Forem: Ryan Pothecary

Tips for AWS re:Invent 2025 that I’ve not read anywhere else

Ryan Pothecary — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 16:01:24 +0000

I took my first trip as a paying customer to AWS re:Invent in 2024. I’m lucky enough to have been several times before, but those times was as an employee and I spent the week working ( Is that a smile I see? How rude…).

2024 was different. I could actual attend sessions other than the ones I was presenting and I could attend the keynotes too ! I was really looking forward to spending the week learning, meeting new friends and old ones too. I’m very fortunate to belong to the AWS Community Builders programme and I’ll highlight experiences I had which were part of this programme but focus mostly on things that everyone will be able to do.

June 2024.
I work for a startup called Digital Futures www.digitalfutures.com and so sending one of their employees away for a week is a big investment. Fortunately, I have an amazingly supportive boss and I got the go-ahead for the trip. On the AWS re:Invent page https://reinvent.awsevents.com they offer a template that provides you some ammunition about the benefits of attending the event which you could use if your manager needs some persuading. It's easy to think a week in Las Vegas is going to be a huge bar-crawl. The reality is that it’s a very busy and tiring week and you’ll learn a massive amount. There will be opportunities for drinks but I only managed to attend one event in a whole week.

It’s incredibly important that as soon as tickets come out you are ready to start booking things. So my strong advice here is to start the conversation with your manager in January and remind them every-month until they say yes !

Why the rush?
It could very well mean you going or not. Let me explain. Tickets for the week long event are $2,099. When tickets go on sale there is an early-bird discount which will bring that cost down to $1,799 although pricing for 2025 may be different. As part of the AWS Community Builders programme I got an awesome 50% off the normal price. If you are an AWS partner or a large enough customer then there are some real discounts to be had, you just have to be cheeky enough to request them from your AWS account team.
However, the real reason for booking early will be the flights and hotel costs.

Flights
My flight cost £709 from the UK to Las Vegas direct on Virgin Airlines. There is a 10% discount code from Delta (which would have worked for me since Virgin and Delta are buddies) on the re:Invent portal, but I only found out about this later. Still, £709 is a good rate because that cost will end up going well over £1,200 the longer you leave it. Also, the flights fill up quickly so you’ll end up taking an indirect flight which will be a pain.
A lot of attendees’ transit via LAX, which is a lot smaller than you imagine it to be. I have known people in the past drive the 4 hours from LAX to Las Vegas but apparently, it’s a very boring drive with not much to see. Book early and you’ll get a direct flight.

The next question you’ll have. How long should I go for? Sessions start 8am Monday. I arrived late Saturday which gave me Sunday to pick up my badge, hoodie and acclimatise. In all honesty I would try and push this further and arrive late Friday if arriving from outside the US. I would also book my return for Saturday/Sunday for the same reasons.

Visas
I don’t have a huge amount of information to help you with Visa’s. In the UK you’ll need an ESTA visa which can be requested fairly easily via https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov and costs around $21 which arrives pretty quickly. Once your re:Invent ticket is purchased and the hotel & flight booked then start looking at a Visa. You’ll need the address of the hotel when you make a visa application, and I remember having some difficulty with the phone number since the hotel I stayed at published a non-Nevada phone number. But a quick Google sorted that.

Every year I read that people from outside the UK/EU struggle with getting a Visa. AWS have a re:Invent support team (awsreinvent-support@amazon.com) that can provide some level of assistance here but they have to deal with 70,000 attendees and they can’t actually provide you a visa, just advice.
My own advice here, get this sorted quickly. If there’s a problem, you’ll have time to fix it.

Hotels & Food
Slightly out of order since you’ll need to know where you are staying before you get a Visa, but this is going to be a longer discussion than Visa’s.
So, who’s paying for your trip and what’s included in that agreement?
The reason I ask is, that it really does determine where you’ll stay and what you’ll eat, and the two areas are very much linked.

My company paid for my hotel which I booked at the same time as booking my re:Invent ticket. As I mentioned, this is a big investment for us so I really didn’t want to exploit this and it maybe stop my colleagues from going on their own trips in the future.
One the re:Invent ticket page you’ll be given a range of hotels that are partnered with AWS and you’ll get a discount from the normal over the counter price per night.
But there are a million ways of booking hotels these days all of which offer discounts so maybe its best to research this a little before jumping at a hotel. Saying that, the hotels on the Las Vegas strip fill up fast and I know that this year come October a lot were full for re:Invent week.

I stayed at the Paris which was one of the lower cost hotels on the portal but certainly not the lowest priced. I thought it was a good middle-ground since it was on the Las Vegas strip, but about half-way down and so a walk to the Venetian would take 25 minutes. You’ll of course know that the Venetian hotel is the hub of re:Invent and its where the keynotes are held alongwith the expo and some sessions. That’s why its important.

In previous trips to Las Vegas, I’ve stayed in the Venetian, Aria, Vdara & Excalibur. The Venetian is a clear favourite. The rooms are lovely and I loved eating at the Grand Lux restaurant for breakfast. It also has a wonderful first floor with restaurants and a river which you can ride in a gondola with your loved one.
The Aria and Vdara are a decent 20 minute walk from the Venetian. The Vdara is one of the only room-only hotels on the strip. No casino, a small restaurant and a Starbucks so if you want to be away from all the noise then it’s a good choice. Its also a 5 minute walk to the Aria if you want noise, casino’s and restaurants !

