Forem: Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️)

Are these the RIGHT 5 skills for a Beginner Cloud Engineer?

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:51:04 +0000

A few weeks ago I posted a video to YouTube titled "No, I will not mentor you".

The point of the video was to explain what someone new to cloud should do to get clarity in their own career (more on that later), rather than shooting off messages on social media asking them "will you mentor me"?

Spoiler: Doing that is (super) ineffective.

Looking for a role in cloud? You need to ask yourself these four questions...

As part of that video I shared a free PDF (you can find the link in description), with four questions that you should answer for yourself if you're looking to get into the cloud industry. Those questions are:

What role do you want in cloud?
What of your experiences makes you suited for the role?
What are the five skills you’ll need to work on?
What are the skills that you will not work on?

After I released the video, I took to social media to share the PDF with various people who had previously asked me to mentor them.

About 50 people DM'ed me to get access to the PDF. But, do you want to know how many filled it in? At first, zero.

This is not a bad thing to me, I believe a lot of those people who message me "will you mentor me" simply don't have skin in the game. So sending this PDF is proving to be a great test to see if the person I'm talking to is serious or not about their career. Most are often scared off by the idea of filling in the four questions above. If that's the case, there's no way I can even help you.

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BUT, after a couple of weeks, I got the most INCREDIBLE submission from someone on Twitter who had answered the questions detailing their own cloud learning plan. I thought it was such a great example, I couldn't help but make a video reviewing the submission, and giving a bit more advice and context for someone looking to become a cloud engineer.

Learning plan for a Cloud Engineer: five skills you should consider focusing on.

Let me assume that you're a busy person, and maybe you don't have time to watch the video. One of the best parts were the five skills that this person wrote down as their areas of focus:

1️⃣ - Computer Science via CS50
2️⃣ - Python via Code Academy
3️⃣ - Linux via Network Chuck
4️⃣ - Networking via CompTIA Network+
5️⃣ - Cloud via AWS Cloud Practitioner

Aside: In the video I also mention Learn To Cloud Guide as a great source of info on things like Linux and beginner projects.

Not only did this person figure out what they wanted to learn (in terms of skills) AND made sure the skills matched the job they are going for… but they also figured out which platforms to learn from 👏 A++

If this the learning path you were choosing, I’d also suggest that you now take these five areas, and really spend 2-6 months (depending how fast you work) to really get your head down and get the skills in the bag. When you're done, then you can start to think about building projects, bulking up your portfolio, and interview prep.

If you're looking to become a Cloud Engineer, you could "steal" this learning plan and get started. I would strongly suggest that you watch the video are these the RIGHT skills for a cloud engineer too, as it gives more context to the five skills.

If you're not so keen on the idea of becoming a Cloud Engineer, I'd suggest that you watch the video "I will not mentor you" to learn more about how to put together your own cloud learning plan based on the four questions above.

If we've not had chance to meet yet, I'm Lou. I run Open Up The Cloud, to help you get your start and grow your career in Cloud! You can find me over on YouTube or on both Instagram and Twitter where I'm very active, let's hang out and chat cloud careers!

Speak soon, Lou 👋

No, I will not mentor you.

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 06:47:44 +0000

I often get asked...

"Will you mentor me?" => And the answer is: No !

However... the "why not" might surprise you.

It's not that I don't want to help... It's that when you ask this question, you're asking more effort from me than you're giving yourself.

When someone reaches out to me like this...

I always ask them the same four questions:

What role are you targeting?
Why do you think you specifically can get that role?
What FIVE skills are you focussing on?
What skills are you NOT focussing on?

Answer these four questions and you'll get immense clarity on your route into the cloud industry. No mentoring required.

I'm not "anti mentoring".

I'm just pro: self-sufficiency, empowering you with tools to unblock yourself—and radical and honest feedback and advice!

If you can find a mentor—amazing!

If not, you can follow my suggestions (for free).

I will link a YouTube video that walks you through these four questions below 👇 In the YouTube video there is also a multi-page PDF that walks you through these exact questions !

Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #30 (January Recap 2022)

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 13:12:17 +0000

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Open Up The Cloud is here to help you get your start, and grow your career in the cloud. The newsletter comes once a month, covering news and updates from the cloud sphere! Open Up The Cloud is more than your average tech blog, check out: the mission 🚀

Welcome Back!

Hello, I’m Lou — and welcome back to Open Up The Cloud!

I hope you’re settling into 2022, because it’s already a month down! This months newsletter is a real mixed bag of cloud, we talk about ClickOps, functionless, the announcements of AWS Lambda powertools for TypeScript, the limitations of serverless framework and more.

This Month’s Top Cloud Pick(s) ⏫

The Rise of ClickOps (Corey Quinn, Last Week In AWS) — A topic near to my heart, but one also likely to ruffle some feathers! Should you use infrastructure as code, or should you start with “ClickOps” (as a beginner)? The main concern I have with “ClickOps” is when beginners don’t appreciate what infrastructure as code is, and I get it… because it’s hard to understand the purpose of infrastructure as code outside of a large organisational setting. Yet, understanding and appreciating infrastructure as code is an essential skill for all cloud professionals. If you’re interested, I’ve already written my arguments in favour of incorporating infrastructure as code into your learning process in this article: 5 important reasons to learn terraform before cloud computing. The reality is that using ClickOps is sometimes the pragmatic choice. But… it must also be a considered choice, knowing what infrastructure as code is, the limitations, and where the rule can be bent or broken.

Feature Releases & Announcements 📚

CloudTrail Lake (Andres Silva, AWS News Blog) — CloudTrail is an AWS service that helps you track API calls and actions in your AWS account, useful for things like compliance and constructing audit trails. But, doing analysis over your CloudTrail events is a pain, and the typical advice from AWS is to set up Amazon Athena (you can also use CloudWatch, and CloudWatch insights). So in short, you can think of CloudTrail Lake as a simpler way to have Athena for you under the hood, adhering to various best practices. For more, Noam Dahan did a nice write-up and analysis of the new service.

Serverless Framework v3 is out (Matthieu Napoli, Serverless Inc) — I must admit that I’m not the biggest fan of Serverless Framework. Serverless Framework shines best when getting a project off the ground, but it can quickly become challenging to deal with. I’ve seen this sentiment shared time and time again by many seasoned cloud engineers / developers, so I know that I’m not alone here. AWS SAM and the AWS CDK are growing as alternative options. But, alas! We should talk about the v3 announcement, which introduces stage parameters, to allow you to change the service configuration based on the deployment stage (dev, test, stage, production) and comes with a new re-designed CLI experience with niceties like cleaner error handling. If you want to see V3 in action, Sam from Complete Coding has a video showing you around all the changes. Also, here’s a nice write up from Almir from Serverless Guru.

AWS announces a new AWS Console home experience (Sébastien Stormacq, AWS News Blog) — AWS has now moved away from the static home page with static links to a more dynamic and customisable home page. The dashboard is now widget based, and has widgets like: AWS health, favourites (a customisable favourites widget), recently visited services to quickly re-access services, and more. Sadly, if you’re an AWS account hopper, it seems there’s no way to bring your configurations with you between accounts—but it’s a start! At this point, we’ll take any improvements to the AWS console that we can get!

Lambda functions now support ES modules (and top-level await) (James Beswick, AWS Compute Blog) — AWS Lambda now supports ES modules for Node.js 14 runtimes, which introduces some niceties like an impact on cold start performance, tree shaking and better static analysis.

How-To’s & Educational Peices ☁

The Trade-off’s With Functionless Integration Patterns (Paul Swail, Serverless First) — So, you’ve probably heard of “serverless”, but have you heard of “functionless”? Functionless is the practice of using native cloud integrations to write business logic and applications entirely via config. With new services like AWS API Gateway and AWS step functions, you can write complicated logic without having to write a single Serverless function, which has lead to this new term “functionless”. Functionless pushes to the more extreme end of cloud development, relying heavily on cloud providers rather than your own logic.

