What is Prometheus?
What is Prometheus? Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. This tool's primary function is to collect and store metrics as time series data. For example, suppose you have a running web application that is too slow. You can use Prometheus to determine the response time of a web server or the number of active connections/queries in a database. Features: Multi-dimensional data model [...]
What is Grafana?
What is Grafana? Grafana is an open-source analytics and interactive visualization web app. When connected to supported data sources, it displays charts, graphs, and alerts on the web. The product is described as a "complete observability stack,” which includes everything you need to interact with your data. How It Works To visualize and analyze data in a dashboard, you’ll need to set up the following: Server - produces [...]
How to View your Actual AWS Bill if you have AWS Credits
Having AWS Credits can significantly reduce the cost of your cloud resources in your AWS account. However, there are some changes in your AWS Billing and Cost Management console that you must be aware of, to ensure that you still understand the running cost of your cloud services. You can easily view the actual bill of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on the Bills page by default, which [...]
My AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Exam Experience
I just passed the latest version of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02! What a way to end the year strong! In this short article, I'll quickly discuss what this SAP-C02 exam is all about and the different things that can help you pass this mind-boggling test. The New AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional SAP-C02) exam is one of the [...]
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
Bookmarks Concepts Security Monitoring Pricing A service that uses fully managed Apache Kafka to ingest and process streaming data in real time. Concepts Configuration If you do not specify a custom MSK configuration, a default configuration will be assigned to a cluster. You can use the custom configuration to new or existing MSK clusters. MSK configurations allow you to specify the properties [...]
AWS CloudHSM
Bookmarks Use Case Concepts Monitoring Pricing A computing device that enables you to provision and manage your own single-tenant HSMs for the generation and use of encryption keys. A hardware security module (HSM) performs cryptographic operations and provides secure storage for cryptographic keys. You can perform the following cryptographic tasks: Generate, store, import, export, and manage cryptographic keys. Use symmetric and asymmetric [...]
My SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Exam Experience
My team and I took the recently released AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 exam version recently. The SAA-C03 test replaced the old SAA-C02 exam version last August. If you can compare the official exam guide of the previous SAA-C02 version with the latest one (SAA-C03), you may notice that the exam domains are almost exactly the same but with quite different domain percentages. For example, the "Design [...]
AWS Backup
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing A service that enables you to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services and hybrid workloads. Concepts Backup plan A policy expression that determines when and how you want your AWS resources backed up. Stores periodic backups incrementally. A backup plan can be created using the AWS Backup console, API, CLI, SDK, or an AWS CloudFormation template. Backup [...]
AWS Compute Optimizer
Bookmarks Concepts Pricing A service that recommends optimal AWS resources to reduce costs and improve performance of your workloads. Uses machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics. You can view findings and recommendations across AWS Regions and accounts. Generates recommendations for the following resources: Amazon EC2 instances Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups Amazon EBS volumes AWS Lambda functions Concepts Recommendation preferences are features that [...]
AWS AppSync
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Security Pricing A serverless GraphQL and Pub/Sub API service that streamlines the development of modern web and mobile applications AppSync GraphQL APIs - provides a unified endpoint for securely querying and updating data from multiple databases, microservices, and APIs AppSync Pub/Sub APIs - data updates are automatically published to subscribed API clients via serverless WebSockets connections. Concepts GraphQL It [...]
AWS Migration Hub
Bookmarks Features Concepts Monitoring Pricing What is AWS Migration Hub? AWS Migration Hub is a service for planning, orchestrating, and tracking application migration to AWS. Supports migration status updates from the following: AWS Application Migration Service AWS Database Migration Service AWS Migration Hub Features Use network visualization to quickly organize on-premises discovery data and accelerate migration planning. Strategy Recommendations analyzes your applications [...]
AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN)
Bookmarks How It Works Concepts Networking Monitoring Security Pricing An automated lift-and-shift solution that simplifies, expedites, and lowers the cost of migrating applications to AWS. It converts source servers to run natively on AWS. How It Works Install AWS Replication Agent on the source servers. If you use agentless replication for vCenter feature, you must add your source servers by [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect SAA-C03 Content Update
With the new version of AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam coming out very soon, we are delighted to let you know that we started transitioning our SAA practice exams from the SAA-C02 to the new SAA-C03 exam version based on the brand new cloud services that AWS recently released. We also released the new SAA-C03 version of our AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Study Guide eBook [...]
AWS Application Discovery Service
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing A service that collects usage, behavior, and configuration data from on-premises servers to help you plan your migration to AWS. The collected data can be exported to Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight for analysis. Integrated with AWS Migration Hub to track the migration status of each application from the home Region. Concepts Discovery Agent An agent installed on virtual [...]
AWS License Manager
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Security Pricing A service for centrally managing software licenses across AWS and on-premises environments. It gives you control and visibility into license usage, allowing you to limit licensing overages and reduce the risk of noncompliance and misreporting. Supports a variety of licensing models: Perpetual - lifetime license with no expiration date. Floating - shareable licenses. Subscription - license with [...]
AWS Serverless Application Repository
Bookmarks Publishing Applications Deploying Applications Monitoring Pricing A managed repository for deploying and publishing serverless applications. You can also use pre-built applications instead of cloning, building, packaging, and publishing source code to AWS before deploying it. Each application includes an AWS SAM template that specifies the AWS resources that will be used. Publishing Applications Use an AWS SAM template to define your [...]
AWS Lake Formation
Bookmarks How It Works Concepts Security Pricing A service for managing and building data lakes. It stores and catalogs data from databases and object storage before transferring it to a new S3 data lake. You can also use ML algorithms to clean and classify data and secure access to sensitive data with granular controls at the column, row, [...]
AWS Control Tower
Bookmarks Concepts Networking Monitoring Pricing What is AWS Control Tower? A service for configuring and managing a multi-account AWS environment. AWS Control Tower Concepts Landing zone A multi-account environment that is well-architected and adheres to security and compliance best practices. Each organization can have one landing zone. A container that holds the following: Organizational Units (OUs) Accounts Users Other Resources Structure [...]
