Hello Reader, Happy Holidays! 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 January 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 student Abhisekh has deep knowledge of the...
3 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. 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 responsible for talking to the app team and coming up with an...
13 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Hi from Las Vegas, USA, where I am here to present at AWS Re:Invent, the biggest cloud conference on earth. In this edition I am going to go over a BIG announcement that you should learn - Amazon EKS Autonomous Mode or EKS Auto Mode or lovingly called EKS Auto! Why is this important? Getting started with Kubernetes is hard. Sure Amazon EKS manages control plane, but you need to install core addons, select AMI, create worker node, and scale the nodes. It doesn't stop there....
21 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, A container icebreaker interview question is the fundamental container workflow from the local machine to the cloud. In this edition, we will start with the manual process that every project starts with, then we will show how this manual process gives way to CICD and then how it evolves to a more mature pipeline. Let's start with understanding the foundational flow first: Developer writes code, and associated Dockerfile to containerize the code in her local machine She uses...
27 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, In today's post, let's look at a correct but average answer and a great answer that gets you hired to common cloud interview questions. This should give you pointers on how to improve your interview answers. Also Lambda turned 10 years, should you still learn it? We got a packed newsletter, let's get started. Interview question - Can you tell me about a microservice you have designed on AWS? Common but average answer - I will use ALB with EC2 with Auto Scaling Group, ALB with...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, EDA (Event Driven Architecture) has become increasingly popular in recent times. In this newsletter edition, we will explore what is EDA , what are the benefits of EDA, and then some advanced patterns of EDA. 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) picks it up and processes...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, One of the most popular interview question is what happens when you type an URL? Let's find out. So obviously when you type in URL like www.amazon.com, you see the website in your computer or your mobile phone. The interviewer wants to know what happens under the hood so that you can see this website. Core Concept At the end of the day, everything is a computer to computer interaction. So in a very rudimentary level, amazon.com is running on bunch of Amazon EC2s. Those EC2s are...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, What is the difference between traditional CICD and GitOps? This topic is coming up frequently in actual project meetings, and interviews. Let us understand this with the below diagram: Traditional DevOpsStep 1: Developers check in Code, Dockerfile, and manifest YAMLs to an application repository. CI tools (e.g., Jenkins) kick off, build the container image and save the image in a container registry such as Amazon ECR.Step 2: CD tools (e.g. Jenkins) update the deployment...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Election season is upon us, and many of us find ourselves doom scrolling the news, getting pulled into conflict about politics, and, as a result, not investing as much time as we could into improving our careers. In today's edition, I want to share some techniques that helped me focus on my goals amidst all the distractions. I thought this is important, because without this, no matter how many technical guides I give you, it is way harder to achieve your goals. While we think...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, If you are in your 30s or 40s or 50s, is it really too late to make changes in your career? The short answer is "No". How do I know- coz I changed my career in mid 30s from dead end legacy job to AWS, doubled my salary, and more importantly, I have helped others in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s do the same. In this edition, I will share all the tips, and tricks so you can do the same. If you are stuck in your career, your situation probably looks like below: You are at a job...
3 months ago • 3 min read