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.