Amazon AppFlow
Bookmarks Features Concepts Pricing An integration service that automates data flows by securely integrating third-party applications and AWS services without writing any code. Features Run flows on-demand or on a schedule to keep data in sync across SaaS applications and AWS services. Aggregate data from multiple sources to train analytics tools more effectively and save money. Use flow management tools to track where [...]
AWS Audit Manager
Bookmarks Features Concepts Monitoring Security Pricing A service that will help you audit your AWS usage on a regular basis in order to simplify risk management and compliance with regulations and industry standards. Automates evidence collection for policies, procedures, and activities, as well as the creation of audit reports. Features Centrally manage and upload evidence from on-premises or multi-cloud environments. View [...]
AWS Outposts
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing A managed service that brings AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to the customer's premises. Concepts Outpost site is a physical location where AWS will install your Outpost. Outpost configurations include EC2, EBS, and networking capabilities. Each configuration has its own requirements for power, cooling, and weight support. The compute and storage resources are called Outpost capacity. You must [...]
AWS Proton
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing A managed delivery service for deploying container and serverless applications. Uses templates to define and maintain standard application stacks, which include the architecture, infrastructure resources, and the CI/CD pipeline. Concepts Templates Manage and provision resources using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Environment Template - a shared infrastructure used by multiple applications or resources. Standard Environment Template - AWS Proton provisions [...]
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
Bookmarks Features Concepts Pricing What is Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus? A managed monitoring service for container environments. You can monitor and alert on the performance of containerized workloads using the open-source PromQL without having to scale or manage the underlying infrastructure. Automatically scale the ingestion, storage, alerting, and querying of operational metrics as workload increases. Integrated with Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and [...]
Amazon Managed Grafana
Bookmarks Components Security Pricing What is Amazon Managed Grafana? A data visualization service for querying, correlating, and visualizing operational metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources. Create dashboards and visualizations to analyze metrics, logs, and traces without having to build, package, or deploy Grafana servers. All logical Grafana server deployment, setup, scaling, and maintenance are handled by AWS. Integrated with the following AWS [...]
AWS Network Firewall
Bookmarks Features Concepts Monitoring Pricing A managed service that helps deploy network protections for Amazon VPCs. Provides fine-grained network traffic control that allows you to restrict outbound requests to prevent malicious activity from spreading. Import previously created rules in common open source rule formats and enable integrations with managed intelligence feeds from AWS partners. With AWS Firewall Manager, you can create policies [...]
AWS Wavelength
Bookmarks Features Concepts Pricing A service that allows developers to create applications with ultra-low latencies for mobile devices and end users. Wavelength Zones can be used to extend an Amazon VPC in order to run ultra-low latency applications that use the same AWS services, APIs, tools, and functionalities. Features Wavelength Zones support a wide range of compute instances for general purpose, gaming, and [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Guide Study Path SAP-C01 / SAP-C02
Bookmarks Study Materials AWS Services to Focus On Common Exam Scenarios Validate Your Knowledge The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam SAP-C01 / SAP-C02 Overview Few years ago, before you can take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam (or SA Pro for short), you would first have to pass the associate level exam of this track. This is to ensure [...]
What’s New with the SAP-C02 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam this 2022?
The AWS Training and Certification team recently announced the third iteration of its challenging AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP-C02) exam. The first day to take the new version of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam would be on November 15, 2022, with an updated exam code of SAP-C02. Take note that the current version (SAP-C01) will only be available on November 14, 2022 so you still [...]
Whitelisting Access to Application Load Balancer Through The Use of AWS WAF
Load balancing an application is a common approach to distributing traffic among multiple servers. It has a breadth of benefits that can optimize performance, including availability and responsiveness, as it spreads the workload from one server to another, preventing server overload. AWS has a wide variety of load balancer types. But one of the most commonly used for web servers is the Application Load Balancer (ALB), as it functions [...]
Exploring AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner Game
What is AWS Cloud Quest? AWS Cloud Quest is an open-world, role-playing game that teaches you how to create AWS solutions using cloud concepts and exercises based on real life. It helps you learn the intricacies of modern cloud technologies and have fun at the same time. Cloud Quest features 12 real-life scenario assignments which prepare and train you to become an AWS Cloud Practitioner at absolutely no cost. [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam – SAA-C03 Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 exam Additional Whitepapers for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 exam Core AWS Services to Focus On for the SAA-C03 Exam Other SAA-C03 AWS Services That You Should Prepare For Common Exam Scenarios for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Video Course [...]
AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Study Path
Bookmarks AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Overview ANS-C01 Study Materials for ANS-C01 Core AWS Services to Focus On AWS Services That Will Appear In The ANS-C01 Exam Irrelevant AWS Services That Will NOT Appear In The ANS-C01 Exam Common Exam Scenarios for ANS-C01 Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty ANS-C01 certification exam [...]
Building Dynamic Start and Stop Scheduler Functions for Non-Distributed Applications Under Auto-Scaling Group
In AWS, it’s of utmost importance to consider the cost in every aspect. In fact, cost optimization is one of the 6 pillars of a well-architected framework, therefore, it must be included in every step in building solutions in AWS. There are infinite ways to reduce bills but one of the most popular ones for EC2 instances is to start or stop them, especially if they don't need to [...]
Real-time Monitoring of 5XX Errors using AWS Lambda, CloudWatch Logs and Slack
Monitoring is the best friend of every system administrator. It gives visibility into what is happening on your application so that when an issue occurs, you or someone in your team could be alerted and do the necessary measures to mitigate it. However, this can only be as effective as the metrics you're keeping track of. There are plenty of factors that can affect application performance. And while it’s [...]
Automatically stop non-production RDS databases with AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge
Every AWS service offering comes with a pay-as-go pricing model, empowering businesses, small or large, to be flexible at experimenting and making changes as they build their products to market. This pricing model is similar to riding an Uber, where you only pay for the distance covered, or to electric bills where you’re charged based on actual energy consumption. Of course, the more devices you have running, the higher [...]
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Bookmarks Components Storage Networking Security Monitoring Pricing What is Amazon EKS? A managed service that allows you to run Kubernetes on AWS without installing, operating, or maintaining your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes. Integration with various AWS services to provide scalability and security for your applications: Amazon ECR for container images Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution IAM for [...]