AWS Lambda Powertools TypeScript (Powertools Repo, GitHub) — AWS already have several utility libraries for AWS Lambda: Python, Java. Now, they’ve introduced one more to the family: TypeScript. Read Sara’s announcement post on Twitter. But, also be sure to check out Matt’s first look at Powertools to learn more about the different features that the library supports such as easier logging, metrics and tracing instrumentation.

How to get hands-on with AWS with no enterprise experience? (Open Up The Cloud, Twitter) — After sitting, and passing, the AWS Associate Developer exam, I share a strategy for building hands-on skills even if you don’t have enterprise experience.

Opinion Pieces & Miscellaneous

Analyzing SRE job postings (JP Cheung, Rootly) — An analysis of the SRE role taken from GitLab, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Amazon. Some interesting takeaways here, such as how much an SRE should code, or not. It seems for most (or all) of these major players that strong development skills are a must. Also, for writing incident reports or analysis blog posts, the SRE is expected to be a great communicator. I also analysed over 100 Cloud Engineering job descriptions to extract the most requested skills (raw data spreadsheet attached)! If you’re interested to learn about the different roles in the cloud, I did this write-up talking about the roles: architect, SRE, cloud engineer, software engineer, data engineer, and understanding their earning potential, whether they code, and if the role is suitable for a beginner.

$1500 AWS Cert Giveaway (Sam, Complete Coding) — Sam from Complete Coding is very close to hitting 10K subscribers on YouTube, and as a way to celebrate, he’s giving away 5 AWS certification vouchers, worth up to $1500! Go ahead and give him a subscribe, and follow along for details on how to win those exam vouchers!

Updates: Open Up The Cloud

Every year I do a write-up of my reflections from the past year, my learnings and plans for the new year. If you missed the article on social, here’s your chance to catch up. A big piece of news from Open Up The Cloud was the income report, now all Open Up The Cloud’s income is public. I also published a video on the YouTube channel talking about the income report, and my plans for 2022.

Also, this month, I passed my AWS Associate Developer exam, using Exam Pro, and Jon Bonso practice exams. I’ve filmed (and currently editing) a video analysis of both of these resources, with a recap of the AWS exam for the YouTube channel, so be sure to check that out. I’ve also been posting daily tips on instagram, and giving you behind the scenes looks at completing different cloud certifications, AWS exams, and generally what it means to work in cloud.

Let’s #OpenUpTheCloud ! 👋

Thanks for tuning in this month, folks! If you have any thoughts or questions about the newsletter, hit reply and the email goes straight to me!

Speak soon!

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The post Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #30 (January Recap 2022) appeared first on Open Up The Cloud.

24 Days To Pass The AWS Dev Exam: Exactly How I Did It 🚀

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 07:08:47 +0000

Sup folks! 👋

In January I managed to take and pass 🚀 the AWS Associate Developer Exam in just three and a half weeks. Today, I released a YouTube video that goes into a TON of detail. I talk about exactly which courses I used, how I approached studying, and my general tips for the exam.

But... in case you don't have the time to watch the video right now, let me at least summarise for you some of the tips (that are also shared in the video!) for taking and passing the AWS Associate Developer Exam here 👇.

🏆 Jon Bonso's Practice Exams

Jon's practice exams are well known and well liked for people taking the AWS exams, I see the practice exams recommended all the time here on DEV.TO, on Reddit, on Twitter, etc. They didn't dissapoint!

But, what I didn't realise about them, is that there's SO much content in the practice exams themselves that you should really treat them like a "course".

Don't take just the 2 hours it takes to sit each exam, I'd suggest that you take more like 10-15 hours per practice exam, so you really can dig into the answers you get wrong!

🛠 Build Mini Projects

Given the content in the course, and the fact that lots of questions were combining services, not just asking about one, hands on learning is essential.

For the AWS associate developer exam, I'd suggest to build the following three mini-projects:

A serverless architecture: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, CloudWatch Alarms. Optionally: Step Functions and Event Bridge.
A classic architecture: EC2, Load Balancers, Route53, Auto Scaling.
A static site: Route 53, CloudFront, Amazon S3.

📆 Book your exam in the afternoon

A big mistake I made for this exam was booking it before work (7AM), which meant for my last minute preparation I had to be up even earlier than my booked exam (4AM!). Yeah, don't do that. I'd suggest you book your exam in the afternoon, and give yourself some time to prepare in the morning.

📚 Use the certification prep page

I'm always telling folks about this page on the AWS documentation, it's seemingly buried, but is an absolute treasure trove of information. Use the dropdown and find your exam, it gives you the exam guide, the exact whitepapers, the right FAQ pages to read, AWS training content. Bookmark this page. 🔖

⏱ How long did it take?

This is a question I get a lot. I spent between 20-30 hours over the course of 3.5 weeks to take and pass the exam. But, I do have a lot of experience with building on AWS already.

💰 How much did the exam cost?

$24 (exam pro AWS Associate Dev Course) + $150 (exam itself) + $19 (Jon Bonso practice exams on Udemy) = $193. But... of course, you don't have to pay anything to train and learn for the exams, lots of content is online for free, and quite frankly the best source of information is mainly the AWS documentation itself!

That's it! A few tips that I hope helps you out. If you get chance, do watch the full video, because there's a lot more detail in there! 🙏

Hey! 👋 If we haven't met, let me introduce myself, I'm Lou, and I created Open Up The Cloud to help you get your start, and grow your career in cloud 🚀.

If you're interested in cloud, the best way to keep up-to-date with news, and everything I publish is via the monthly cloud newsletter. And find Open Up The Cloud on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram... wherever you like to hang out! 😄

Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #29 (November Recap 2021)

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:40:00 +0000

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Welcome Back!

Hello, I’m Lou 👋 and welcome back to Open Up The Cloud!

The newsletter is a little later than I usually send out, but… I did need some time to digest the absolute torrent 🌊 of Re:Invent announcements and analysis! This year’s Re:Invent was definitely less of a whizz-bang affair than in the past. Most say it’s because “AWS seemingly had nowhere else to go but up, as in abstraction layers” [1]. I mean, if we keep abstracting at this rate, everything will be YAML! [1]. AWS are seemingly grappling with either providing low-level “primitives”, or those developer experience and “frameworks” on top [1].

One big theme from Re:Invent that was clear is: The future is Serverless and event-driven[1][2]. AWS are continuing to invest in new instance types[1][2][3]. There were even some sustainability announcements [1], and a lot of improvements for machine learning[1][2].

Let’s take a look through some of the announcements 👇

This Month’s Top Cloud Pick(s) ⏫

If you only read one or two things this month, let it be this.

Open Up The Cloud: Hangout — Actually, before we get to the Re:Invent links, let me tell you first about the Open Up The Cloud hangout, a casual Twitter space for you to bring your cloud resume or project [1], to be “reviewed” and discussed. We have some amazing folks coming: Linda Vivah (100% go follow Linda on Instagram) Brian Hough, the most friendly, energetic guy in tech and cloud. Andrew Brown—who has some of the most watched cloud certification videos on YouTube. The super hard-working and kind folks behind learntocloud.guide: Rishab, Antonio and Gwyneth, and maybe a special guest or two! It looks set to be a blast, join us! [1] If you share a resume or project to be reviewed, I’ll send you a copy of either Cloud Resume Challenge book, or The Tech Resume: Inside Out.

Feature Releases & Announcements 📚

New stuff in the cloud, that you probably should know about.

Top announcements of AWS Re:Invent 2021, Re:Invent One Pager and this A Cloud Guru Article — All nice summaries of the main Re:Invent announcements. If you’re short of time, scan the one-pager document, and you’ll be (mostly) all caught up! … Kinda.

New Instances: M1, Graviton3 and more EC2 instance types — AWS have invested some more in a new line of their own Graviton3 chips. You can now access M1 instances via AWS, which are essentially “mac mini’s [1], but over the internet”. And finally, AWS announced a whole bunch of new EC2 image types, optimised for various aspects.

