started with a  networking as I had multiple Nortel and Cisco Certifications and was studying to the CCIE Lab back then.  But over the last 12 years,  I got away from networking.    Doing this exam was going back to something I loved for a long time, as  BGP, Networking, Load Balancers, WAF makes me excited.

My exam results

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0  Design and implement hybrid IT network architectures at scale: 75%
2.0  Design and implement AWS networks: 57%
3.0  Automate AWS tasks: 100%
4.0  Configure network integration with application services: 85%
5.0  Design and implement for security and compliance: 83%
6.0  Manage, optimize, and troubleshoot the network: 57%

I have limited experience with AWS networking prior to this exam.   I had the standard things likes load balancers, VPCs, Elastic IPs and Route 53.   This exam tests your knowledge of these areas and more.      To prepare I used the acloud.guru course, also the book  AWS Certified Advanced Networking Official Study Guide: Specialty Exam and the Udemy Practice Tests.    With the course and book, I set up VPC peers, Endpoints, nat instances, gateways, CloudFront distributions.    I put about 50 hours into doing the course, reading the book, doing various exercise, and studying etc.

Based on my experience the acloud.guru course is lacking the details on the ELBs, the WAF, private DNS, and implementation within CloudFormation.     The book comes closer to the exam, but also doesn’t cover CloudFormation, WAF or ELBs as deep as the exam.   The Udemy practice tests were close to the exam, but lack some of the more complex scenario questions.

I plan to sit the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam later this week.

What’s up with interviewers asking about kubernetes experience lately?   Two different interviewers raised the question today.

Kubernetes Is only 4 years old .   GCP has supported it for a while. AWS released it in beta at Re:invent 2017 and it went general release June 5 2018.   Azure went GA June 13, 2018.

So how widely deployed is it?     Also if it is supposed to speed deployments, how complex can it be?   How many hours to learn it?

Next week I will be learning it.  Looking forward to answering these questions.

The pdf provided this:

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (Released February 2018) (SAA-C01) has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 720.

I got a 932….

awsarch went SSL.

Amazon offers free SSL certificates if your domain is hosted on an ELB, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, API Gateway or AWS CloudFormation.

For more information on the Amazon ACM service. 

So basically it required setting up an Application Load Balancer, updating DNS, making updates to .htaccess and a fix to the wp-config file.

Now the site is HTTPS and the weird non-HTTPs browser messages went away.     Come July Chrome will start carrying a warning sign per this Verge Article.

Free SSL certificates can also be acquired here https://letsencrypt.org/ 

I sat the exam for the AWS Certified Developer - Associate this morning.     I felt lucky as the system kept asking questions I knew in depth.   There were only 4 questions I didn’t know the answer to and took an educated guess.

I did the exam in 20 minutes for 55 questions.    I only review questions I flag, and I only flagged about 8 questions.    I felt really lucky as the exam was playing to my knowledge of DynamoDB, S3, EC2, and IAM.   There were other questions about Lambda, CloudFormation, CloudFront, and API calls.   But the majority of the questions focused on 4 areas of AWS, I knew really well.

At the end of the exam, I got the Congratulations have successfully completed the AWS Certified Developer  – Associate exam.

Also within 15 minutes, I got the email confirming my score:

Congratulations again on your achievement!

Overall Score: 90%

I’m still waiting on my score from my Solution Architect - Associate Exam.    In the meantime, I’ll get back to studying my AWS Networking Speciality.

AWS offers practices emails through PSI exams.   Cost $20 and gives you 20 questions for practice.    I did the exam today.   Here is the results email.

That’s a confidence builder going into the exam tomorrow morning.