The New AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 This August 2022
Heads up! AWS just announced today that there would be a new version of their popular AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam. The new SAA exam code will be upgraded to SAA-C03 this coming August. Mark your calendars as the last day to take the current SAA-C02 exam version would be on August 29, 2022. Thus, if you need to recertify, you have to make sure that you book the current exam [...]
AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty DAS-C01 Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials AWS Services to Focus On Common Exam Scenarios Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty DAS-C01 exam is intended for people who have experience in designing, building, securing, and maintaining analytics solutions on AWS. The exam will test your technical skills on how different AWS analytics services integrate with each other. You also need to [...]
What’s New with the SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam this 2022?
The AWS Training and Certification team recently announced that there’s yet another version release of its popular AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam will be released this August 30, 2022. Its new exam version would be SAA-C03. Take note that the current version (SAA-C02) will only be available on August 29, 2022 so you still have time to recertify. The new SAA-C03 will be focused on Security, as shown on its official exam [...]
AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty MLS-C01 Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials AWS Services to Focus on Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AWS Machine Learning — Specialty MLS-C01 Certification is intended for individuals who are responsible for developing data science or applied machine learning projects on the AWS Cloud. This specialty certification is quite different from any other AWS exam. If you already have prior experience with other AWS certifications, [...]
Getting Started with SageMaker Ground Truth Private Workforce
Before we begin, let’s quickly talk about what Amazon SageMaker is and what it is used for. If this is your first time learning about Amazon SageMaker, it is the machine learning platform of AWS that helps solve the different requirements of data scientists, developers, and machine learning practitioners. It has several features and capabilities that assist in the different stages of the machine learning process. In this tutorial, [...]
AWS Transfer Family
Bookmarks Benefits How to delegate access Managing users Pricing AWS Transfer Family is a secure transfer service for moving files into and out of AWS storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS. With Transfer Family, you do not need to run or maintain any server infrastructure of your own. You can provision a Transfer Family server with multiple protocols (SFTP, FTPS, FTP). Benefits [...]
Scalable Data Processing and Transformation using SageMaker Processing (Part 2 of 2)
In this 2-part tutorial, we will focus on SageMaker Processing and how we can use it to solve our data processing needs. Our overall goal is to demonstrate how to use SageMaker Processing to help us perform Min-Max scaling on a dataset in its own dedicated and easily scalable environment. If you are looking for Part 1, you can find it here. As mentioned in Part I, we have [...]
Scalable Data Processing and Transformation using SageMaker Processing (Part 1 of 2)
Amazon SageMaker is the machine learning platform of AWS which helps solve the different requirements of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. It has several features and capabilities that assist in the different stages of the machine learning process. Here is a simplified list of the capabilities of SageMaker mapped to some of the stages of the ML lifecycle. SageMaker Processing Data Preparation and Processing SageMaker Training Model Training [...]
AWS Certified Sysops Administrator Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Experience
I recently took the new AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 exam last week via the Pearson Vue online proctoring. There are a lot of recently introduced features and services that showed up in this new version which you should be aware of. The new version included the new Exam Labs section in the test, which is unique among the other existing AWS certifications. If you’re planning to take this exam soon, [...]
Sample SysOps Exam Lab Scenario #1 – Create an Alarm Using a Metric Filter
This sample exam lab was taken from our AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Practice Exams. Check out our practice test course for more exam lab scenarios. LEARNING OBJECTIVE The goal of this lab exercise is to help you understand how you can leverage CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Metrics, CloudWatch Alarms, and Amazon SNS services in creating an automated alarm system that can inform you of unusual activity in your AWS [...]
ELB Health Checks vs Route 53 Health Checks For Target Health Monitoring
We all know that health checks are a very useful tool for making sure that AWS services such as AWS ELB and Amazon Route 53 know the state of their targets before forwarding traffic to them. In this section, we will take a look at ELB health checks and Route 53 health checks, and compare them with one another.
Interface Endpoint vs Gateway Endpoint vs Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint
Interface Endpoint Gateway Endpoint Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint An elastic network interface with a private IP address that serves as an entry point for traffic destined to a supported AWS service, endpoint service, or AWS Marketplace service. For each interface endpoint, you can choose only one subnet per Availability Zone. Endpoints are regional, which means they are only usable within the same region they are created in. Since interface [...]
Amazon EFS vs Amazon FSx for Windows vs Amazon FSx for Lustre
Amazon EFS Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Amazon FSx for Lustre • Amazon EFS is a serverless, scalable, high-performance file system in the cloud. • EFS file systems can be accessed by Amazon EC2 Linux instances, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda functions via a file system interface such as NFS protocol. • Amazon EFS supports file system access semantics such as strong consistency and [...]
How to Create Wait Conditions in a CloudFormation Template
Wait Conditions, as the name suggests, is a tool used to control the order of creation of the AWS resources in a CloudFormation stack. It can pause the creation of a stack and wait for a signal to ensure that specific resources and configurations were properly launched before resuming the stack creation process. Use cases: For example, you want to make sure that a specific domain name is working [...]
Multi-Account Multi-Region Data Aggregation On AWS Config
AWS Config is a service that tracks changes made to resources associated with an AWS account. This service can give you a detailed view of the resource configuration’s timeline so you can go back in time and identify when and what resource the change was made into. It also enables you to determine the overall compliance against the rules and configurations specified in your guidelines. This simplifies compliance auditing, [...]
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams vs Data Firehose vs Data Analytics vs Video Streams
Data Streams Data Firehose Data Analytics Video Streams Short definition Scalable and durable real-time data streaming service. Capture, transform, and deliver streaming data into data lakes, data stores, and analytics services. Transform and analyze streaming data in real time with Apache Flink. Stream video from connected devices to AWS for analytics, machine learning, playback, and other processing. Data sources Any data source (servers, mobile devices, IoT devices, etc) [...]
Specifying Triggers for AWS Config Rules
AWS Config allows you to set “rules” to evaluate configuration settings on your AWS resources. The result of these rule evaluations are then displayed on the AWS Config web console. You can control the frequency of rule evaluations by AWS Config by specifying a trigger. A trigger refers to the method of evaluation for your config rules. There are two types of triggers to select from when creating a [...]