Control Tower Account Factory For Terraform — Setting up an AWS organisation isn’t easy, and when you try doing that with Terraform, it’s not any easier! You need to decide on things like patterns for your backend / state management (e.g. how many backend locations you want, and which AWS accounts those backends will live), and you’ll need to hand-roll a load of tooling to get things to work. This new module is kinda AWS out-of-the-box in a Terraform module. However… the code module behind the announcement only has only two contributors 👀. That said, it is nice to see AWS supporting Terraform more heavily. Earlier this year, AWS announced they would invest in officially supported Terraform modules [1][2], which now live under a new GitHub organisation called “AWS Integration & Automation” [1]. The terraform modules announcement did come with some criticisms, though about the lack of engagement with existing open source folks before announcing the project [1].

AWS Lambda Supports Cross Account ECS — AWS Lambda originally announced support for containers at last year’s Re:Invent [1]. It was an interesting announcement, because using Docker for serverless is somewhat antithetical to AWS Lambda [1]. With Docker, you are aware of your underlying infra (your image layers). Whereas AWS Lambda was (in a purist sense) about having as close-to-zero knowledge of the underlying infrastructure. When AWS announced container support, you could only configure to pull from an ECS repository from the same AWS account, which was a massive pain if you run a multi-account set up as you’d have to rebuild an artifact to do that. That’s now fixed!

CloudWatch Evidently — A service for A/B testing and feature flagging. However, the keen-eyed among you, will have noticed that Evidently looks incredibly similar to existing functionality in AppConfig [1]. AWS did acknowledge the similarities in the announcement post but didn’t go into great detail, leaving folks generally confused [1]. Seems like Evidently is intended to be a more fully-featured option, potentially meaning App Config might go away (or at least be pushed to the background) in the future.

AWS Console UI Improvements — This AWS UI announcement is a little weird in my opinion. Because there was always a bunch of nagging inconsistencies still in the AWS console UI… except they didn’t fix those, AWS kinda just sprinkled on some glitter instead, like a reintroduced favourites bar (which AWS took away last year and now they’re giving it back!) and dark mode.

AWS Re:Post — AWS must be struggling under their support burden, and are hoping that some community participation might help. AWS Re:Post is a smart bet, but I’m skeptical of the execution. It’s essentially like StackOverflow but for AWS. However, the service is odd, as posting is done via an AWS account, and as Corey Quinn points out, what happens if you move job? How do you take all your kudos and account with you? [1] If the service takes off, it could be a huge help, but I can’t say that I’m really sure why AWS decided to hide Re:Post behind an AWS login.

AWS Private 5G — This announcement is pretty wild. AWS Private 5G will make deploying a 5G network a lot easier than it is right now. Amazon is stepping truly into the mobile connectivity market, revolutionising telecommunications infrastructure as they have for so many other industries like web. AWS is even managing the shipping of hardware. What next—Starlink competition [1]?

RedShift Serverless, EMR Serverless, MSK Serverless, Kinesis Serverless — If it wasn’t already apparent that the future is Serverless, AWS are working through their services offering serverless options everywhere that they can. This announcement is also interesting as it seems to position RedShift close to BigQuery, which was always the poster-child and main service within GCP.

Serverless Storage For Serverless Cloud — Despite the AWS announcements, in the background companies like Serverless Inc are still busy shipping features. This announcement from Serverless Cloud is interesting, as it gives an easy way to integrate stateful file storage with Serverless. It feels like Serverless Cloud are now changing the industry using Serverless in a way that Heroku did previously for more stateful applications.

Miscellaneous & Opinion Pieces ⬇

Cloud commentary, spicy takes, memes, and just-for-fun stuff!

Reviewing A Real Cloud Engineers Resume — In this video I reviewed the resume of Alex, an aspiring cloud engineer. It’s a great looking resume and portfolio, but there were still some common pitfalls that you can avoid when putting together your resume.

Outages ⬇

What went down or got hacked?

AWS Went Down — This month AWS has been down a couple of times now in various ways. At one point they even took down their own status page [1].

Open Up The Cloud Updates ☁

A meta update about Open Up The Cloud.

I’ve been musing a lot on the mission of Open Up The Cloud. Over the Christmas break, I’ll make some homepage and branding updates to really emphasise the mission (social enterprise, community-led aspect) of Open Up The Cloud. I also want to kick-off some “income reports” in the new year, where I’ll show every penny Open Up The Cloud makes, and where that income is being re-invested! But more on that coming soon!

Also, don’t forget to add a reminder for the Open Up The Cloud: Hangout!

Let’s #OpenUpTheCloud ! 👋

Thanks as always for tuning in this month! Remember, any support that you give for Open Up The Cloud then gets re-invested in the community, in the form of gifted certifications, books, sponsors for open source and more! Thank you for being a part of the mission!

Speak soon!

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Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #28 (October Recap 2021)

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:20:58 +0000

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What is going on cloud friend! It’s been another month in the cloud world, so it’s time to catch up on everything that’s been going on!

Let’s get into it…

This Month’s Top Cloud Pick(s) ⏫

If you only read one or two things this month, let it be this.

AWS ReInvent (AWS) – By the time I send you the newsletter next month, we’ll be talking about AWS ReInvent. It’s always a crazy and busy time of the year, trying to keep up with all the updates, and the opinion pieces that go out around that time. For Re:Invent this year, it seems that some of the content is going to be available online (but not all of it, sadly). However, the content will include the keynotes 🎉 (which I strongly recommend). So be sure to start checking out the schedule ahead of time to make a plan 🧐 of what you want to watch and/or attend 😀 I’m sure I’ll also be spending a lot of time on Twitter (@loujaybee) sharing updates, so let’s chat as they roll in.

Feature Releases & Announcements 📚

New stuff in the cloud, that you probably should know about.

100DaysOfCloud Twitter Spaces (Andrew Brown) – Andrew has been on fire 🔥 recently doing some cloud-focused Twitter spaces. The last time I checked, Andrew was shooting for 100 spaces in 100 days—which is totally nuts 🥜 but doesn’t surprise me because Andrew is a total workhorse. Either way, if you’re not already following Andrew on Twitter, this is your nudge!

Learn To Cloud Guide – From what I’ve seen, the good folks behind the learn to cloud guide (Gwyneth, Rishab & Antonio) are putting in some big efforts to really ✨ jazz up ✨ the project, it’s now hosted on it’s own website at learntocloud.guide and I hear they have some pretty serious plans to build the project up. Watch this space and give these guys a follow to keep up with what they have planned!

AWS Sam Accelerate (Eric Johnson, AWS Blog) – It seems that everyone and their mums are now wading in to try to solve the local development vs cloud debate. In this article, read about some updates from AWS SAM to improve the speed of their local development. In their words: “AWS SAM Accelerate brings the developer to the cloud, and not the cloud to the developer”. AWS SAM has introduced some new ways to sync your code and watch for changes, to make the whole deployment and testing cycle faster. It seems like companies are becoming more and more bullish of this idea of personal, and/or ephemeral environments for development (serverless cloud have also been taking a swing at the topic). And now I feel like more than ever we’re dying for someone to write a book on this topic.

How-To’s & Educational Pieces 🤓

Articles on how to do various cool things with the cloud.

What Are The Different Roles In The Cloud? (Open Up The Cloud) – Ever wondered what the actual difference is between roles like SRE, Cloud Engineer, DevOps, etc? In this article, I dive into the roles, what they do that we have in the cloud, look at how much 💰 earning potential 💰 each role has, how much coding is involved 💻 and whether or not the role is suitable for a beginner 👶. The article was inspired originally by this Instagram post where I talked about the different cloud roles, which people seemed to think was useful! 🙏 Andrew Brown also has some nice career blogs on his site iamcloud.dev, where he talks about similar topics like do you need to be a sys admin/support role before working in cloud, which I think are also worth checking out.

Moving To Cloud (Anurag Kale) – In this article, Anurag shares his journey of how he moved from a SQL dev to the cloud industry (which started life as a Tweet thread). Anurag covers how you should start by complimenting your existing skillset, become involved in communities 👨‍👧 (I couldn’t agree more) and to teach 🧑‍🏫 (of course, I agree), and finally to look into getting certified 🥇 as a way to structure your learning. Anurag’s advice seems to reflect very much my own (e.g. Where To Start With Cloud Computing? 5 Quick Tips To Get Hands-On Today!)