All of the hotels on the strip have their own character and come with multiple restaurants but it's here where I think I’d take a different approach if I were to attend another re:Invent . The hotel restaurants are expensive. Which is why I asked at the start of this blog who’s paying for your trip and what’s included. I think an average $50 nightly allowance isn’t going to get you past a burger and a beer in most of these restaurants. In the Paris the steak restaurant start at approx. $80 not including sides or drinks. Prices go up to $250.

At the risk of losing all your respect, a $250 steak is lost on me. I’d probably frame it rather than eat it. Do some research here, I’m sure there’s reasonably priced food available aside from the high-end restaurants. There’s a host of restaurants in the Linq area but nothing really caught my eye enough to want to venture inside.

I mentioned a different approach for next time, here it is… I think I’d look at a hotel outside the Las Vegas Strip for my next stay. You’ll find prices are cheaper, the food is going to be cheaper, and Uber/Lyft is plentiful. Uber rides from the strip to a hotel like the Rio or The Orleans is about $20 so make sure you add that to your daily cost. I think you’ll experience a different side to Las Vegas away from some of the unpleasant aspects of staying on the strip.

I’m really curious about feedback if you’ve stayed outside the strip, let me know in the comments.

Of course, if your company is paying for everything and you have a generous budget for food then I would always stay at The Venetian or maybe Palazzo/Wynn hotels.
Finally, on the subject of food, breakfast & lunch as well as coffee & soft drinks are provided to delegates in the hotels running events so if you want, you’ll be covered for those meals for free.

Your Agenda
Ok, you are all ready to go. You’ve got flights, tickets, hotel and food covered. Its now time to relax! Not a chance…

The session catalogue will start to populate in September and continue to add sessions until about a week away from re:Invent . It was this aspect of the whole journey where I received the best advice from my AWS Community Builder colleagues.

Keep an eye on the re:Invent portal and start favouriting the sessions that you are interested in seeing.

Tip #1– Focus on sessions that are not recorded. Basically, Workshops or any session that requires you participate in some way. The recorded stuff you’ll watch when you are back home.

Keep checking back on the re:Invent portal as new sessions are added and you’ll quickly build a large list of sessions you’d like to attend. The re:Invent portal has a calendar so you’ll see where your favourited sessions clash. You’ll then receive an email from AWS in early October saying that ‘Reserved Seating’ will be opening on a certain date. This is very important for you.

Look at that favourite list and be ruthless with it. Try to minimise travel between hotels as much as possible. In an ideal world you’ll book a single days sessions in a single hotel (for example, Monday in the Manderley Bay, Tuesday in the Venetian etc..).
If you don’t have a reserved seat and the session fills up then you’ll have to queue to get in and there’s a chance you’ll miss it. Queuing wastes time, so get your very favourite sessions booked.
If you have to switch hotels from session to session, give yourself 30-60 minutes. Even sessions in the same hotel you’ll need time to get there. If you book 10 hours of back to back sessions you’ll miss around half of them. Be considerate, if you arnt going to make a session then release your seat.

Session planning
This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I found the official re:Invent session booking and planning to be perfectly fine. I could see in the calendar where I should be and that came through on the AWS Event mobile app. But there are some great alternatives to this that were created by members of the AWS community.

https://reinvent-planner.cloud/ built by Raphael Manke which a lot of people recommend it
https://reinvent-planner.richardfan.xyz/ built by Richard Fan and also a favourite of many.

However, you do it, make sure you reserve seating on the sessions that you simply must-attend. As mentioned, you’ll get an email telling you the date and time that Reserved Seating will open (usually late afternoon UK time). Make sure you get there early. In October 2024 it opened 10 minutes earlier than specified and I managed to book everything I needed.

Sessions start at 8am and go until 6-7pm. AWS re:Invent starts on the Monday and there are still sessions to attend on Friday. Friday sessions are not as popular as delegates head for the airport to travel home. Be kind to yourself, book no more than 5 sessions a day and make sure you take time to catch-up with friends and take an afternoon to cover the expo.
Also, I’ve just got to add here that hotels in Las Vegas are BIG (if you’ve not been before). I’m serious, its going to take you time to walk from one session to another in the same hotel or to the inter-site transport. I’ll skip the advice on wearing comfortable footwear since this is covered by other blogs.

Inter-site transport
AWS provide free transport between hotels. The buses leave regularly, and are a perfect way of getting around. However, re:Invent 2024 occurred a week after the Las Vegas Grand Prix and the roads around the strip had lots of roadworks and this added to the time needed between sessions. These journeys are a good time to say hi to people you’ve not met.

I’ve missed Reserved Seating, should I just cancel now?
No !
If your session is fully booked, that still leaves 10-20% of seats available for walk-ups. If you really do want to attend that session, then get there early and queue. If you are early in the queue, you’ll get a seat. Also, a lot of sessions are replayed on other days of the week, so keep an eye out for those.