Setting up AWS Systems Manager for Hybrid Environments
AWS Systems Manager allows your organization to monitor and control their infrastructure on AWS and on-premises environments. Systems Manager provides a unified interface to which you can monitor thousands of servers and services of AWS. Essentially, Systems Manager simplifies resource and application management, shortens the time to detect and resolve operational problems, and makes it easy to operate and manage your infrastructure securely at scale. The following are the [...]
Symmetric vs. Asymmetric CMKs
Even before the Internet, the security, privacy, and integrity of information have always been the top concern of institutions like banks, hospitals, and universities. Nobody wants their personal information (name, address, credit card number, etc.) to be exposed in public for anyone to use. Imagine signing up on your favorite social media website, and after a few days, somewhere on the globe has been using your profile and pretending [...]
Amazon Textract
A fully managed document analysis service for detecting and extracting information from scanned documents. Returns extracted data as key-value pairs (e.g., Name: John Doe) Supports virtually any type of documents Can detect text written in Standard English alphabet and ASCII symbols. Common Use Cases: Building search indexes Importing documents into a business application Building automated document processing solutions Text extraction for Natural Language Processing (NLP) Applications Maintaining document compliance [...]
Amazon Augmented AI (A2I)
Amazon A2I is a service that helps you easily integrate human reviews in a machine learning workflow. Simplifies managing a large number of human reviewers at scale. Has direct integration with Amazon Textract and Amazon Rekognition Common Use Cases: Content Moderation where human oversight is required to judge uncertain results from a machine learning model. Manual reviews of low confidence predictions due to documents that are scanned poorly or [...]
Amazon Personalize
A fully managed machine learning service for building recommendation systems. Amazon Personalize allows you to train, build, and deploy recommendation models without an extensive machine learning experience. Offers batch and real-time recommendations. Common Use Cases: Personalized product and content recommendations. Product rankings. Improves marketing communication through individualized push notifications and emails. Concepts Amazon Personalize can provide recommendations based on real-time data, historical data, or a mix of both. Event [...]
My AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 BETA Exam Experience in 2021
I took the BETA version of the new AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 exam last week via the Pearson Vue online proctoring. There are a lot of recently-introduced features and services that showed up in this new version which you should be aware of. There is also a new Exam Labs section in the test, which is unique among the other existing AWS certifications. If you’re planning to take [...]
Azure Active Directory (AD) vs Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Azure AD Azure RBAC Description An identity and access management service that helps you access internal and external resources. An authorization system that manages user’s access to Azure resources including what they can do with those resources and what areas they can access. Focus Grants permissions to manage access to Azure Active Directory resources. Grants permissions to manage access to Azure resources. Scope Tenant level Specify at multiple [...]
AWS Managed Policies For Job Functions
AWS managed policies for job functions are policies that contain sets of permissions required for a specific job function or role (especially in the IT industry). It is designed to simplify the creation of policies by combining the permissions for many services into a single policy. You can attach these policies for job functions to any group, user, or role. To further understand this, let’s consider the scenario below: [...]
Amazon Aurora vs Amazon RDS
Aurora RDS Type of database Relational database Features • MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible. • 5x faster than standard MySQL databases and 3x faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. • Use Parallel Query to run transactional and analytical workloads in the same Aurora database, while maintaining high performance. • You can distribute and load balance your unique workloads across different sets of Aurora DB instances using custom endpoints. • [...]
My AWS Certified Security Specialty Exam Experience – Tips and Important Notes
My AWS Certified Security Specialty Exam Experience - Tips and Important Notes The AWS Certified Security - Specialty is included in the top 10 Most Popular Cybersecurity Certifications based on Global Knowledge’s 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report. Beating some of the famous security certifications on the list (e.g. CEH, CompTia: Security+) only shows how influential AWS has been to the IT industry in the previous years. Not only [...]
AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Exam Study Guide
Bookmarks Study Materials Azure Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam is designed for people who have experience in implementing, managing, and monitoring a Microsoft Azure environment. The exam will test your technical skills in implementing solutions based on different scenarios. Having prior experience in infrastructure management will help you understand the concepts [...]
GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Study Guide
Bookmarks Study Materials GCP Services to Focus on Validate Your Knowledge Google offers the Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) as an Associate level certification for individuals who already have IT experience but are relatively new to the Google Cloud Platform. For individuals with zero IT experience or for non-IT people who want to learn Google Cloud, you might want to check Google’s Cloud Digital [...]
Amazon Aurora Machine Learning
Amazon Aurora Machine Learning is a proprietary technology of Amazon that enables a native SQL user to integrate Machine Learning-based predictions to an application without knowing or understanding any machine learning algorithms. Machine learning heavily relies on datasets for it to work. You can say that data is the oil that keeps the engine of machine learning running. There is a massive amount of data generated every day. To [...]
Amazon Comprehend
Bookmarks Common Use Cases Concepts Pricing Validate Your Knowledge What is Amazon Comprehend? A managed Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that you can use to extract meaningful information from unstructured texts so you can analyze them in a human-like context. It is an off-the-shelf solution that does not require deep machine learning expertise to get started. Works with social media feeds, web [...]
AWS DeepLens
A deep learning-enabled camera for developers A wireless-enabled camera integrated with AWS Cloud Capable of delivering 100GFLOPS of computing power (1 billion operations per second) Contains sample projects at launch to get you started Optimized for Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, and Caffe Integrates with Amazon Rekognition for advanced image analysis Common use cases Developing computer vision applications such as: Face Detection Activity Detection Object Detection Bird Classification Artistic Style Transfer [...]
Amazon SageMaker
Bookmarks Concepts Optimization Monitoring Pricing Note Validate Your Knowledge A fully managed service that allows data scientists and developers to easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. Provides built-in algorithms that you can immediately use for model training. Also supports custom algorithms through docker containers. One-click model deployment. Concepts Hyperparameters It refers to a set of variables [...]