How Should You Run Production Containers On AWS? (Vlad, Twitter) – There are precisely ✨ 4 million ✨ ways to do anything in the cloud these days, and there’s no exception when it comes to choices for running containers. Where do you start when choosing somewhere to run your containers? You’ve got Kubernetes, Managed Kubernetes (EKS), ECS Fargate, ECS with EC2, and now even AWS Lambda runs containers. So what do you choose? Vlad has put together this really neat flowchart of the different options and his suggestions depending on your situation. It’s a nice decision tree if you’re thinking about which AWS service to use for deploying/running your containers.

Should You Learn To Code When Learning Cloud? (Open Up The Cloud) – “I thought maybe cloud computing is a great career option for me because it requires little coding” was the email question I received. But… is it even true? 🤔 Does cloud require coding? And if so—when? Under what circumstances? It’s a common question I get asked a lot, and I’ve also written a blog about whether cloud engineers code where I talk also about what type of code cloud engineers write, such as infrastructure as code, build scripts, and monitoring and tooling. My short answer is: You can get into/work into the cloud without writing any code, but I think by approaching it with that mentality you’re potentially short-changing your learning, and limiting your career growth and potential. But you’ll have to check out the post for all the details!

Operating Serverless At Scale – Governance (Part 1) (Jerome Van Der Linden, AWS) — This is the first article in a three-part series covering the topic of “governance”—or in friendlier terms: 🏷 tagging and getting control of resource groupings. If you’ve ever had to do anything like managing costs 💰 in large cloud accounts you know how important (and difficult!) tagging can be. Jeromes article covers how you can use things like tag policies, service control policies, AWS Config, etc to manage the situation. There’s some good, practical advice in here, and it’s not just serverless related.

Operating Serverless At Scale – Consistency (Part 2) (Jerome Van Der Linden, AWS) — This second article goes into topics of standardization, with the examples of SAM templates and base images. I know from working on internal platform teams on developer experience just how big a topic standardization and templates can be. Rolling templates out to teams, and managing them, ensuring they’re used, maintained, and kept up-to-date, is a really difficult task. Tools like Backstage can help us here. The second part of the article covers using base images, which is a fairly standard industry practice. If you’re using containers with Lambda, or Fargate it does make sense to have standardized base images, not just for consistency but also for security. Tools like Packer can also help here.

Operating Serverless At Scale (Controlling Resources) (Jerome Van Der Linden) — This final article in the series covers topics such as implementing the principle of least privilege through IAM controls. I always found this principle is actually a tough one to apply in practice. It makes sense on paper, but can be hard to enforce without tying yourself in knots. Jerome also discusses the important topic of reactive and proactive guardrails, which I think is a great way to “frame” your thinking when it comes to implementing these configurations throughout your account. Are you trying to slow software engineers down, or help them and speed them up?

7 GitHub Projects To SuperCharge Your Docker Practices (DEV.TO, Ankit Anand) — Some nice links in here to some projects with tutorials, best practices, and performance improvement utilities.

Opinion Pieces / Miscellaneous 💭

Cloud commentary, spicy takes, memes, and just-for-fun stuff!

State Of My Cloud Journey (Alex Eversmeyer) – I stumbled across Alex’s DEV.TO updates whilst on my travels around the cloud space, and liked the approach. Starting a journal like this can help in so many different ways: it keeps you accountable, it can potentially make you friends/connections that can lead to a job and helps you to avoid playing resume roulette. So if you’re curious to see what other cloud learners are doing, go check out Alex’s updates, and maybe you should consider starting a journal of your own… I’ve also seen Alex about in the Cloud Resume Challenge Discord, and if you’re not in there already—you should come join us!

12 AWS Certifications in 6 weeks (Adam Elmore) – Okay, so this is a pretty crazy thought experiment 💡… and there’s just so much to unpack here (don’t worry, I’ve taken a note to make a YouTube video 🎥 on this topic!). For instance… if someone can pass all the AWS exams in 6 weeks—what does that say about their value? Also… is this something that we should recommend? Short answer: not really! We don’t have time to unpack this right here today, so I’ll let you make up your own mind… however, there are some really great links and resources mentioned in the article such as Jon Bonso’s practice exams, and Stephane Mareeks courses, both of which I strongly recommend. You should also go follow Adam on Twitter, and also sign-up for AWS FM, where Adam is interviewing a bunch of different people in the AWS/cloud space.

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared From The Internet (CloudFlare Blog) – Sometimes it can be a scary prospect deploying some new code, or running a command that could impact production code. As software engineers, we often have nightmares that something we do ends up causing some severe outage down the line. In this case, for some poor engineers, that nightmare became true when they took down a fairly substantial portion of the internet. How is that even possible? What went wrong. Take a read to learn a bit more about how Facebook borked their BGP and in turn took down their entire stack, including WhatsApp and Instagram 😬

Werner Vogels Is A Celeb (Twitter, loujaybee) — This easter-egg that I found on the AWS Rekognition marketing pages cracked me up. You have to see it for yourself.

Personal Updates 🙍🏼‍♂️

On a YouTube front, I’ve been working on a series called “Cloud: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know” (you can find the full series here). The idea behind the series is to dive into some more “advanced” cloud topics, with the intention to give you some insights and tips for ways that you can extend and improve your own cloud projects to help out in interviews, and generally just take your projects to that next level. I started off the series talking about database migrations, then secrets management, and then most recently talking about adding logs to your project. Hopefully, these videos help to give you some ideas and inspiration of ways that you can boost your own cloud projects, let me know what you think in the comments 🙏

See You Next Month 👋

That’s all for this month’s newsletter, thanks again for joining!

If you’ve got feedback on the newsletter, e.g. if there’s something you would like to see more or less of reply to the email and let me know. I’m always looking for ways to make the newsletter more relevant and useful for you 🙏.

Speak soon, cloud friends!

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2021 Summary: A Rebrand To “Open Up The Cloud” & The Start Of Video Content

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:20:00 +0000

It’s now become a tradition for me to sit down and do an end of year review, if you want to see the previous years, here is 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. But wow, what a crazy year 2021 has been! Sitting down to look at the numbers, I’m even a little blown away myself. It’s been a year of really pushing myself, personally to get out there, join the community more, engage in video content.

Looking back, it’s hard to recognise where things were at the start of the year. I started the year with no real YouTube videos or subscribers, no real Instagram account, no real Twitter following, etc. In just a year, things already look incredibly different. But more on that later.

Let’s start with the numbers…

A Year In Numbers

🚢 33 YouTube Videos published.
🚢 12 Blogs published.
🚢 11 newsletters published.
👀 148K unique users visited the blog (up from 80K in 2020)
👀 20K blog visitors per month (up from 8K in 2020)
👀 18K YouTube views (up from 1K in 2020)
📧 681 newsletter subscribers, with a 40% open rate (up from 300)
⏫ 2267 personal Twitter followers (up from 526 followers)
⏫ 626 YouTube subscribers (up from 12!)
⏫ 531 followers on Open Up The Cloud twitter (from 0!)
⏫ 892 Instagram Followers (from 40)

A Rebrand To “Open Up The Cloud”

A big milestone of 2021 was the rebrand to “Open Up The Cloud”. It’s actually wild for me to think that even just 6 months ago, Open Up The Cloud was still branded as “The Dev Coach”!

A few years ago, “cloud” wasn’t even really a career path, it was more like a tool that some tech folks used. Now, cloud is a whole career path for architects, data engineers, serverless folks…

It was back in 2019 that I decided to double-down on cloud content, and ever since that decision, I’ve continued to see huge industry growth, which gave me the confidence to make the rebrand.

It’s hard to overstate how impactful the branding change has been. Not only was I able to shed the “dev coach” branding which made me cringe when I shared content, but “Open Up The Cloud” more embodies the vision I had. “Cloud” is big enough to be interesting and varied, but narrow enough that people know exactly what it is that I’m talking about.

To read more about the name change, check out this instagram post / this interview with Sai.

A Commitment To Being Open

Another big milestone for me this year was publishing the first income reports!

