I passed the 200-125 CCNA exam today.   Actually scored higher than I did 17 years ago.     However the old CCNA covered much more material.   Technically per Cisco guidelines it’s 3 - 5 days  before I become officially certified.

Primarily I used VIRL to get the necessary hands-on experience and Ciscopress CCNA study guide.   Wendell Odom always does a good job and his blog is beneficial in studying.   The practice tests from MeasureUp are ok, but I wouldn’t get them again.

Next up the 200-310 DESGN.

Last time,  I started studying for Cisco Certifications, I built a 6 router one switch lab on my desk.   One router had console ports for all the other routers, and the management port was connected to my home network so I could telnet into each of the routers via their console ports.     It was exciting and a great way to learn and stimulate complex configurations.     The routers had just enough power to run BGP and IPSec tunnels.

This time, I found VIRL, which is interesting as you build a network inside an Eclipse environment.   On the backend, the simulator creates a  network of multiple VMs.

So far,  I built a simple switch network.   I’m using it with the Cloud service Packet as the memory and CPU requirements exceed my laptop.    Packet provides a bare-metal server which is required for how VIRL does a pxe-boot.   I wish there was a bare-metal option on AWS.

I’m still trying to figure out how to upload complex configurations and troubleshoot them.

The product is very interesting as it provides a learning environment for a few hundred dollars vs. the couple thousand which I spent last time to build my lab.

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?