Amazon Lex
A service that can help you build conversational interfaces using voice and text. Uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to convert speech to text. Uses natural language understanding (NLU) for recognizing the intent of the text. Provides highly-engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. Gets more intelligent over time by using deep learning. Common Use Cases AI Chatbots Informational bots Enterprise Productivity bots Voice Assistants Concepts Bots Performs automated tasks [...]
Amazon Elastic Inference
Allows attaching low-cost GPU-powered inference acceleration to EC2 instances, SageMaker instances, or ECS tasks. Reduce machine learning inference costs by up to 75%. Common use cases Computer vision Natural language processing Speech recognition Concepts Accelerator A GPU-powered hardware device provisioned. It is not a part of the hardware where your instance is hosted. Uses AWS PrivateLink endpoint service to attach to the instance over the network. Only a single [...]
Amazon Polly
Bookmarks Common use cases Concepts Features Pricing Validate Your Knowledge A text-to-speech (TTS) service Uses advanced deep learning technologies to convert text into natural, lifelike speech It supports saving text into MP3, OGG, and PCM file formats. Offers Standard and Neural TTS (NTTS) Common use cases Increase customer engagement Language learning applications Helps visually impaired individuals to consume digital content Testing [...]
Amazon Transcribe
A fully managed automatic speech recognition (ASR) service. Converts speech into text. It supports a wide variety of audio coding formats such as WAV, MP3, MP4, FLAC, AMR, AMR-WB, Ogg, and WebM. It can process batch and streaming transcriptions. Common Use Cases Transcribing customer calls Meeting transcription Closed captioning Generating metadata to create a searchable archive Concepts A confidence score is between 0 and 100, indicating the probability that [...]
Amazon Translate
A Neural Machine Translation service that provides fluent translation with higher accuracy than traditional statistical and rule-based translation models. Powered by deep learning models that deliver fast, accurate, and affordable translation between supported languages. Supports batch translation, real-time, and on-demand translations. Common Use Cases Language localization Translating content for text analytics Cross-lingual communication Concepts Amazon Translate uses a Translation Model that consists of two (2) components: Encoder Read a [...]
NEW EXAM VERSION – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 vs SOA-CO1
AWS previously announced a new update on the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam. This certification exam is designed for individuals who have at least a year of hands-on experience with networking, management, deployment, and security on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. The sample exam questions can be found in this link. The beta version of the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate (SOA-C02) exam was made available from February 16 [...]
Logging Using awslogs Log Driver in Amazon ECS
Monitoring and logging can be as important as developing and deploying applications. Imagine managing an enterprise-level distributed application that runs on hundreds of containers. You must place your containers cleverly on instances to achieve a certain level of resilience and performance. On top of that, you would want to have visibility into CPU and memory usage so you’ll have an idea which task/tasks are resource-hungry at a given time. [...]
AWS Savings Plan
Savings Plan is a flexible pricing model that helps you save up cost on Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda usage. You can purchase Savings Plans from any account, payer or linked. By default, the benefit provided by Savings Plans is applicable to usage across all accounts within an AWS Organization/consolidated billing family. You can also choose to restrict the benefit of Savings Plans to only the account [...]
NEWS: AWS re:Invent 2020 will be Hosted Online and Registration is FREE!
NEWS: AWS re:Invent 2020 will be Hosted Online and Registration is FREE! AWS re:Invent is a conference organized by Amazon Web Services for the cloud computing community. Since 2012, the conference has always been held in Las Vegas, but this time it’s going to be different. This 3-week conference will now be hosted online, and take note that this event is FREE for everyone. To join AWS re:Invent 2020 [...]
AWS Glue
Bookmarks Use Cases Concepts Populating the AWS Glue Data Catalog Authoring Jobs Glue DataBrew Monitoring Security Pricing Validate Your Knowledge A fully managed service to extract, transform, and load (ETL) your data for analytics. Discover and search across different AWS data sets without moving your data. AWS Glue consists of: Central metadata repository ETL engine Flexible scheduler [...]
Managing Amazon GuardDuty Security Findings Across Multiple Accounts
In our previous article, we discussed how GuardDuty can help organizations monitor their workloads and AWS accounts from malicious activities and how to monitor findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events. Imagine that your organization has multiple AWS accounts for different workloads, teams, and projects. With every account, you need to monitor GuardDuty findings individually. It will be quite difficult for your security team to monitor these findings with their constant [...]
Monitoring GuardDuty Findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events
Large scale cyber attacks are now becoming normal in this age of interconnectivity. As we rely more and more on cloud technologies, companies are looking to tap into digital innovations to improve their businesses. Cyber attacks are costing companies millions of dollars of downtime not to mention the possibility of lawsuits whenever an attack occurs. It is imperative that security teams have the means to prevent, detect, and take [...]
Aurora Serverless Tutorial Part 2
In the first part of this tutorial, we gave a walkthrough on Aurora Serverless and its use case. You can read the article here. For this tutorial, we will do some hands-on training and create an Aurora Serverless database. Creating an Aurora Serverless Database: 1. Open the AWS console and go to RDS. Click the button “Create database”. 2. Choose Amazon Aurora. You can either choose MySQL or PostgreSQL [...]
Aurora Serverless Tutorial – Part 1
What is Aurora Serverless? Before we get into it, let us briefly define Aurora and serverless first. Aurora is a fully managed, closed source relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. According to Amazon, it is five times faster than the standard MySQL and three times faster than PostgreSQL. It uses a distributed architecture that provides fault tolerance and high availability. Serverless is a technique in the [...]
Google BigQuery vs BigTable
BigQuery BigTable BigQuery is Google Cloud's fully managed, petabyte-scale, and cost-effective analytics data warehouse that lets you run analytics over vast amounts of data in near real-time. You can use bq command-line tool or Google Cloud Console to interact with BigTable. You can access BigQuery by using the Cloud Console, by using the bq command-line tool, or by making calls to the BigQuery REST API using a variety of [...]
Google Cloud Functions vs App Engine vs Cloud Run vs GKE
Serverless compute platforms like Cloud Functions, App Engine, and Cloud Run lets you build, develop, and deploy applications while simplifying the developer experience by eliminating all infrastructure management. On the other hand, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) runs Certified Kubernetes that helps you facilitate the orchestration of containers via declarative configuration and automation. Both Google serverless platforms and GKE allows you to scale your application based on your infrastructure requirement. [...]