I won’t go into the background much here, as I think it’s covered well in the blog post, and in this Twitter thread. But, the TL;DR is: all of the income and expenses are now public, and I’ll report on them every month. I’ll use the report to share about social media and other metrics growth, too.

Opening up the finances is a new chapter for Open Up The Cloud.

I did a lot of meditating and thinking on this topic. At this point, I’m not personally motivated by random financial goals. I’m motivated by the potential impact I can have. Open Up The Cloud was, and now simply continues to be put the audience and community first.

Now, let’s look back at last years goal, whether I hit it, and what I learned over 2021.

Last Years Goal: Write 100 Blog Articles!

Last year’s goal was to write 100 blog articles, and get to 100,000 monthly recurring users. It was a big goal that’s for sure. Did I hit the goal? Nope, not even close! I only wrote 12 articles throughout 2021. However… Was it such a huge loss? Not at all.

Throughout the year I achieved a much bigger goal, which was pushing through some blockers I had with publishing more “personal” content. In 2021, I posted: 33 YouTube videos, published 11 newsletters, and wrote 12 pretty big blog posts.

If we add those all up, it equals 56 individual items of high-quality content, that I’m proud of. It’s not the 100 articles that I wanted, but it’s more than 1 piece of content per week, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s some really good output. I’m proud of that work. For YouTube, I had to learn photography, research and buy equipment, teach myself how to edit, learn thumbnails, improve my presentation on camera, and more. Behind those videos was a load of thinking, research and work.

To build credibility in an online world, we must constantly remind people that we know what we’re talking about. And it’s our responsibility to constantly build that credibility. We can’t assume everyone knows us and trusts us—they don’t. When people discover our work for the first time, we have no credibility. So, we have to re-share old work, and “remind” people of our credibility.

The challenge that I faced when doing the majority of my work written, through blogging was that despite having a growing website… no-one knew who I was. I’m sure lots of people read my work, but failed to notice the little author box at the end, and draw the link between the article they read. The reality is that blogging simply isn’t very good for building credibility in today’s world.

I was not fully utilising my story, my history and credibility to grow the brand.

I’ve been a software engineer for over 10 years now, I’ve worked in start-ups, enterprises, government, finance, I’ve done front-end, UX and UI design, I’ve built full-stack apps and backends, I’ve built infra, networks and serverless services, libraries and tools, I’ve refactored legacy codebases, I’ve ran training courses, lead workshops, coached and mentored folks, I’ve managed teams, built products which landed huge amounts of investment. But we simply can’t expect everyone to know every detail about our past.

Visual platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, are great to “get your face out there”, and build credibility. When people hear you speak, and talk, and see the “context” of where you work and your space, trust just comes more naturally. We can’t simply expect people to go through our LinkedIn, dig up our resume or read all our old articles. We have to remind people, link things, reference them.

Which is why I got more personal. I started posting on Twitter, I revived my Instagram, and forced myself to do more video’s. I started posting more on YouTube. I knew that being on camera would make me uncomfortable, but it seemed like more of a good reason to do it than not. And now, at the end of 2021, I can say those experiments were a massive success, I can see the quality of the networks and relationships that I’ve built have gone up exponentially, and I credit that to “putting my face” out there, sharing more of my past and my experience.

So, did I hit my writing goal? Nope. But Is that a problem? I don’t think so, I think I achieved something far more powerful in the mean time. So, that covers last years goal, but what about this year? What do I have in store?

2022 Goal: 12 Months, 12 Videos

Last year’s goal was all about writing. This year’s is goal is all about video. Video is the future of content in my eyes, and my goal this year is to produce one really good video per month (at least).

Producing one video doesn’t mean I’ll not write any blogs, or post on social media, it simply means I’ll commit to a theme each month and publish at least one video that I’m proud of.

My plan is also to do a bunch of product/course reviews of the different learning platforms and use taking some certs as the excuse / exercise in which to review them. Here’s a draft plan of what those 12 video’s are currently looking like for 2022 (in no particular order):

Exampro (AWS Data Analytics Speciality)
Analyse 100 cloud architect and data job descriptions
Antoni IT (Google Cloud Professional Architect)
Review Of Mastering Vim (vim.so)
Review of A Cloud Guru (AWS SysOps Associate Exam)
A day in the life
Review of Adrian Cantrill (Solutions Architect Professional)
Tech World With Nana Review (CKA Kubernetes Administrator)
Review Of CodeAcademy (Data Science)
Certified Developer Associate (Stephane Mareek Udemy)
GoLang Course(s) Review (TutorialEdge.net)
Review of Cloud Academy (Linux Server Professional LPIC-101)

The majority of these video’s are going to be about reviewing some existing courses, and certifications. I talk a lot about the cloud, but folks who I talk to are in the trenches, doing these courses, so I’d like to get in the trenches with them.

Along the way, I want to also get certified in a bunch of different areas: complete and finish off some AWS certifications, as that’s been my previous area of speciality. But also step into traditional networking, and also Kubernetes, which I’ve actually long since ignored.

So that’s it, that’s the plan for 2022. I enter 2022 with a much stronger vision of what Open Up The Cloud is, and can do. I’m excited for the year ahead! See you next year in 2023!

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Open Up The Cloud Monthly Income Report – Dec 2021

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 11:58:39 +0000

This is the first in a series of monthly income reports. In these reports, I will share where Open Up The Cloud generates it’s revenue, and where every penny is spent. Open Up The Cloud is a community-led social enterprise (read the mission). Publishing income reports [1][2] feel like a logical next step.

I have always strongly believed businesses can be a force for good. Open Up The Cloud is living proof that a sustainable and open business model can, and does work. Importantly, Open Up The Cloud is not structured as a charity, e.g. not driven by donations. Income is generated through content and value exchanges, whilst avoiding financial barriers (e.g. paywalls) where possible.

The finances will be open, to generate feedback and discussion on where best to allocate any funding to help support the mission. If you want to chat with me, a DM on Twitter [1] is a good place to start.

Summary Of 2021

Since this is the first income report, I’ll recap the entire last year. In future, reports will likely be on a monthly basis with an annual recap.

Here are the headlines from 2021:

£2912 revenue generated in 2021 (almost entirely “passively” and without any paywalls). Majority of income is via display ads, however I’m experimenting with other areas, e.g. affiliates on Gumroad, and Udemy.
£277 was spent in a combination of sponsorships, and giveaways, books, certification vouchers, and GitHub sponsorships. So far Open Up The Cloud has given away: 3 x The Tech resume by Gergely Orosz. 2 x AWS Certifications. 1 x The Cloud Resume Challenge Book by Forrest Brazeal, and has 1 x ongoing GitHub sponsor (Anton Babenko).

You can find the full spreadsheet at: openupthecloud.com/incomereport

Income

The majority of the current income comes from display ads on the website, served by Ezoic. I could do more to optimise these ads further, but the yield is already pretty good. The website currently gets around 20K unique users per month, which converts to several hundred USD per month (the amount varies somewhat depending on the ads market).

Open Up The Cloud 2021 Income

The intention is to try and diversify further the income streams. A clear area of exploration is affiliate products. I’ve not pushed hard on affiliates so far, but I’m leaning more towards taking them more seriously over time.

So far, I’ve had poor results with affiliate experimentation. Amazon has been low converting and paying. Udemy has been the most promising. Affiliating with indie creators who make relevant products to my audience on gumroad (e.g. The Tech resume by Gergely Orosz and The Cloud Resume Challenge Book by Forrest Brazeal) is now showing some promise.

Despite website display ads being the cash cow, this last year I invested heavily in video content (primarily on YouTube). Video is undoubtably the future of content, especially in education. However, video content does have quite a significant learning curve: camera’s, lighting, editing, creating thumbnails, speaking on camera, etc. Which all comes with additional expenditure.

Open Up The Cloud YouTube

Over the year, I did invest in equipment for YouTube [1], but took most of those expenses from my own pocket. However expenses like the Final Cut Pro [1] license were paid for by Open Up The Cloud.

The YouTube channel is not yet in the partner program[1], so doesn’t contribute to any income yet. But, there are also some other ideas I have to experiment with for monetising YouTube, without compromising on the mission/values.