Tip #2 - I’ve not read this anywhere and so I’m unsure if this only happened in 2024 or not. Either way, as we approach December there are a significant number of new sessions that appear in the catalogue all of which are detailed as NEW LAUNCH. These are going to be sessions directly talking about new services or features announced in keynotes. It’s obviously a bit of a gamble to book these since you don’t know what the subject is until the service is launched. Quite exciting to be one of the first to learn about new things though!

Outside of re:Invent
I’ll skip a mention of re:Play, other blogs cover that much better than I could, since I didn’t attend. What I was actually surprised at was the amount of invites I got over email in the weeks preceding re:Invent to join vendor/partner parties which happen throughout the full week of re:Invent.
In fact there’s a website dedicated to these parties ( ), the vendor parties are all in restaurants or nightclubs and so attending these parties will certainly be a good source of food, drink and great networking opportunities. Of course, these vendors/partners are after your business so prepare yourself for a sales pitch.

One of the very best things to do in Las Vegas is to visit The Sphere and I noticed that 6 vendors/partners held events here that included tickets to see the amazing ‘Postcard from Earth’ show which I loved. My tickets were bought for me by my kids as a birthday present, but I could have saved them $$$ by attending via a vendor !

There are lots of entertainment shows happening the week of re:Invent ( ‘Marriage can be Murder’ was an absolute favourite and I’d certainly recommend it). Buying tickets online usually provides you with money-off further shows, so please don’t book everything in one go (like I did), and wait for the voucher code instead !

Tips that you’ve read elsewhere, added for completeness
• Use Comfy shoes only. You’ll be walking 20-30,000 steps a day.
• Buy a humidifier for your room. Costs around £20 and makes for pleasant sleeping.
• Bring an extra case for all the swag you’ll have. Actually, I disagree with this. How about not grabbing loads of swag in the first place? I saw a lot of people walking around with mine-craft style plastic swords. Are you really going to take that back home with you? You will be receiving a hoody for sure, so you’ll need space for that. I neglected to queue for a re:Invent jacket after questioning if I really would use it. Quite like stickers, socks and tshirts other than that I’m good.

I hope some of this has been useful to you. If you are going to re:Invent 2025 then I wish you a safe journey and a wonderful time !

The re-re-rebirth of AWS Systems Manager

Ryan Pothecary — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 15:46:11 +0000

If you were launching an EC2 Instance back in 2015 you’d have noticed that the console had a lot of things going on. Nestled in the Instances subsection on the left hand side was a brand new option called ‘Commands’

I think the best AWS services and features are the simplest to explain and yet are usually the most powerful to use. Run Command does guess what? It runs a command or script or actually these days performs lots of actions on your fleet of Instances. So simple and yet so potentially powerful and versatile. Add to Run Command a suite of other features, all with specific functions, and all focused on managing your long-running instances.

And yet, AWS Systems Manager has never received the credit that it rightly deserves.
Is this due to the promise of the immutable nirvana of DevOps ?.

When talking about AWS Systems Manager with customers I would often hear ‘Why would you even need to ‘manage’ EC2 instances?’ The idea behind this was explained early-on to me with the rather brutal ‘Pets versus Cattle’ analogy. We shouldn’t be ‘managing’ servers, we certainly shouldn’t be ‘logging-on’ to them, nor patching them, nor taking backups nor doing any manner of things that we’d been doing for years in our on-premise existence. Instead, Instances were disposable. If something was wrong, terminate it and allow auto-scaling or your Cloudformation template to rebuild it fresh and trouble-free. Our entire immutable infrastructure is rebuilt nightly and therefore doesn’t require patching or managing.

I really didn’t want to be managing Instances so all of this is fantastic news to me.

Except….
My reality, and more accurately, my customers reality, is there are a number of server roles which need to be up and running 24/7/365. In any reasonably sized company you’ll find applications running on a single server, running something potentially critical (or more likely something unknown) and this application is not going to be happy with being rebuilt nightly.

If you are saying ‘containerisation’ to me now, then believe me I’m saying something equally unpleasant right back 'atcha.

Then there’s anything Microsoft-related, all connected to an Active Directory which was designed to register new servers and doesn’t deal very well with servers being removed and reregistered every 24 hours. And it’s those servers that AWS Systems Manager ably takes care of.

Fast forward to November 2017, myself and my colleagues had created a Workshop to run at AWS re:Invent which focused on managing those long-lived EC2 Instances and adding advocating AWS’s Directory Services as your Domain Controller replacement.
On reflection, it was lucky that our session was scheduled for the Wednesday, since in Andy Jassey’s Tuesday morning keynote he introduced a new service called AWS Systems Manager. The new AWS Systems Manager service took all the management features out of the EC2 Console and plonked them in their own service. This release, which we were very much not expecting, broke everything in our workshop. Our workshop guide was wrong and had to be re-written and everything had to be tested again. All overnight.

As an aside, re:Invent is a terrible time if you are an AWS employee. You have zero idea what is being launched until the presenters are on stage saying it. So, you find out about new stuff at the exact same time as your customers (who expect you to know all about it). Even the product teams are unaware if their new feature or service is droping during pre:Invent, re:Invent or afterwards.

We finally fixed everything and the Workshop was a success and we ran it during re:Invent 2018 also, since not a huge amount had changed for the service.

And since 2018, there have been new features which have been interesting to explore, adding more in the way of Service Management to AWS Service Manager. And also, this little service now serves 450 million nodes and runs 2.5 Billion scripts every month*.