Google Cloud Storage vs Persistent Disks vs Local SSD vs Cloud Filestore
Google Cloud Storage Persistent Disks Local SSD Cloud Filestore Cloud Storage is a service for storing your objects in Google Cloud. An object is an immutable piece of data consisting of a file of any format. You store objects in containers called buckets. You specify a location for storing your object data when you create a bucket. You can either select region, dual-region, and multi-region as location. Objects stored [...]
Google Compute Engine vs App Engine
Google Compute Engine Google App Engine Compute Engine delivers configurable virtual machines running in Google's data centers with access to high-performance networking infrastructure and block storage solutions. App Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications at scale. Delivered as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Delivered as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Supported Languages: Any Supported Languages: Go, Python, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby (.Net and Custom runtimes for Flexible Environment) [...]
Google Cloud Build
Build, test, and deploy on Google Cloud Platform’s serverless CI/CD platform. Features Cloud build is a fully serverless platform that helps you build your custom development workflows for building, testing, and deploying. Cloud Build can import source code from: Cloud Storage Cloud Source Repositories GitHub Bitbucket Supports Native Docker. You can import your existing Docker file. Push images directly to Docker image storage repositories such as Docker Hub and [...]
Google Container Registry
Container Registry is a container image repository to manage Docker images, perform vulnerability analysis, and define fine-grained access control. Features Automatically build and push images to a private registry when you commit code to Cloud Source Repositories, GitHub, or Bitbucket. You can push and pull Docker images to your private Container Registry utilizing the standard Docker command-line interface. The system creates a Cloud Storage bucket to store all of [...]
Google Cloud Source Repositories
A fully managed git repository where you can securely manage your code. Features You will be able to extend your git workflow with Cloud Source Repositories. Set up a repository as a Git remote. Push, pull, clone, log, and perform other Git operations as required by your workflow. You can create multiple repositories for a single Google Cloud project. This allows you to organize the code associated with your [...]
Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service that automates the creation and management of Google Cloud resources. Features You can write template and configuration files and utilize them to create deployments that have a variety of Google Cloud services working together, such as: Cloud Storage Compute Engine Cloud SQL A configuration defines the structure of your deployment. You must specify a configuration on a YAML file to [...]
Google Cloud Monitoring
Bookmarks Features Workspaces Cloud Monitoring Agent Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Cloud Monitoring collects metrics, events, and metadata, hosted uptime probes, and application instrumentation to gain visibility into the performance, availability, and health of your applications and infrastructure. Features Collect metrics from multicloud and hybrid infrastructure in real time. Metrics, events, and metadata are displayed with rich query language that helps identify [...]
Google Cloud Logging
Bookmarks Features Cloud Audit Logs Exporting Audit Logs Pricing Validate Your Knowledge An exabyte-scale, fully managed service for real-time log management. Helps you to securely store, search, analyze, and alert on all of your log data and events. Features Write any custom log, from any source, into Cloud Logging using the public write APIs. You can search, sort, and query logs [...]
Google Cloud Billing
Bookmarks Features Cloud Billing Account & Payments Profile Cloud Billing Reports Cloud Billing Budgets Overview of Cloud Billing roles in IAM Validate Your Knowledge You can configure billing on Google Cloud in a variety of ways to meet different needs. To use Google Cloud services, you must have a valid Cloud Billing account, Features If you have a project that [...]
Google Cloud Console
Google Cloud Console is a web admin interface to manage your Google cloud infrastructure. Features You can create projects on Google Cloud Console. With Cloud Console, you can quickly find and check the health of all your cloud resources in one place, including virtual machines, network settings, and data storage. Logging Manage and audit user access to project resources. Track down production issues quickly by viewing logs. You can [...]
Google Cloud Secret Manager
Secret Manager is a secure and convenient method to store API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data. It provides a central place as the source of truth to manage, access, and audit secrets across Google Cloud. Features Secret names are project-global resources, but secret data is stored in regions. You can choose specific regions in which to store your secrets. Secret data is immutable and most operations take [...]
Google Cloud Key Management Service
The Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) is a cloud-hosted key management service that enables you to manage encryption keys on the Google Cloud Platform. Features Lets you manage your symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic keys the same way you manage them in an on-premises environment. You can decide to use the keys generated by Cloud KMS with other Google Cloud services. These keys are known as customer-managed encryption keys [...]
Google Cloud Armor
Help protect your applications and websites against denial of service and web attacks. Detect and mitigate attacks against your Cloud Load Balancing workloads. Mitigate OWASP Top 10 risks and help protect workloads on-premises or in the cloud. Features Comes with predefined rules for protection against OWASP Top 10 risks. Easily monitor the metrics associated with your policies in the Cloud Monitoring dashboard. View suspicious traffic patterns on the Cloud [...]
Google Cloud Identity
Cloud Identity is an API for provisioning and managing identity resources. Is a unified identity, access, app, and endpoint management (IAM/EMM) platform that helps IT and security teams maximize end-user efficiency, protect company data, and transition to a digital workspace. Features Use a single admin console to manage user, access, app, and device policies. Monitor your security and compliance posture with reporting and auditing capabilities, and investigate threats with [...]
Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Bookmarks Features Roles Service Accounts Policy Groups Best Practices Validate Your Knowledge Create and manage permissions for your Google Cloud resources with Identity Access Management (IAM). Provides a unified view into your organization’s security policy with built-in auditing to ease compliance purposes. Features Lets you authorize who can take specific actions on resources to give you full control and [...]
Google Cloud Router
Cloud Router is a fully distributed and managed Google Cloud service that helps you define custom dynamic routes and scales with your network traffic. Features It works with both legacy networks and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks. Cloud Router utilizes Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routes between your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network and your on-premises network. Using Cloud Router is required or recommended in the following cases: [...]
Google Cloud Hybrid Connectivity
Bookmarks Cloud Interconnect Direct Peering Cloud VPN Validate Your Knowledge There are several ways to extend your on-premises environment to the Google Cloud Platform. You can connect your infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) on your terms, from anywhere based on your requirements. Cloud Interconnect Provides low latency, highly available connections that enable you to reliably transfer data between your on-premises and [...]