Open Up The Cloud YouTube Partner Progress

Expenses

The expenses are fairly low (~£100 per month), and consist primarily of a couple of SaaS subscriptions, currently for FeedHive, Notion, GeniusLink, AWS wordpress hosting, an A Cloud Guru subscription.

Open Up The Cloud Expenses

One area not to overlook as an expense is that of training and/or learning resources. Since Open Up The Cloud has recommended products (e.g. books, courses), it’s important I purchase and use these products before recommending them, I also appreciate being able to support creators in this way.

Sponsorships

Since the revenue has grown over the last year, I’ve finally been experimenting with sponsorships. I had thought about sponsorships for some time: e.g. how to structure them and how to make them work.

Sponsorships make Open Up The Cloud a force multiplier. By sponsoring folks who do great work in the community means they can worry less about monetisation, and concentrate on their main work, whether that’s open-source, making content, running communities, etc.

Lou ☁️ 👨‍💻🏋️‍♂️🎸🚴🏻‍♂️🏍

@loujaybee

1. Sponsorships.

I want to be able to repeatably fund others who are doing great work in the industry and give them some recurring income.

18:10 PM - 26 Feb 2021

Sponsorships are challenging, due to the ongoing financial commitment, so I was hesitant to commit too early on. Right now, Open Up The Cloud has just the one sponsor via GitHub sponsors[1], Anton Babenko [1].

Open Up The Cloud 2021 Sponsorships

Why Anton? Because I consistently recommended Terraform as a technology that cloud folks should learn [1][2], due to it’s prominence in the industry[1] and Anton puts out great content and open source code which helps folks get started and use Terraform. Supporting Anton’s work was an easy decision.

However, having sponsors now raises other questions: How do I ensure that these sponsorships are made fairly? Could/should I introduce some sort of application process? The income is not infinite, so I cannot sponsor everyone, how should this work in future? These are questions I don’t have good answers to yet, but I’m keen to figure them out.

First Income Report ✅

That concludes this months (and annual) income report. I hope that you found viewing the data and information interesting. If you’d like me to dive into one particular area in future, I’d be happy to do so in a future income report!

I’d like to thank all those who have supported Open Up The Cloud so far. Without people reading the blog, watching the videos, sharing the content, Open Up The Cloud wouldn’t have grown to where it is today, and having the impact it does. If you would like to keep up-to-date with, you can follow on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe to the newsletter.

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Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #27 (August and September Recap 2021)

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:08:00 +0000

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Well hello, there cloud friend!

The keen-eyed among you will realize this is a double-edition newsletter because there was in fact no newsletter in August! Why? Because I took a little time off! 🏖 But, we’re back to it, and for this month only, I’ll summarise two months, as opposed to one.

Let’ get into it…

This Month’s Top Cloud Pick(s) ⏫

If you only read one or two things this month, let it be this.

The Cloud Resume Challenge Book — It should be pretty well known at this point that I’m a big fan of the Cloud Resume Challenge (check out the full series on YouTube) set up by Forrest Brazeal. Earlier on this month, Forrest released a companion book to the challenge. The book is totally optional, but full of useful tips about getting into the cloud industry. To celebrate, I ran a giveaway of the book, which I’ll be doing more often, so be sure to follow openupthecloud for future giveaways.

Feature Releases & Announcements 📚

New stuff in the cloud, that you probably should know about.

AWS Lambda Supports ARM (AWS Blog) — AWS Lambda has now released a new configuration that allows you to use the ARM-based processors. If you’re using Golang, you’ll need to tweak how you re-build your binaries. For Node/Python it should just be a case of updating your AWS Lambda configuration. Lots of customers are reporting increased speeds, and as a result, some reductions in cost, too.

AWS Increases Step Functions Service Support (AWS Blog) — AWS has now increased the number of services integrated with AWS Step Functions. This pushes us closer into an era of not just “serverless” but also “functionless” with a lot less “glue code” being required to integrate the different services in AWS. Previously, step functions was a way to orchestrate workflows in mostly serverless architectures, but this might see Step Functions take a step towards being considered more of a core service within AWS, let’s see!

A New Way To Do Cloud For NodeJS Developers (FooBar Serverless, YouTube) — A deep dive on the new Serverless Cloud platform with Jeremy Daly, who also runs the off by none newsletter (highly recommended—it’s one of the few newsletters I go through religiously). Worth checking out if you want a live demo/run-through of the new Serverless Cloud features.

How-To’s & Educational Pieces 🤓

Articles on how to do various cool things with the cloud.

Mono-Lambda vs Single Purposed Functions (AJ Stuyvenberg, DEV.TO) — The debate wages on, should your lambda logic be put into one, or split out? In this article, AJ shares some well-balanced thoughts and useful considerations for both approaches.

AWS.FM (Adam Elmore, Twitter) — Adam Elmore, is an AWS Community Builder, and king of AWS certifications (with all the certifications! 😬). This past month, Adam has been running some cool Twitter spaces on the topic of cloud. Catch them live on Twitter, or as podcasts later. I’m really liking Twitter spaces recently, as a sort of alternative to in-person meetups, so it’s great to see more spaces emerging in the cloud/AWS space.

DynamoDB Office Hours With Rick Houlihan (Serverless Land, YouTube) — The Serverless Land channel is growing in hidden gems, with a lot of the content being originally streamed on the AWS twitch channel. If you’ve not heard about Rick before, he’s got some of the best DynamoDB content out there, talking a lot about the best way to model and optimise DynamoDB tables. There’s also the Serverless Land website, curated by a lot of AWS serverless heroes and advocates if you haven’t seen it, yet.

AWS Solutions Architect Tech U Path (MecaHumArduino, YouTube) — The Tech U program is a working and education scheme from AWS open to those with minimal experience. The program is something that I think will interest many of those who follow this newsletter. In this video, Yusra and Ilyas go into details about how the program works. See also this thread on Twitter about the Solutions Architect role.

What Do You Think SRE Means? (Devon, Twitter) — I’m often getting asked about the different roles that exist in cloud, one of the options being the SRE role. This Twitter thread goes into many different opinions on the SRE, what they should do and how they should work. Worth checking out if you’re considering the role. Similarly, I also did a write-up on Instagram about the differences between the different roles like DevOps, SRE, Operations, etc.

Opinion Pieces / Miscellaneous 💭

Cloud commentary, spicy takes, memes, and just-for-fun stuff!

How I Got Into The Tech & Cloud Industry With A Degree (Open Up The Cloud, YouTube) — I thought it’d be fun to give some of my own personal background on how I got into tech and the cloud industry. In this video, I talk about my journey, and some of my own lessons learned, including some things that I’d do differently if I were to start all over again.

A First Look At Serverless Cloud (Anthony, DEV.TO) — Serverless Inc, the creators behind the very popular Serverless Framework are now branching out into a new area of business, the cloud itself. In this article, Anthony gives us his first thoughts on using the platform, and you can take a sneak peak at some of the planned features. Serverless cloud is currently in beta/preview—so you have to sign-up to check it out.

Cloud Career Live Q&A (MadebyGPS, YouTube) — I’m a big fan of GPS, her YouTube channel. She even recently ran a live Q&A, covering off a lot of common questions that I also get asked. Questions like: “which cloud certifications are best” and “why AWS vs Azure”. It’s unlisted (not on the main channel), so make sure to bookmark it if you need!

Building A DX Team: Lessons Learned (Lou Bichard, DAZN Tech Blog) — I don’t often talk about my work in this newsletter, but this last week, I put out a blog post talking about 2 weeks of working on the Developer Experience team for DAZN. We’ve learned a lot in that time, made a bunch of mistakes, but done a bunch of things right. If you’re curious about what a DX team is, or what they do, check it out. Also, be sure to check out part 1 for some additional context and background!

What Is The Role Of A Developer In The Cloud? (FooBar Serverless, YouTube) — A wide-ranging discussion about the cloud between Jeremy Daly and Marcia. A little hard to summarise… so you’ll have to just watch it!

