Hello Reader, In today’s post, let’s look at another correct but average answer and a great answer that gets you hired to common cloud interview questions. This question is critical because everyone uses this service in almost every project! Question - How will you secure your S3 bucket? Common but average answer I will use KMS so bucket objects are not unencrypted I will use Bucket Policy and IAm roles for least privilege to secure my bucket What the interviewer is looking for is you...
11 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Often I hear this - API Gateway is Serverless, hence it's better than Application Load Balancer (ALB). In todays newsletter edition, we will take an objective look at both, consider pros and cons, and more importantly how to tackle this in system design or tech interview. Remember our guiding principle - to get the job, or to excel at the job - you need to DELIGHT and not just MEET the standard. Let's get started. Both can route traffic to backends, both are managed by AWS, and...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, In today’s post, let’s look at another correct but average answer and a great answer that gets you hired to common cloud interview questions. This question is even more relevant now, after this week's AWS outage! Question - How did you do Disaster Recovery (DR) for your AWS application? Common but average answer - I will replicate it to another region What the interviewer is looking for is how DR strategies are chosen, and what are the different strategies. As an SA, you will be...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Recently, I had the privilege of speaking to the Computer Science and Business Club at Rutgers University - ranked #1 in New Jersey for Engineering and Computer Science by U.S. News & World Report. It was incredible to see how driven and curious these students were. Many already had offers from Amazon, JPMorgan, and other top companies. Talking with them took me right back to my college days - studying for exams, chasing grades, and trying to figure out how to land that first...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Another week, another AI announcement. But this one is worth studying because this one will become the defacto standard of running agents on AWS. I am talking about newly released Amazon AgentCore. Let's dive in. 🧩 The Big Picture: Why Agents Exist Let’s break it down using a practical example: What happens when a user asks an LLM app: What’s the time in New York? What’s the weather there? List my S3 buckets The LLM don't have these information, hence it needs to invoke tools...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, AI agent frameworks have created a crowded and confusing landscape. This edition offers a direct, value-focused comparison of these popular frameworks, examining their features, ease of use, enterprise readiness, and ideal use cases to help you decide which is best suited for your project. This edition of the newsletter is written by Adam Bluhm, Principal AI Engineer at HiddenLayer, and a former award-winning Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. Adam Bluhm builds and architects...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, In today's newsletter, I am going to share three tips that helped me and many of my students switch careers to the cloud and get high-paying jobs. I will also share an update about the upcoming Sep cohort of the AWS SA Bootcamp. Tip 1: Leverage your IT experience Your existing IT experience is NOT throwaway. Don't think you can't reuse components of your existing knowledge in your cloud journey. For example, my mentee and SA Bootcamper Rukmani, came from software engineering...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, In today’s post, let’s look at another correct but average answer and a great answer that gets you hired for common cloud interview questions. And this ties to a larger thread - most candidates fail their Solutions Architect interviews - not because they’re underqualified… But because they don’t know how to communicate like a Solutions Architect. How to stand out as a must-hire? Let's start with a common question, and we will go from there! Question - What's the difference...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Not all questions are equal in interviews and real-world projects. There are some questions that you simply can't mess up, because these concepts are so fundamental, they are used in almost ALL projects. One such concept is high availability. Surprisingly, I hear wrong answers on this all the time. In this edition, let's go over the common bad answers, a good answer, and then some! Question: What is High Availability? Bad Answers Even if a component fails, application should...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, EDA (Event Driven Architecture) has become increasingly popular in recent times. In this newsletter edition, we will explore what EDA is, what the benefits of EDA are, and then some advanced patterns of EDA, including with Kubernetes! Let's get started: An event-driven architecture decouples the producer and processor. In this example producer (human) invokes an API, and send information in JSON payload. API Gateway puts it into an event store (SQS), and the processor (Lambda)...
4 months ago • 3 min read