I completed my Master’s in computer science through Georgia Institute of Technology.   It took 3.5 years, and hundreds of hours each semester.   Normally I would take 2 classes per term.   Saying it was hard would be an understatement.   The hardest part are hours lost studying and away from my family.    It was like having a second full-time job.   I feel honored to be part of the 5th graduating class.   I’ve met some great people along the way.   Whether it was my first group in CS6310, only 3 of the original 5 made it thru that class.   The other group from CS8803 Cyber-Physical Design and Analysis who happened to be in the on-campus class.  I had the privilege to meet in person when I opened a retail store in Atlanta.   There were groups in other classes too.   The work taking a class two times to graduate.   

 I know the program is not meant to be easy, as the brainchild of and Dr. Zyi who will retire later this year.  He and faculty created something special, and the unbelievable amount work of my fellow students spent as TA’s.   I hope this program continues to educate the masses and continues to grow and develop.   I know it has made a positive impact on my life and hopefully, with time I’ll find ways to give back to the program.   

Every year 10s of thousands of AWS customers and prospect customers desend on Las Vegas. For those of us to don’t make the trek Amazon live streams the the daily Key Notes. Those are where AWS announces it’s newest products and changes. Each year I build a list before November as AWS has a tendency to leak smaller items. This year my wish list for AWS was as follows:

1. Mixing sizes and types in ASG - Announced
2. DNS fixed for Collapsed AD - Announced
3. Cross regional replication for Aurora PostGreSQL - Regions expanded  still waiting on the cross regions to be announced 
4. Lambda and more Lambda integrations  - Announced 
5. AWS Config adding machine learning based on account.  
6. Account level S3 bucket control - Partly Announced 
7. 40Gbps Direct Connect 

There a lot of announcements, far too many to recap if interested in them all go read the AWS News Blog.   I do like to find two announcements which shock me and two things that seem interesting. 

The two items which shocked me were:

1. DynamoDB added transactional support (ACID).   This means someone could build an e-commerce or banking application which requires consistent transactions on dynamoDB.  
2. AWS Outposts and AWS RDS on VMware allows you to deploy AWS on-premise and AWS will manage this for you.   I can only assume this is to help with migrations or workloads so sensitive they can’t move off-premise.     It would be interesting to see how AWS manages storage capacity and compute resources as many companies struggle with these and how the management model will work.   However, given the push to move away from traditional data centers, so reserves that course.   It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next year and what services this provides a company migrating to the cloud. 

On my passions is security, so the two things which interested me are

• AWS Security Hub and  AWS Control Tower  - I consider these one thing as they will be used in tandem.   Control Center will provide security launch zone for an organization while AWS Security Hub will provide governance and monitoring of security 
• The ARM processor in the a1 instances which Amazon developed internally.   Based on pricing these instances seem to offer cost advantages to the existing instance types.   

What did you find interesting, amusing or shocking?   What were you looking for which wasn’t announced? 

Sat the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional Exam last this afternoon.  The exam is hard, as it scenario based.   Most of the exam questions were to pick the best solution for deployments which comprised CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks.   Every one of those questions had 2 good answers, it came down to which was more correct based on the keywords cost, speed, redundancy, roll back capabilities.  

I did the course on acloud.guru and a lot of AWS pages. At some point I will make a page of all the links I collected when studying for this exam.

The exam took me about two-thirds of the allowed time, I read fast and have a tendency to flag questions I don’t know the answer to and come back later and work thru them. This exam, I flagged 20 questions. Most of them I could figure out, once I thought about them for a while. But flagging questions and going back helps manage the time.

Upon submission, I got the “Congratulations! You have successfully completed the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional…”

I got my score email very quickly:

Overall Score: 82%

Topic Level Scoring:

That now makes my 7th AWS Certification.