But now we have a new version of AWS Systems Manager with a whole new raison d'être.
Since the original AWS Systems Manager the world has embraced cloud and are now working across multiple AWS accounts and even multiple cloud platforms. The new AWS Systems Manager is focused on this disparate fleet of servers and gives you a single place to manage them all.
Hang on, hasn’t AWS Systems Manager always been able to manage servers on-prem and in other cloud platforms via its agent ? Well yes, but now it looks like someone has actually designed it to be used this way. The new Node Management screen very clearly shows your managed and unmanaged instances/servers/nodes across your entire estate/accounts/clouds/on-prem. It also integrates with Amazon Q (which I am slowly falling in love with) to provide insights via familiar GenAI text prompts.

There is some real thought gone into the new AWS Systems Manager. Gaining feedback from customers, AWS have focused on 3 specific areas – VIEW, GOVERN, ACT and clearly the new experience allows you to do those things.

View, Govern, Act in the new AWS Systems Manager

One area that has recently been given a breath of fresh air is the Automation feature which now allows no-code drag and drop to create a runbook of all the steps in your automation – very powerful. It also has a range of pre-created runbooks nicely organised into the tasks that you’d like to complete. We know we should be automating everything, this has made the task a lot simpler.

I’ve a feeling that there’s a lot more to come in 2025 for this service now that new, firmer foundations are in place and there’s a vision of where the service sits. I really do feel that all companies would benefit from re-evaluating AWS Systems Manager. Its much more than 21 individual features these days.

I’d like to see a refresh of all the other features that perhaps have not received much care and attention since they launched. I’d also love to see tighter integration with Cloudwatch and a sprinkle of some more Amazon Q magic dust to draw my attention to potential issues amongst my fleet of servers in the future and perhaps pre-emptively fix them via automation? Session Manager is a great tool, but needs an authorisation workflow and if I’m advising customers to use Session Manager I want a quick way of disabling Instance Connect without delving into IAM Policies. There’s a lot to be done, but the recent changes are a great start and I hope gives customers the opportunity to look at AWS Systems Manager with a fresh pair of eyes.

What changes would you like to see?

Becoming an AWS and Google Authorised Trainer

Ryan Pothecary — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 20:26:43 +0000

Becoming an AWS and Google GCP Authorised Trainer

The last 12 months have been busy for me.
In summer 2023 I became an AWS Authorised Instructor (AAI) and helped my company, www.DigitalFutures.com become an AWS Authorised Training Partner (ATP).
Then in February 2024 became a Google Authorised Instructor and in March 2024 we’ve become a Google GCP Authorised Training Partner also.

Before we begin, you may be wondering where Microsoft Azure is in all this. Well, that’s a job for 2024.

https://aws.amazon.com/training/aai/

We’ll start with becoming an Authorised AWS Instructor. I’ve been fortunate enough to collect a few AWS certifications over the last few years. I currently hold Cloud Practitioner along with 3 Associate level, both Professional level certs and a few Speciality certs. I’ve also got a 10 year history of working with AWS in both a customer setting as well as being an AWS Professional Services Senior Consultant as well as a Specialist Solution Architect and Partner Trainer when I worked for AWS for nearly 5 years (2017-2021).

Plus, I’m part of the truly wonderful AWS Community Builders programme (take a look at https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/community-builders/ for more info and to apply)

You do not need this level of certification or history with the platform to become an Authorised Trainer. In fact you need just two things: -
1) A current AWS Solution Architect certification
2) An Authorised Training Partner that will sponsor you.

I hold the first and my company was going through the process of becoming an ATP which covered the second and allowed me onto the programme
Once registered onto the programme there are two main steps to progress through.
1) Complete the on-demand training
2) Successfully pass the Trainer Evaluation

I want to talk about the first of those. The training is fully on-demand. The Instructor training is GOOD. It takes you through some solid training on AWS Solution Architect certification, so if you don’t already hold this certification then by the time the 200+ hours of training are over you’ll have gained it. There are also some really interesting sessions focused on how people learn in a classroom setting, how best to train over a virtual setting etc. I have to admit that I sprinted through most of this training and it’s been a goal of mine to retrace my steps here and go through the whole training again at a slower pace.

I don’t enjoy on-demand training. Unfortunately, both AWS and Google (and I fear Microsoft) seem to be favouring this form of training over in-person. But I did enjoy the AWS AAI training, there were lots of valuable nuggets here for any potential trainer to enjoy.

Once you’ve gone through the 200+ hours of training (yes it really is that long), and you’ve obtained the AWS Solution Architect Associate certification, then you can schedule your 3 day Trainer Evaluation bootcamp. This is the final hurdle before becoming an AAI (AWS Authorised Instructor).

I loved this bootcamp. A small group of potential AAI’s meet virtually with an experienced AWS Trainer and you teach a number of modules while learning about the lab system and troubleshooting lab exercises.
The AWS Solution Architect Associate course offers a wide range of technologies to cover and the way my bootcamp was structured was that each AAI chose a module subject that they would like to teach on each of the three days and then the AWS Trainer moderator chooses 3 subjects for you.
You present these modules to the class, comprising of the moderator and your potential AAI classmates. You then hear feedback on the module from all those present. This can be invaluable if you’ve not taught before. After teaching all 6 modules there is then a troubleshooting lab exercise where you use a real lab used by the course where the moderator has created a number of errors and you’ve got to find them. This mimics the real-life scenario that all Instructors face of things going wrong within a lab environment and you have been asked to fix it.