Google Virtual Private Cloud
Bookmarks Key Concepts Network and Subnets Configuring IP Addresses Firewall Rules Routes Communications and access for APP Engine Connecting VPC Networks Pricing Validate Your Knowledge You can create and manage your own virtual topology network where you can launch your Google Cloud resources using Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Google VPC is the networking layer of Google Cloud resources. [...]
Google Cloud CDN
The Google Cloud CDN (content delivery network) service accelerates your web content delivery by using Google’s global edge network to bring content as close to the user as possible. It helps you reduce latency, cost, and load for your backend services. Features Activates with a single click for Cloud Load Balancing users. Cloud CDN supports modern protocols originally developed at Google, like HTTP/2 and QUIC. Integrates with Cloud Monitoring [...]
Google Cloud Load Balancing
Google Cloud Load Balancing allows you to put your resources behind a single IP address. Features Can be set to be available externally or internally with your Virtual Private Network (VPC). HTTP(S) load balancing can balance HTTP and HTTPS traffic across multiple backend instances, across multiple regions. Enable Cloud CDN for HTTP(S) load balancing to optimize application delivery for your users with a single checkbox. You can define the [...]
Google Cloud DNS
Cloud DNS is Google’s infrastructure for production quality and high-volume authoritative DNS serving. Features Authoritative DNS Lookup Cloud DNS translates requests for domain names like www.google.com into IP addresses like 74.125.29.101. Manage your DNS records for your domain using Google Cloud Console. Create managed zones for your project so you can add, edit, and delete DNS records. You can control permissions at a project level and monitor your changes as they [...]
Google Cloud Dataproc
Build fully managed Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Presto, and other OSS clusters on the Google Cloud Platform using Cloud Dataproc. Features You can spin up resizable clusters quickly with various virtual machine types, disk sizes, number of nodes, and networking options on Cloud Dataproc. Dataproc provides autoscaling features to help you automatically manage the addition and removal of cluster workers. Cloud Dataproc has built-in integration with the following Google [...]
Google Cloud Dataflow
Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed data processing service for executing a wide variety of data processing patterns. Features Dataflow templates allow you to easily share your pipelines with team members and across your organization. You can also take advantage of Google-provided templates to implement useful but simple data processing tasks. Autoscaling lets the Dataflow automatically choose the appropriate number of worker instances required to run your job. You [...]
Google Cloud Dataprep
Cloud Dataprep by Trifacta is an intelligent data service for visually exploring, cleaning, and preparing structured and unstructured data for analysis, reporting, and machine learning. Features You can transform structured or unstructured datasets of any size — megabytes to petabytes — with equal ease and simplicity. Cloud Dataproc can transform datasets stored in CSV, JSON, or relational table formats. You can process data stored in Cloud Storage, BigQuery, or [...]
Google BigQuery
Bookmarks Features Loading data into BigQuery Querying from external data sources Monitoring Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud BigQuery A fully managed data warehouse where you can feed petabyte-scale data sets and run SQL-like queries. Features Cloud BigQuery is a serverless data warehousing technology. It provides integration with the Apache big data ecosystem allowing Hadoop/Spark and Beam workloads to read [...]
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Bookmarks Features Key Concepts Publisher-subscriber relationships Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Cloud Pub/Sub is a fully-managed real-time messaging service for event driven systems that allows you to send and receive messages between independent applications. Features Capable of global message routing to simplify multi-region systems. Synchronous, cross-zone message replication and per-message receipt tracking ensure at-least-once delivery at any scale. Pub/Sub delivers each message [...]
Google Cloud Bigtable
A fully managed NoSQL database service designed for large analytical and operational workloads and enables you to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Features You can use Cloud BigTable to store and query time-series data. It is ideal for storing large amounts of single-keyed data. Scales seamlessly from thousands to millions of reads/writes per second. Resize your cluster nodes to adjust Cloud Bigtable throughput without restarting – all [...]
Google Cloud Filestore
Fully managed NFS file servers on Google Cloud for Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine instances Most commonly used for media rendering, data analytics, and managing shared content. Features Simple, fast, consistent, scalable, and easy to use network-attached storage. You can copy data from Cloud Storage to a filestore fileshare that is mounted on a Compute Engine instance. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit with system-defined keys [...]
Google Cloud Functions
A pay-as-you-go function as a service (FaaS) to run your code with zero server management. Features There is no need to provision, manage, or upgrade servers. Cloud Functions can be written using: Node.js Python 3 Go Java Automatically scales based on load without thinking about the infrastructure. Built-in security at role and per function level based on the least privilege principle. Allows you to trigger your code from Google [...]
Google Cloud Spanner
A fully managed relational database service that scales horizontally with strong consistency. Features SLA availability up to 99.999% for multi-regional instances with 10x less downtime than four nines. Provides transparent, synchronous replication across region and multi-region configurations. Optimizes performance by automatically sharding the data based on request load and size of data so you can spend less time thinking about scaling your database and more time scaling your business. [...]
Google Cloud SQL
A fully managed relational database service. Cloud SQL is available for: MySQL PostgreSQL SQL Server Features Scale instantly with a single API call as your data grows. Automated and on-demand backups are available. You can restore your database instance to its state at an earlier point in time by enabling binary logging. Data replication between multiple zones with automatic failover. You can perform an analytics job by using BigQuery [...]
Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
Bookmarks Buckets Bucket Configurations Storage Classes gsutil tool Uploading objects to GCS Pricing Validate Your Knowledge An object storage service that stores data within buckets. Below is a sample Cloud Storage integration: Buckets The data you upload on Cloud Storage are called objects. An object is an immutable piece of data consisting of a file in any format. You [...]
Cloud Run
Bookmarks Features Cloud Run for Anthos What images you can deploy Pricing Is a managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless HTTP containers that are invokable via web requests or Pub/Sub events. Features Cloud Run is serverless which means it abstracts away all the infrastructure management and maintenance so you can focus more on building your application. In Cloud Run, [...]
