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...
about 1 hour 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)...
7 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 - What is RTO and RPO? Common mistakes candidate make - they say RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is measured in unit of data, e.g. gigabyte, petabyte etc. Here is the right answer - Both RPO and RTO are measured in time. RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective and is a measure of how quickly after an outage an application must be...
14 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, Most engineers are using MCP clients and agents. But very few know how to build and host an MCP server, let alone run it remotely on the cloud. In today's edition, we will learn how to create and run a remote MCP server on Kubernetes, on Amazon EKS! I will share the code repo as well, so you can try this out yourself. But first.. 🔧 What is an MCP Server really? It’s not just an API that performs a task. An MCP Server is a protocol-compliant endpoint (defined by Anthropic) that...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, On my interactions, this question is coming up a lot - “How are AWS Strands different from Bedrock Agents?”. In today's newsletter, we will go over this, so you can also answer this in your interviews or real-world projects 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 for time, weather, and AWS...
28 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Another day, another MCP tool. But this one is special. Today we are going to go over newly released EKS MCP server. This is the official Kubernetes MCP server released and maintained by AWS. This one will rule them all! In today's edition, we are going to go over what it is, why this one is a game changer, how you can use this to get job interviews and demand more money, and whether it will eliminate SRE jobs. There are three Ways to Manage Kubernetes : Traditional Way (Manual...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, We all heard it - Gen AI is taking away your job. The reality is, it is for sure impacting your job functionalities. However, there is a bigger reason why many folks are failing interviews and not growing in their career, due to Gen AI, but NOT for the reasons you think! Let's dive deep You're Learning the Wrong Gen AI Tools ⚙ There are countless Gen AI tools and services out there. But here’s the key question you should be asking: Which tools are actually being used by the...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, MCP is all the rage now. But does this make RAG obsolete? This is becoming a burning question in real-world projects and in interviews. In today's edition, let's take a closer look and find out the answer. Let's go over what is what quickly. RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is used where the response can be made better by using company specific context that the LLM does NOT have. You store relevant company data into a vector database....
3 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Gen AI hype is at an all-time high, and so is the confusion. What do you study, how do you think about it, and where are the most jobs? These are the burning questions in our minds. I love first-principles thinking, which means breaking down a problem into the smallest logical chunks, and I approach Gen AI the same way. Gen AI can be broken down into the following four layers: The bottom layer is the hardware layer, i.e., the silicon chips that can train the models. Example -...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Becoming an AWS Community Builder is both prestigious and significantly increases your chances of being picked up by recruiters for an interview. In today's newsletter, my mentee Vijay, Principal Engineer at Nokia, will detail the steps so YOU can become an AWS Community Builder as well. Off to you Vijay.. Hi, Vijay here 👋! In March 2025, I got into AWS Community Builders Program. Many people reached out to me to know how to get into the program. Here is a detailed article on...
3 months ago • 4 min read