Once complete you’ll have the results delivered in a few days time, and if successful, you’ll begin the process of onboarding as an AAI.

A few more things to note here before we move on. There are a number of different internal systems that you’ll get access to which allow you to purchase courses, deliver coursework content, manage labs and send out CSAT surveys. Take your time to understand these. Your AWS ATP Partner Manager will be able to help navigate all these different systems, but make sure you keep notes to help yourself.

Secondly, you are only able to teach courses that a). You hold a current certification on & b). You take and successful pass the onboarding on-demand training for that course.

Lastly, your obligations as an Authorised AWS Instructor are to deliver amazing training (of course!), ensure you hold a current certification and after every class receive a CSAT score of above 4.5 out of 5.

As you can tell. This isn’t going to be something you pass once and then forget about. You’ll be constantly training and delivering new material alongwith gaining new certifications in order to train new classes.

The process is similar when you are becoming a Google Authorised Instructor. It’s a similar amount of time and effort although there are some differences.
What made this far more difficult for me personally is that I do not have 10 years of experience in using Google GCP in a customer environment. Firstly I had to learn the platform.

I think you go through a number of phases when learning Google GCP as an AWS Cloud engineer.
At first you are looking for the similarities. Yes there’s an IAM service and a VPC service and you’ll know what they are about from your AWS experience. There are virtual machines, containers, databases and all the normal Infrastructure building blocks that you are used to.

As you dive in a little more, you’ll start to notice the differences. IAM has Basic as well as Predefined and Custom roles (policies) as well as Service Accounts which are more like the Instance Profiles we expect to see in AWS (although the scope is larger). Another nice surprise was that VPC’s are now global in scope which is an oft-wanted feature in AWS. Subnets can also span Availability Zones which simplifies networking. However, I think the most noticeable difference is the use of Projects to isolate resources and the use of Folders to provide structure and security. Oh, and don’t get me started on Cloud Spanner. That service blows my mind.

To become a Google Authorised Instructor you’ll need to choose a Tech-Track of subjects you wish to teach and from that you’ll know which Professional-level certification you’ll need to pass.

I chose the Cloud Infrastructure track and therefore had to pass the Google Cloud Infrastructure Professional certification. Since we had already approached Google about becoming an Authorised Training Partner our account team really helped us by pointing us in the right direction to navigate through the Partner Portal and provided training credits to get us through the Professional level certifications.

This is where I spent a huge amount of time. You’ll see via the Partner Training portal there’s already a pathway called Google GCP Professional Cloud Architect for AWS Professionals. On paper this looks like a fairly light and doable pathway covering 4 modules of a mixture of lessons and labs.

I don’t know where I went wrong here, I completed modules and clicked next for the next module or lab but the whole process of going through the training was a full time job for near 6 weeks. You can earn points for every lab, module and knowledge check you go through. I had so many points at one stage I was expecting a 5-star holiday or new car to arrive….

I had a huge amount of trepidation before scheduling The Google Cloud Solution Architect Professional exam, but I was pleasantly surprised that it was not as difficult as I expected. Certainly in comparison to the AWS Pro-level or Speciality level exams I’ve completed. Although, to put this in perspective, my colleague completed the Google AI/ML Professional certification around the same time and found it far more difficult than he expected. Exams huh ?!

Before you chose which certification, please bear in mind that in the large list of available Professional level Google GCP certifications, only a few of them are applicable for the Authorised Instructor path. If you noticed in the above graphic there are four Instructor Tech-tracks and basically either the Google GCP Solution Architect Professional or the Google GCP Data Engineer Professional certifications which are applicable.

On to the Instructor Enablement Session. You’ll need to schedule this via your Google Training Partner account team. Mine took quite a long amount of time to schedule so prepare to do some nagging and chasing.

You’ll be sent three modules to revise via a Google docs folder. Each of these modules is on a different Infrastructure topic. In the hour-long 1-1 session (Thats correct, its a single hour long session not 3 days..) you are asked to present one of these modules as if doing it in front of a class, along with a nice amount of questions from the session moderator.

Being completely, I'll admit that I failed my first attempt at the Instructor Enablement session.

During the session I presented on the topic of GCP Networking, a topic that was new to me, but I have enough knowledge of general cloud networking that at the time I was confident.

Until the questions started…… I did as every good Instructor should do and did not answer questions incorrectly. That is a cardinal sin for any instructor. If you do not know the answer, you take it away and research during a break.

I was asked a lot of questions during the session and took too many away to answer. As the session progressed, I knew I’d failed.

But it got worse once I got the feedback.

It was nice that they highlighted the way I delivered a session but questioned my knowledge of GCP and wondered why I didn’t use the slide notes.

Slide notes? WHAT SLIDE NOTES?

Remember that Google drive that contained the modules? Inside this folder is a sub-folder with the same content, but this time containing slide notes covering what should be said during the delivery of the module.

I was very upset with myself for not finding this earlier. It was a hard lesson, but something I won’t forget in a hurry.

