Category: Computing

bs the longest certified AWS individuals.

During my time with AWS, I also helped contribute to an early set of questions for the then-in-development Solution Architetc Professional certification. My contributions pulled upon my many years of involvement in Linux and Open Source, as well as my time then as AWS Security Solution architect for Australia and New Zealand.

As time (and I) moved on, I continued to sit more AWS certifications – at this time, I hold 8 AWS Certifications, and am awaiting results of the new Database Specialty certification. I’ve written many times about sitting these certifications, given guidance to friends and colleagues on sitting them. I’ve watched as the value to an individual of these certifications has increased, making them amongst some of the most respected, and best paid certifications in the technology field.

The attention to detail on running the certifications is high. The whole point of a certification is to discriminate fairly based on those who have the required capability to perform a task, and those who do not. If the certification were too easy, then it would undermine the value of the certification to those who are more adept in the topic.

Of course, the certification itself is not based on the same static set of questions. Some questions get invalidated over time as features get released and updated. Some services fall out of fashion, and new services are born that become critical (could you imagine running today without CloudTrail enabled).

The questions for these certifications are in a pool; and each time a candidate sits a certification, a subset of the currently active questions gets presented to them. The order of the questions is not fixed. The likelihood of two people getting the same questions, in the same order is extremely low.

However, over time, the pool runs low. Questions expire. New questions are needed.

In January 2020, I received a request to attend a question-writing workshop as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the Solution Architect Professional certification.

These workshops bring together some of the most capable, experienced AWS Cloud engineers on the planet. The goal is not to write questions that none of us could pass, but questions that all of us could pass that would bring more people into this tier.

Travel there

Arriving on Sunday, I managed to make it to my hotel, and then run to dinner with some dear friends and former colleagues from a decade ago who live in and around San Francisco.

Monday was a work day, so I was in the Modis office in San Francisco, talking to our team there about our cloud practice in Australia.

I was also lucky enough to cross paths with Corey Quinn, whom I had met when he came to Perth for the Latency conference in 2018. A quick coffee, and we realised we knew a fair number of people in common, across AWS, and the UK and Australia.

As timing was still working well, there was an AISA and NAB sponsored trade delegation with the Australian Consular General hosting an event in town on Monday evening. Many people were in town for the popular RSA Conference, so I popped along.

Small world it is, running in to Andrew Woodward of ECU, and Graeme Speak of Bankvault, both from Perth. I was also recognised from my AISA presentations over the last few years…

The exam workshop

14 Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from around the world gathered in San Francisco for the Question writing workshop. The backgrounds were all varied, from end customers of massive national broadcasters, to finance workloads, government, and more.

Much time was spent trying to strike a fair balance of what should be passable, and trying to ensure the expression of the problems, and the answers, were as clear and unequivocal as possible.

Three days of this was mentally draining. But the team contributed and reviewed over 100 items. These items now go through review, and may eventually turn up in an exam that those aspiring to the professional lavel AWS certification will sit.

Thanks to the AWS team for organising and paying for my travel, and thanks to my team for letting me participate.

Today, Monday 25th of November 2019, is the dawn of a new AWS Certification, the “Certified Database — Specialty“, taking the current active AWS certifications to 12:

• Cloud Practitioner — Foundational
• Solution Architect — Associate
• SysOps — Associate
• Developer — Associate
• Solution Architect — Professional
• DevOps Engineer — Professional
• Networking — Specialty
• Security — Specialty
• Big Data — Specialty
• Alexa Skills Builder — Specialty
• Machine Learning — Specialty
• Database — Specialty

I saw my first AWS Certification, the Solution Architect Associate, back in January of 2013 with the initial cohort of AWS staff while in Seattle, and thus am the equal longest AWS-certified person in the world; to which I have continued doing many of these certifications.

I’ve been using databases – primarily open source databases such as MySQL and Postgres, since the mid 1990s. I was certified by MySQL AB back in 2005 in London. Indeed, in 2004 I wrote (and open sourced) an exhaustive MySQL replication check for Nagios, so I have some in-depth knowledge here.