100 Days Of Cloud Blog (100DaysOfCloud) — A new blog that is a companion to the 100 days of cloud community. If you’re not already part of the discord, etc, you should!

How They Started Their Tech Career (YouTube, Rishab Kumar) — This last week I was lucky enough to get interviewed/chat with Rishab Kumar, on his YouTube channel, we dug into my career and background (which I haven’t actually talked a lot about publically). I hope there’s some useful bits of advice or tricks in that video which are useful for you, too. If you watch it and have questions, feel free to reach out.

How I went from $14/hr to 70K with no experience (Reddit) — This one is an oldie, that I stumbled upon recently, but it’s just as relevant today as it was 2 years ago. I love hearing stories like this one, and it answers some questions that a lot of people always ask, like what to focus on to crack that first cloud job. Everyone’s story is slightly different, but the common theme is always persistence, commitment and focus. Some unique things about this journey are things like creating YouTube videos. Which is certainly not mandatory, but wow, what a great way to stand out.

Personal Updates 🙍🏼‍♂️

As I mentioned, I’ve been taking some (much needed!) time off over the last few weeks, you can see a bunch of pictures on Twitter from some hiking I did in the Balkans. I’m now just getting back into the swing of things, and new videos should be going up on YouTube again shortly, but it feels good to be back.

See You Next Month 👋

That’s all for this month’s newsletter, thanks again for joining!

Speak soon, cloud friends!

—

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The post Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #27 (August and September Recap 2021) appeared first on Open Up The Cloud.

What Are The Different Roles In The Cloud? A Beginners Guide.

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 17:08:00 +0000

If you’re new to the cloud industry, it’s likely you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the routes and roles to get you into the cloud industry, right? I speak to many people new to the cloud industry every day, and “what are the different roles in cloud?” is a very common question that I get asked.

Today, I’ll take you through some of the most popular roles in cloud, covering: how much they earn, how technical the roles are (e.g. if they write code, how much), and if the role is suitable for a beginner and why. Then, in the end, I’ll make you some recommendations about where I suggest you should start.

What are the different job roles in the cloud industry? Cloud Architect, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Cloud Engineer, Software Engineer, Data Engineer, DevOps, Product Manager, Quality Assurance, and Cloud Support Engineer.

Let’s start to break these roles down.

Cloud Roles Compared

To make things easier, here’s an overview of the different roles. I created this visualization so you can easily compare different aspects across the different roles, understanding how much the roles can earn, how much coding is usually involved, and if the role is (generally speaking) suitable for a beginner.

Of course, to make this visualization, I had to make some generalizations, and of course, there always are exceptions and things that “it depends” on, so let’s dive into the details of the different roles to understand them better.

Cloud Architect

Responsible for the high-level design of software systems. An architect usually requires deep expertise in the many technologies that they use in order to facilitate considered decisions. Architects usually start their careers in other roles, like software engineering.

💵 Earning potential? High, $137K USD (Source) – Due to the wide impact the architect can have on a company, and the depth of skills that are often required, the earning potential for cloud architects is typically high.

💻 How much code? Low – An architect usually is not required to write much code in the day-to-day. However, an architect is often expected to keep up-to-date with trends in the industry, to ensure they make informed decisions.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? Low – Due to the depth of knowledge required, architecture is often a difficult role for those new to the tech industry. There are some exceptions where larger companies, such as the cloud providers offer schemes to help less experienced candidates step into the architect role (such as AWS Tech U).

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Ensures reliability and stability of software systems. The SRE spends their time gathering data about the systems they operate through “telemetry”. The SRE role suits those who like data and investigations. SRE’s are also responsible for configuring and creating processes around responding to incidents or outages, which makes the role also quite people-focussed.

💵 Earning potential? High, $128K USD (Source) – SRE’s are required to have deep knowledge of the systems they operate, write code, influence stakeholders, and set up processes, all of which can make the SRE role quite challenging, and as a result, compensation is high.

💻 How much code? Medium – SRE’s might not write as much code as a typical software engineer, but they certainly write code. Knowledge of how underlying applications are created is essential to an SRE, to allow them to instrument and support those systems.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? Medium – Whilst an SRE is a technical role, it is feasible for a beginner to aim to land a role as an SRE as some companies will offer junior positions and be willing to train an SRE. However, due to it’s technical nature, it’s not an easy role or skillset to pick up.

Software Engineer

There are many flavors of software engineer, those who work on user interfaces, and those who work on backend systems moving about data and building application programming interfaces (APIs).

💵 Earning potential? Medium, $108K USD (Source) – Compensation for software engineers varies depending on the type of role and company, but generally, the earning potential is quite high.

💻 How much coding? High – Out of all the roles in cloud, the software engineer has the most technical and in-depth coding knowledge.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? Medium – Whilst it’s not easy to land a job as a software engineer, it is one of the most well-documented routes into tech and the cloud industry.

Cloud Engineer

A cloud engineer manages and maintains a companies cloud accounts, and builds shared cloud components. A cloud engineer guides other software engineers and their business on cloud best practices. A cloud engineer is usually required to code, but more often “infrastructure as code” than application code.

💵 Earning potential? High, $111K USD (Source) – The cloud industry is constantly changing, and keeping up can be a challenge, which is why the cloud engineer role is also highly compensated.

💻 How much coding? High – The cloud engineer is very hands-on with writing code. Cloud engineers will often write more “infrastructure as code” than application code.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? Medium – A cloud engineer is a highly technical role, but some companies will offer junior positions. The skillset for a cloud engineer can vary dependent on the technologies used in the company.

DevOps Engineer

The DevOps role is often quite varied in expectation and can involve tasks similar to that of a cloud engineer, SRE, or platform engineer. However, in some cases, the DevOps engineer is considered responsible for the delivery and operation of software systems, which typically means working on build and deployment (often called CI or CI/CD pipelines).

💵 Earning potential? High, $105K USD (Source) – A DevOps engineer is sometimes a jack-of-all-trades, requiring skills in many different areas of the tech stack. Due to the high skill requirement, the compensation is high.

💻 How much coding? High – Much like a cloud engineer or SRE, the DevOps engineer won’t write much application code, instead, they will typically write more infrastructure as code, and build and deploy pipeline configurations.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? Medium – DevOps can be a challenging role to apply for, due to the varying interpretation of the role, however, by building the right skills, it is possible to land a job as a DevOps engineer.

Data Engineer

A data engineer is responsible for handling a companies data, and putting it to strategic use. Company data is often used to create company insights to guide decision-making, or the data could form part of the product or services of the company itself. It’s the data engineer’s job to help get that data from its source, cleaned up, and structured for analysis.

💵 Earning potential? High, $112K USD (Source) – Data engineers need knowledge of the systems they are extracting data from, understanding of how to build data pipelines, and analytics. Due to the highly technical nature of the job, the compensation is high.

💻 How much coding? High – Data engineers certainly will write code. Data engineers will need to understand how databases are structured and queried, and will need to write code that sanitizes, structures or moves data around.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? Medium – Whilst a strongly technical role, some companies will offer junior positions working as a data engineer, working on a subset of systems.

Quality Assurance Engineer

A quality assurance (QA) engineer is responsible for ensuring that newly created versions of software work as expected. Depending on the role, some QA engineers work manually to verify applications, whilst others will work in a highly automated fashion, writing code to test applications.

💵 Earning potential? Low, $84K USD (Source) – Some QA engineers, especially those working with automation, can command high salaries. However, due to the fact that some roles have a manual element, which can be low-skilled, the compensation on average is lower than for other roles.

💻 How much coding? Low – Some QA engineers work on automation and write a lot of code, however, there are many QA roles requiring only a limited understanding of software and programming.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? High – Due to some QA roles working with manual verification, the QA role can be easier to land than others. In some cases, it will be possible to learn some automation and whilst working, and eventually move into more technical positions.

Cloud Support Engineer

Cloud support engineers work to resolve customer queries. Support roles are often created to ease the pressure between customer requests, and the busier, more technical members of the business, such as software engineers. Depending on the role, some technical skills may be required.

💵 Earning potential? Low, $85K USD (Source) – Due to the lower technical requirements of the cloud support engineer, the total compensation is lower than for other roles.