You must wait at least 14 days until scheduling another Instructor Enablement Session, once again sessions were difficult to schedule but I found a date that worked in mid February. I spent all available time revising the slides (and slide notes), thinking of what questions could be asked and researching answers. It was nice getting back into learning about Google GCP again, picking up new things once more.
Although now the pressure was very much on, since a failure for a second time means that you cannot re-take the Instructor Enablement session for at least 3 months. This would have put our goal of becoming a Google ATP on hold and we had plans to teach our students about Google GCP asap.

The second Instructor Enablement session was a LOT better. It was done over Zoom and once again was for an hour. This time the amazing session moderator asked which module I wanted to teach and in all honesty I couldn’t decide out of the three available choices of Storage & Database, Compute or IAM. They all had sections I enjoyed talking about. So the moderator suggested I cover 10 minutes of each module, something I really enjoyed. The time went very quickly and the questions that were asked I actually had the answers to. There was one question I couldn’t answer but didn’t try and guess it, which the moderator commented was the correct thing to do.

Overall, it was a really enjoyable experience. And a week later I had confirmation that I’d become a Google GCP Authorised Instructor.

There’s always more to learn. My immediate plans are to cover the AWS Data Engineering Associate exam and follow that up with the Google GCP Data Engineering Professional Certification. Then on to Microsoft Azure…. I’ll update this post when I get there.

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading, feel free to reachout if you have any questions.

Awesome AWS Services that arnt in the console pt1

Ryan Pothecary — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 16:53:58 +0000

If you are new to AWS you’d be forgiven in thinking that all the services you can use are waiting for you in the console. The truth is there are a whole host of services, really useful services, that are not in the console and you have to find other ways of getting to them. This short guide will tell you about some of the ones I’ve used and I’m hoping our wonderful cloud community will add some comments to any I’ve forgotten.

AWS CART
Sounds like something shopping related?
No, this is the AWS Cloud Readiness Assessment Tool. It’s a cut-down public version of a tool that AWS’s Partners and Professional Services consultants have been using for the last decade called the AWS Migration Readiness Assessment.
The aim of the tool is to find out if your customer is ready to move to cloud or not. A move to cloud can be more a cultural shift than a technological one for a business and the CART assessment hopes to draw out any issues so that they can be fixed before a migration to cloud is considered.
The 47 questions it asks are aligned to the excellent AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and the idea is that someone is tasked with using the CART tool with as many people within the business (not just those C-suite stakeholders) the result would be a Heatmap and Radar chart, once again, aligned to CAF.

If you are at the start of your cloud journey there are a lot of third party consultancy’s out there who will come along and evaluate you potential Cloud Journey. Save yourself a huge sum of money, become a hero and do it yourself.

AWS Migration Evaluator
This is a real gem. Only available via request from the link below. Squarely aimed at the pre-cloud phase when you’ve agreed that moving to cloud could be a good idea, and you’ve done your CART assessment, and you are just about to start migrating your first application then the CFO asks the dreaded question ‘So, how much is this going to cost?’.

This service has a nice history. Originally developed by TSO logic, AWS decided to purchase the service and call and give it a very generic name, But the functionality was untouched and the service is one of my favourites.
AWS Migration Evaluator will run on a local VM inside your data centre and works by collecting all the details of each VM including what applications are running on each and most importantly the PERFORMANCE of each VM. You’ll need to run this in-place for a few weeks to give you a good view of the performance of your VM’s since some applications only become busy at certain times of the month. With all this information, AWS Migration Evaluator will present you with a very nice Report detailing what EC2 Instance Type you’ll need to be using which will work for you when you migrate.
Since we typically overspec everything then its very surprising the kinds of savings the Migration Evaluator will give you. Typically 30-40% sometimes much higher (I’ve heard 90%).

But there’s more…
If your company has invested in expensive Microsoft SQL Server licenses then Migration Evaluator will take this into consideration and propose Dedicated Hosts to allow you to reuse those licenses, saving you even more.

Got more than VM’s? Migration evaluator can detect physical machine details via SNMP or WMI and there’s an agent to pick up performance data also.

As with every AWS service, there’s some overlap with other services. AWS Migration Evaluator has some overlap with Application Discovery Service.

There are pro’s/con’s with each. I love Migration Evaluators reports and rightsizing benefits, I also love that it integrates with AWS Application Migration Service.
I don’t like the fact that I have to wait for AWS to install it for me.
Application Discovery Service is great, I love that it gives me network information and it integrates well with Migration Hub. I also like that its sitting in the console and I can use it anytime I want.

End of Support Migration Program for Windows Server
It’s a fair bet that the Product Marketing team were doing an offsite when this slipped through the net, but It gets worse. In a bid to abbreviate the longest service name in history they decided on ‘EMP for Windows Server’.
It would be easy to make jokes on the words EMP and Windows Server, but the service does not deserve it. For its very unique use case it’s a pretty great service.

Again, this service was a purchase that AWS made from a third party company and the idea is that it allows legacy applications to run inside a new version of Windows Server. The fixes the problem that companies have of not being able to shutdown a data centre and move all-in to the cloud because there's some poor server in the corner somewhere running an application that is critical but cannot run on newer OS's.
It does this by taking a before and after snapshot while installing the application and then effectivly containerising the application so that it runs on your new Windows Server.