So today, on this first day of the new certification, I went and sat it. Since this is a new beta, there are no immediate pass/fail scores made available — that will be some time in 2020, when enough people have sat this, and grading can be done to determine a fair passing score (as well as review the questions.

Services Covered

As always, three’s an NDA so I can’t go into detail about questions, but I can confirm some of the services covered:

• RDS — of course — with Postgres, MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server
• DynamoDB – regional and global tables
• Aurora – both Postgres and MySQL interfaces
• Elasticache Redis
• DocumentDB
• DMS
• Glue

Sadly for Corey Quinn, no Route53 as a database-storage-engine, but DNS as a topic did come up. As did a fair amount of security, of course.

What was interesting was a constant focus on high availability, automated recovery, and minimal downtime when doing certain operations. This plays squarely into the Well-Architected Framework.

Who is this Certification for?

In my opinion, this certification is playing straight into the hands of the existing Database Administrator, who has perhaps long felt threatened by the automation that has replaced much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of basic database operation (patching, replication and snapshots) with Managed RDS instances.

This gives the humble DBA of yore a pathway to regain legitimacy; for those that don’t will be left behind. It will probably spur many DBAs to undertake architectures and approaches they may have often felt were too hard, or too complicated, when indeed these are quite easy with managed services.

Conclusion

A good outing for a new certification, but the odd typo (the likes of which I produce) were seen (eg: cloud where it should have been could, if you can believe me).

For anyone with a Pro SA and Pro Dev Ops certification, this one shouldn’t be a stretch too hard. Of course, come March I may eat my words.

I know how much work goes into creating these question pools, reviewing the blueprints, questions, and the work yet to be done – grading and then confirming and rejecting. Well done Cert team on another one hitting customers hands!

Another long overdue post from three weeks ago…

On the heel of the AWS Canberra Public Sector Summit 2019, and after some 24 hours at home with my family, I joined my fellow AWS Partner Ambassador at Modis – Steve Kinsman – and we started to wend our way across three flights to get to Seattle, departing a few minutes after midnight on Friday night/Saturday morning.

Continue reading “AWS Partner Ambassador Meetup #1, Seattle, August 2019”

I’ve been lampooning around in a very cloudy jacket for the last few months at various events, and people have asked “Why?”. In response, here is a tech run-down of… me (of course, see LinkedIn profile as well)…

Continue reading “Why the Cloud Jacket?”

It’s been a reasonably busy few weeks for me; here’s a recount of the AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra…

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On Monday 19th July, I went to Canberra for the AWS Public Sector summit, held at the National Convention Centre, with some 1,200 people in attendance this time. I recall the first AWS Canberra Public Sector Summit of 2013, with a few hundred going to the Realm Hotel: NCC is now starting to look reasonably full.

It’s always nice running into old friends, and this time, long time Linux.conf.au and Australian Open Source community personality Michael Still. Michael ran LCA 2013 in Canberra, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee was one of the keynotes (and Bunnie Huang, Bdale, and Radia Perlman). I helped the video team that year – and recall chatting with Robert Llewellyn…

Later, I ran into Matt Fitzgerald, whom I first met when I worked for AWS – and was the only other person at that time (circa 2013) from Perth in Seattle with AWS.

Of course, multiple current and former colleagues, other AWS Ambassadors from the region, other folk in the cloud space with other vendors.

And then, in the foyer while chatting, I suddenly find Pia, well known for her work inside the halls of government from Australia to New Zealand, but 17 years ago, helping establish the fledgling Linux.conf.au conference and helping the Australian open source community find its platform and voice.

Of course, its not all about catching up with friends.

The masses packed into the main theatre to hear the set of lighthouse case studies, new capabilities, and opportunities that can be reached on the AWS platform.

This time, the baton of AWS PS Country Manager and MC responsibilities had passed to Iain Rouse, formerly of Technology One. Modis has been an AWS partner since 2013 (as former brand Ajilon), with many Public Sector customers since then, it was nice to see our logo amongst a healthy ecosystem of capability.