💻 How much coding? Low – Very little, or often no coding is required to become a cloud support engineer. An understanding of the companies product is usually required, which might be technical, and there may be some interaction with some cloud services in order to complete the role.

👶 Suitable for a beginner? Cloud Support is one of the most popular roles entry-level roles to the cloud industry due to the lower barriers to entry. One criticism of the support role is that sometimes positions do not give much exposure, or room for learning and growing as expected.

Which Role In The Cloud Is Best For A Beginner?

Naturally, the next question you might have is: “which role is best?”

But that’s a very difficult question to answer.

I’ve met people who have broken into the cloud industry through every role listed here. I see many people enter the industry via the support role, due to the low barrier to entry, however that shouldn’t put you off aspiring to take on a more technical role such as a software engineer or cloud engineer.

If you think some of the roles here might suit you, what I’d suggest your next step is: start to look through different job descriptions, which should start to give you an idea about the skills required and create a learning plan.

Because I recommend this approach so often, I put together a YouTube video going through 100 Cloud Engineer job descriptions to show how I’d do it.

I hope that helped to start you off on your journey to understand the different roles in the cloud industry, do your research, reach out to people already in the industry, and make a decision that’s right for you.

If you’re looking for resources to get into the cloud industry, I’ve collated some of my favorites here.

Hey! 👋 If we haven't met, let me introduce myself, I'm Lou, and I created Open Up The Cloud to help you get your start, and grow your career in cloud 🚀.

The post What Are The Different Roles In The Cloud? A Beginners Guide. appeared first on Open Up The Cloud.

Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #26 (July Recap 2021)

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 22:10:00 +0000

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Hey cloud friends!

It’s been quiet on the announcements and new features front this last month— it must be summer! And, of course, for AWS, they’re busy stacking up their releases for this year’s Re:Invent. One great thing I’m seeing these last few months is a real increase in cloud content. So much more in-depth content, beginner content, etc which is great news (but of course means more work for me!).

Let’ get into it…

This Month’s Top Cloud Pick(s)

If you only read one or two things this month, let it be this.

Cloud, Code, Life — I cannot speak highly enough of Gwyneth Pena-Siguenza, and her commitment to helping out the cloud community, so when this podcast was announced, collaborating with Rishab, who is very active in the cloud community, and Antonio, I knew it was going to be good. If you’ve not had a chance to listen in, you should!

Feature Releases & Announcements

New stuff in the cloud, that you probably should know about.

Building SaaS on AWS (Gunnar Grosch, DEV.TO) — Gunnar Grosch, Developer Advocate at AWS is running a new show, streamed on Twitch, that dives into different architectures and design choices behind businesses building SaaS products on AWS. This adds to an already pretty packed schedule on the AWS Twitch channel.

Serverless stack raises $1M (Tech Crunch) — If you’ve not had a chance to play with Serverless Stack, maybe this is the sign you need to go check it out. Serverless stack closes the gap between local and cloud development by giving you tools like live development (think hot-reloading) and debugging via breakpoints. And I’m sure we’ll start to see even more tools stepping into this space, too.

How-To’s & Educational Pieces

Articles on how to do various cool things with the cloud.

The What, Why and When of Mono-Lambda vs Single Function APIs (AJ Stuyvenberg, DEV.TO) — Mono vs single-purpose functions are a topic that will come up as soon as you start your journey into working with AWS Lambda and Serverless. As always with these discussions, the answer sits on a spectrum. AJ does a great job here of walking you through the pros and cons of each approach. But ultimately you’re going to have the decision that makes most sense for you, and your situation. The topic of monolithic vs single-purposed AWS Lambdas is one that also came up during my Cloud Resume Challenge series if you want to check that one out, too!

How to pass the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Exam (Danny Steenman, Dannys Cloud) — Danny is the king of exam preparation articles! Danny is like those war veterans you see with so many medals that they run out of jacket because they’re hanging off the side. Jokes aside, this is again just another great write up. Make sure to bookmark his blog if you’re looking to take any of the cloud exam. Danny is also really active on Twitter, so you should really go give him a follow.

What Is The Biggest Trade-Off Of Going Serverless? (Brian LeRoux, Twitter) — Serverless certainly isn’t a silver bullet. There are some great answers on this thread covering the downsides of Serverless, everything from local development pains to operational difficulties.

Is It Recommended To First Be A System Admin In A User Support Role Before Becoming A Cloud Engineer In GCP/AWS? (Andrew Brown, iamcloud.dev)— I was pumped to see an article with this kind of title, as these roles/career questions come up a lot, but they’re hard to answer. The industry is in a real jumble, and there’s so much “it depends”. However, Andrew does a good job of dissecting the different roles and providing an overview. I’m also really happy to see Andrew talking on the intersection between cloud and career, so be sure to give iamcloud.dev blog a bookmark.

How I Became A Cloud Engineer With No Computer Science Degree (Rishab, YouTube) — Hearing peoples cloud journies is always good fun, and it was great to hear Rishab’s story. Now it’s got me thinking that I should do a similar video myself! I like the subject, too, as it’s a common question to ask about how relevant degrees are when breaking into the industry (I’ve written about it before, in can you learn AWS and get certified with no experience?)

The 4 Tools Cloud Beginners Should Focus On (Open Up The Cloud, YouTube) — Overwhelmed by the many different tools that you could learn in the cloud space? In this video, I go through the 4 different categories of tools that you should focus on as a beginner, and give you examples of the tools I recommend. I’ve discussed this tech-stack approach on Instagram, and Twitter before. If you’re looking for a default technology stack, this should be your go-to, and in this video, I explain why.

The 3 Cloud Architecture Approaches Tech Companies Use (Open Up The Cloud, YouTube) — In this video, I cover the three different architectural approaches that I’ve seen that companies use for cloud. Why? Because companies are unlikely to use multiple approaches, so by choosing to double-down on one are, you can hone your skills and have more success when applying for jobs.

Is It Possible To Go From Zero To Cloud Architect? Should Cloud Beginners Target Solutions Architect Positions? (Lou Bichard, Twitter) — This is one of my own Twitter threads/conversations, but it’s a question that many have asked, about whether the path to Solutions Architect is possible / a good route. Previously, I wouldn’t have suggested the Cloud Architect role to a beginner, however, some stories were shared of how people landed their first job as a Solutions Architect.

Opinion Pieces / Miscellaneous

Cloud commentary, spicy takes, memes, and just-for-fun stuff!

AWS Tech U Program —I discovered the Tech U program only recently, and I know it will be relevant/useful to a lot of you. Tech U is an accelerated learning program within AWS. All the roles are a mixture of technical and people skills so should be good for those with only a minimal background/ education—definitely worth looking into.

Build your summer Spotify playlist with Terraform — Just for fun… because there’s almost no reason anyone would actually do this! But, the announcement does showcase one of my favourite features of Terraform, which is the ability to wrap just about anything in TF syntax, to be managed as code.

Personal Updates

So I’ve been taking it quite steady over the last few weeks, enjoying my summer (note to self: schedule a summer break next year). I’ll be kicking things back up a gear soon when the weather closes in over winter. I’m also still experimenting with YouTube video types and formats to see which ones I enjoy, and the ones that get the best response.

I’ve also been chatting to lots of people in the cloud industry recently, if you wanna chat, all you have to do is reply directly to this email. I also have Calendly set up if you wanted to talk about anything careers, cloud or in between.

See You Next Month

That’s all for this month’s newsletter, thanks again for joining!

Speak soon Cloud Engineering friends!

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The post Open Up The Cloud Newsletter #26 (July Recap 2021) appeared first on Open Up The Cloud.

Cloud Beginner? Don't Learn DevOps: Here's Why.

Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 07:24:23 +0000

DevOps? What on earth is DevOps, and should you, as a cloud beginner target the DevOps role? My short answer: no.

The DevOps role is very confused across the industry, with many companies having a vastly different idea of what a DevOps person does, making it much harder to build a learning plan around, and making it harder to prepare for interviews.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't apply for jobs with the title DevOps, just that I don't recommend using it as a role to target.