In a move that Migration Evaluator should follow, this service began by being request only but now has a self-service option so anyone can do it.

Great service, fits a common issue and is unfortunatly hidden away so that no one can find it.

Schema Conversion Tool
From a legal perspective, Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) isn’t in the console so I am allowed to add it to this list. However, it is very closing linked to AWS Database Migration Service which is in the console. SCT is one of those rare services that doesn’t have a nice AWS or Amazon prefix.
The idea is that AWS help you move from those expensive commercial database engines to something a lot cheaper running in the cloud. SCT is the tool that helps with that conversion by analysing your current database and suggesting changes to allow it to run on a different target.
Imagine walking into the office one day, migrating those Oracle databases to Postgres, telling your manager that you’ve saved them several million $$$ and walking out at the end of the day, almost certainly in slow-mo.

Of course, it might not be that easy. There would be some functionality you may use in Oracle’s PL/SQL that isn’t present in Postgres’s PL/pgSQL in which case SCT has a library of Lambda functions that potentially can be called to provide that native functionality.
If the idea of running Lambda functions outside of a database fills you with dread then your options are –
1) Stay as you are and help buy Larry another boat.
2) Convert manually. I’m sure you have the time don’t you?.
3) Use some kind of magic real-time conversion thingy.

SCT is a great free tool that can help with certain scenarios. It can be found here

Bablefish for Aurora Postgres
Ok, ok, ok technically this is in the console, but honestly, unless you knew about it already its so easy to miss. I would argue that its intended audience wouldn’t know about it.
Bablefish for Aurora Postgres is the answer to Option 3 above. It is the magic real-time conversion of Microsoft SQL Server databases to be able to run on Aurora Postgres.
AWS launched this way back in 2021 with the setting-themselves-up-for-failure title “Goodbye Microsoft SQL Server, Hello Bablefish.”.
I’ve not checked recently but 3 years on I’m pretty sure that Microsoft SQL Server is still available.
I’ve not used this service-that-became-a-feature in a production environment. I would LOVE to hear from anyone who has. I really would love this service to be brilliant. But I’m guessing that since it never gets mentioned then people have either not tried it for various reasons or perhaps they have tried it and its trash.
My biggest concern would not be one of compatibility but of performance. Please give me your insights !

Sitting the AWS Solution Architect Associate SAA-C03 exam 60 times

Ryan Pothecary — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 21:03:02 +0000

I first attempted AWS's Solution Architect Associate level exam in 2015. It was perhaps the worst exam experience i've ever had, and i've had quite a few over a 30 year career in IT.

This was long before the conveniance of at-home testing. I had to drive to a test centre and I made a really common mistake, which was, I forgot to bring a passport. I had a UK driving license which has my photo on it (and seems perfectly valid now), but the exam proctor refused to let me sit the exam until she had read through the full exam guidelines which took the best part of an hour. And although it didnt say that a driving license was valid, it didnt say it was invalid...... so she let me sit it.

I was completely stressed before sitting down at that exam computer and by the time I got through 55 questions with another 10 to go I noticed that I had just 5 minutes left on the clock. I'm amazed I finished and even more amazed that I passed.

I've gone through most of the AWS certification over the last 7 years working up toward both Professional levels exams back in 2017 and then letting them lapse before doing them all again in 2021. The second attempt at SAA felt a LOT better than the first time.

I'm now the Cloud Academy Lead at Digital Futures and every three months take a cohort of 30 future cloud engineers through the AWS Cloud Practitioner and AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. Its important that I understand what's in the exam so I can tailor the lessons to cover all the topics. We had a pretty awesome first-time passrate on the SAA-C02 exam of approx 85%.

At the end of August 2022 a new version of the exam came out - SAA-C03. This was the first update since March 2020, when SAA-C02 replaced the original SAA-C01 exam which had been receiving rolling-updates since its launch in April 2013.

The official exam guide is the first place to go when understanding what to expect. All exam guides follow the same format -

General Information about the exam
The exam domains to study with a breakdown of each domain
Additional Services that may be included in the exam

If you compare the exam guides for SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 the first thing that will hit you is just how broad the new version of the exam is. SAA-C02 covers 39 services where SAA-C03 covers 131 services. That is a HUGE difference and means that your revision for SAA-C03 needs to cover not only the standard cloud building blocks of Network, Security, Compute & Storage but ALSO AI/ML, Migration, Media, Analytics... even Amazon Pinpoint gets a mention.

This changes your revision strategy and requries you have a good knowledge of those services. Of course, thats kinda impossible isnt it? The Solution Architect Associate exam asks questions at a detailed level. A level where you could confidently talk about those services to a technical customer.

So, how can you gain this detailed knowledge of 131 AWS Services and be able to retain that information successfully in order to pass this exam?.

You can't.

There are just too many services now. My recommendation is you'll need a strategy which combines detailed learning of 40 services, basic knowledge of 60 services and a quick read-through to cover the remaining 31 services.

I'm in the enviable position of teaching the next generation of bright, curious, diverse Cloud Engineers and helping them take their first steps into this industry. I get to see those future engineers take the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam and get feedback on the subjects that are covered. We've now put 60 students through the SAA certifcation since it changed to the new version (hence the title of the blog, wait... did you think I needed 60 times to pass the exam?)