Even nicer than seeing our logo, is our customers and those I have worked with. At the first PS Summit in 2013, I asked and had ICRAR attend; I used to work for UWA (as chief webmaster in the last millennium); when I was at AWS I worked with CFS SA and Moodle, and of course, Landgate – which is now over four years of running on the AWS Cloud.

New Zealand’s Conservation’s CIO, Mike Edginton spoke of the digital twinning they have been doing for the environments that their endangered species are in, and of having to set traps for introduced species but IoT enabling them. They cover a vast area of NZ, but the collection of data and analytics and visualisation makes their management more efficient. They’ve also managed to decode Kiwi calls (the bird, not the people).

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Former colleague Simon Elisha continued with a strong positioning of the further efforts around the efforts that the AWS engineering teams have been deploying on resilience, multi-layered security, hardware design, physical security, video CCTV archiving; and then into the customer accessible security services for Data Protection, Identity Directory & Access, Detective Controls & Management, and Networking & Infrastructure.

He then dived into a customer controlled capability for S3 (Object Storage) that was surfaced at the global re:Invent service in 2018: Block Public Access. This capability can be leveraged at a per-bucket level, as well as at an AWS-account-wide level (which would be effective for any new S3 Buckets created, regardless of their per-bucket settings)

S3 has been around for many years, and has expanded from a small set of micro services, to over 200 today (as disclosed at AWS Sydney Summit 2019). It can by itself act as a public web server for the content in a bucket; can have public anonymous access.; can encrypt in flight and at rest; storage tiering; life-cycle, logging, and much more. These days, I don’t encouraged teams to serve content to the web directly via S3, but via the CloudFront global CDN (today: 189 points of presence – see this). And with the ability for CloudFront to access S3 buckets using an Origin Access identity, its possible to remove all anonymous access from S3, and enable the Block Public Access – something we have done for many of our customers. This pattern forces that access to the data from the Internet will come from an endpoint set to my desired TLS policy, with a custom named TLS Certificate, and with a bonus, I can set (inject) my specific security headers on the content being served. For example, check out securityheaders.com (hi Scott) and test www.advara.com.

Simon also spoke about the technology stack (not quite the full OSI stack, for those that recall):

• Physical Layer: secure facilities with optical encryption using AES 256
• Data Link Layer: MACsec IEE 802.1AE
• Network Layer: VPN, Peering
• Transport Layer: s2n, NLB-TLS, ALB, CloudFront and ACM
• Application Layer: Crypto SDK, Server Side Encryption

After a quick tour of Security Hub, and then Ian speaking about some of the training and reskilling initiatives, it was time for another customer.

This was the second time I had seen this, with the drone having been shown at the AWS Commercial Summit in Sydney in July. However, Dr Scully-Power’s presentation was, to be honest, very powerful. Watch the video and hear for yourself about rescuing kids from rips, spotting sharks, crocs and more.

The AWS DeepRacer (reinforcement learning autonomous vehicles) was set up and competing again, part of the effort to lower the barrier of entry for customer into machine learning. The exhibitor hall continued to have technology and consulting partners showcasing their achievements and capabilities, as well as the various AWS customer-facing teams such as the certification teams, concierge team, Solution Architects (now split further by services and specialisations).

In the break-out sessions (actually held on the Tuesday), was a track dedicated to Healthcare, a track for High Performance Compute, and more. Presentations for the fledgling Australian space community (see Ground Station), decoupling workloads, connectivity, etc.

Once again a group of local school children were given the opportunity to attend and see the innovation being discussed, and a stream of activities aimed at helping show them career pathways.

Of course, in specific break out streams were media analyst briefings, executive briefings, Public Sector partner forums and workshops.

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I also had the opportunity to stop by the Modis Canberra office, and with Mark Smith (with whom I have worked for nearly half a decade) and I spoke at length to the local team on the challenges and successes of our engagements with customers, delivering advanced, managed Cloud services and solutions.

That night, I returned to Perth for a day at work and a few hours with my family… before heading for the next adventure, the AWS Ambassador Global meetup in Seattle (next post).