I even took the exam myself early September 2022 after it was just updated. I needed to see if the new version of the exam was significantly different than the previous version.

The good news for those of you reading this post that have maybe been studying for this certification is that there is still a heavy focus on those 'building block' services such as networking, compute, storage & databases.

I've also heard feedback thats been quite interesting. About how new questions on newer services creep into the question bank over time. Its been curious to hear the first of my students talk about AWS Lake Formation or Amazon Pinpoint making an appearance.
However, understanding what the service does and its use-case provides you with enough information to answer correctly in most cases. There are still those Solution Architect phrases that steer you toward the correct answer, you know the ones... 'Most cost-effective', 'Least overhead', 'Most efficient'etc.

With 131 services mentioned in the exam guide but only 65 questions being asked its a safe bet to focus heavily on those building blocks and try to cover the rest by understanding their use-case.

We are fortunate to be an AWS Academy partner and they graciously give us content that we use to teach the subject. Although the content hasnt been refreshed for the new version of the exam, so we use the SAA-C02 material to dive deep on those building blocks and supplement that content with some Security, AI/ML & Data Analytics material.

We also supplement this training material with our own content and practice tests from both Whizlabs and Udemy. However, the best revision aid is actual hands-on experience. If you are using your own account then please remember to set a budget so that you dont incur costs. Use the free-tier that AWS give you to explore services. You may not even have to start any services, just look around their consoles, understand the questions that you are asked and why.

There are so many free resources available for you to use and an incredible community willing to answer your questions. Reach-out and ask them.

Good Luck, you can do this !

What is Poly-cloud : Choosing the right job for the tool

Ryan Pothecary — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:17:08 +0000

The myth of multi-cloud

Multi-cloud is a more well-known concept than poly-cloud. It refers to a cloud adoption model for spreading your existing and new workloads across multiple cloud providers – typically Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Fundamentally, multi-cloud is focused on reducing a dependency on one provider, particularly with fluctuating prices.

However, multi-cloud is not the optimal solution. Every cloud platform has excellent advanced services in the areas of databases, serverless, AI, machine learning and more. Adopting multi-cloud is fundamentally limiting because, although you can use multiple clouds at the same time, you are not optimizing which cloud you use for which service. Whilst businesses have been trying to implement multi-cloud for years, it has arguably brought very little value in comparison to sticking to a single provider due to its distinct lack of specialisation.
Enter poly-cloud.

Why poly-cloud?

Poly-cloud is an evolution from the standard multi-cloud approach. Where multi-cloud places an emphasis on the generic nature of cloud capabilities, poly-cloud is focused on the specialised nature. Poly-cloud allows businesses to choose the most beneficial cloud services for their operation based on the specific features of that cloud service, irrespective of which provider runs it. Put simply: some cloud services may have what you need, but others won’t.
There are undoubtedly some services that are better than others for certain functions. It would be easy to choose to run big data and analytics workloads on GCP, all Windows Server workloads on Azure and everything else on AWS. But this is overly simplistic and stifles efficiency. For example, AWS has been running more Microsoft workloads, and for longer, than Azure and GCP combined.

A poly-cloud strategy allows businesses to overcome this and to be more thoughtful and intentional around the way they choose services and providers. To combine multiple clouds is one thing but being selective is much more advantageous in both performance and value terms.
There are, of course, drawbacks. Poly-cloud sounds simple in its theory but is complicated to implement. Setting up poly-cloud is time consuming, and it would require an honest assessment of a businesses’ current cloud architecture to understand what is required to make specific operations work within a poly-cloud approach. Crucially, it requires expert teams that have the knowledge, skills, and experience in all three clouds.

For this blog post I spoke with James Smith. CEO of DevOpsGroup and now Managing Director EMEA for Sourced Group, James has been working with clients on poly-cloud strategies for the last few years. Speaking on the multi-cloud versus poly-cloud debate, James said: “We’ve never been a supporter of a multi-cloud approach, it’s expensive for the customer because you are always having to make compromises in terms of the solution you can create. Poly-cloud absolutely makes sense. Each of the three large hyperscalers have areas in their service portfolio that are stronger than others and the majority of our customers have this strategy.

“Having some knowledge of other cloud platforms also helps allay fears of vendor lock-in for our customers. However, the limiting factor here is in skillset. You can’t hire enough engineers that have all of the skills required at the depth required in all three cloud platforms. Hiring engineers that know one platform well is difficult; for all three platforms it’s impossible.”

Managing the skills deficit

As the Cloud Academy lead at Digital Futures we teach our cloud engineers about the benefits of multiple cloud providers and technologies so that poly-cloud can become a reality for our clients. We encourage an open mindset when it comes to what cloud service can be used for each solution.
AWS forms the bulk of our curriculum, with engineers passing their Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate examinations within 12-weeks. Alongside this, we place a major emphasis on standard cloud technologies such as Linux, Terraform and Docker. With firm foundational cloud knowledge in place, learning Microsoft Azure and GCP then comes easily to the engineers and ensures they are ready to demonstrate their skills across multiple cloud providers.
With such a holistic understanding of the cloud, it will be these future engineers, unburdened by bias and profiting from a huge amount of curiosity, that hold the key to a successful poly-cloud approach.