Local SSD
Is a local solid-state drive storage physically attached to the server that hosts your virtual machine (VM) instances. Features Tightly coupled to a physical server that offers superior performance, very high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and very low latency compared to other block storage options. Each local SSD is 375 GB. Moreover, you can attach a maximum of 24 Local SSD partitions. You can also format and mount [...]
Persistent Disks
Bookmarks Features Zonal and Regional Persistent Disks Persistent Disk Types Encryption Snapshots Pricing Are durable network storage devices that you can provision to host your virtual machine instances. Features Data on each persistent disk is distributed across several physical disks and is designed for high durability. It stores data redundantly to ensure data integrity. Persistent disks are resizable to accommodate [...]
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Bookmarks Features Kubernetes Cluster Architecture Kubernetes API Objects GKE Sandbox Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Secured and managed Kubernetes services with auto-scaling and multi-cluster support Features Can be configured to automatically scale node pool and clusters across multiple node pools based on changing workload requirements. Auto-repair can be enabled to do health checks on node Choose clusters tailored to your requirements [...]
Google App Engine
Bookmarks Features Types of Scaling Pricing Validate Your Knowledge A highly scalable fully managed serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications. Features A fully managed environment to allow you to concentrate on deploying your application. Custom runtimes allow you to bring any library and framework to App Engine by supplying a Docker container. Application versioning is available to easily host different [...]
Google Compute Engine (GCE)
Bookmarks Configurations Instance Templates Instance Groups Managing access to your instances Backing up your instance Sole Tenant Nodes Preemptible Instances Shielded Instances Instance Life Cycle GCP Marketplace Live Migration Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Linux-based and Windows-based virtual machines Each instance you create belongs to a project A project can have one or more [...]
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Pricing
GCP’s customer-friendly pricing allows businesses to pay as you go, without termination fees, and no upfront costs. Google Cloud Free Program New customers are given $300 free Cloud Billing credits valid for 90 days to explore and evaluate the Google Cloud Platform. Free Tier Limits are also available for all GCP customers on selected Google Cloud services – like GCE, GCS, and BigQuery. The free tier limit does not [...]
Google Cloud Global Infrastructure
The cloud infrastructure of GCP is built around: 20+ regions 70+ zones 140+ network edge locations Multi-regions A large geographic area, such as the United States, that contains two or more geographic places. Regions Are collections of zones that provide high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region. Regional resources can be used by any resource in that region, regardless of zone Generally, communication within regions [...]
Google Cloud Platform Overview
The Google Cloud Platform is the infrastructure that powers the Google products you are familiar with including Gmail, Search, and Google Photos. In April of 2008, Google announced its first service called App Engine, a cloud compute service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Since then, Google has evolved and added more cloud services to its platform. GCP lets developers build and host applications and [...]
Lifecycle Event Hooks in CodeDeploy
Bookmarks Events Things To Consider In biology, life cycle refers to the series of stages or events that occur during an organism’s lifetime. Lifecycle also applies when automating software deployment on AWS CodeDeploy. Lifecycle event hooks refer to the series of events that describes how a deployment is accomplished. It allows you to control or perform actions on different stages of your deployment. In [...]
Amazon EBS Multi-Attach
Amazon Elastic Block Store or EBS is a durable block-based storage device that can be attached to your EC2 instance. AWS released a feature called Multi-Attach, which allows EC2 instances to share a single EBS volume for up to 16 instances and provide higher availability of your applications for Linux workloads. Each instance to which the volume is attached has full read and write permissions to the volume. The [...]
ECS Network Modes Comparison
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) allows you to run Docker-based containers on the cloud. Amazon ECS has two launch types for operation: EC2 and Fargate. The EC2 launch type provides EC2 instances as hosts for your Docker containers. For the Fargate launch type, AWS manages the underlying hosts so you can focus on managing your containers instead. The details and configuration on how you want to run your containers [...]
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner vs Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Exam
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner vs Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Exam One way to boost your career in the cloud computing space is through certifications. These exams will help validate your current understanding and knowledge in the cloud. Cloud service providers offer different learning paths such as Cloud Architect, Cloud Developer, and Cloud Administrator. Both AWS and Microsoft have introductory certifications that will test your understanding of the basics. AWS has [...]
Amazon SES
Bookmarks Common Use Cases Features Methods of Sending Emails Testing Amazon SES Concepts Email Authentication Methods Email Sending Requests Dedicated IP Addresses vs Amazon SES IP Addresses Security Pricing Limits A cost-effective and scalable email service that enables you to send mail from within any application. A regional service. Amazon SES is for applications that [...]
Azure CycleCloud
Orchestrate and manage high-performance computing (HPC) environments on Azure. Enables you to provision infrastructure for HPC systems, deploy familiar HPC schedulers, and scale the infrastructure automatically to run jobs efficiently at any scale. Features Scheduler Agnostic - use standard HPC schedulers or extend CycleCloud autoscaling plugins to work with your own scheduler. Manage Compute Resources - manage VMs and scale sets to provide a set of compute resources to [...]
Azure Batch
A service that runs large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) batch jobs in Azure. Allows you to run jobs in a group of Linux or Windows virtual machines. Components A task represents a unit of computation and a job is a collection of tasks. Job priority values range from the lowest priority to the highest priority. To specify certain limits for your jobs, you can use job constraints: Maximum [...]
Azure Service Bus
A fully managed message broker service. It allows you to decouple applications and services. Provides a reliable and secure platform for asynchronous data and state transfer. Enables you to deliver messages to multiple subscribers and fan-out message delivery to downstream systems. Features Message Sessions for implementing first in, first out (FIFO) and request-response patterns to ensure the order of messages in the queue. Autoforwarding allows you to remove messages [...]
Azure Service Fabric
A distributed systems platform that helps package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers. Build microservices and container-based applications using the programming language of your choice, including .NET Core 2.0, C #, and Java. It supports two types of microservices: Stateless - It does not maintain a mutable state outside a request and its response from the service such as protocol gateways and web proxies. Stateful - [...]
Azure ExpressRoute
Bookmarks Features Use Cases Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Enables you to establish a private connection between your on-premises data center or corporate network to your Azure cloud infrastructure. More secure, reliable, and faster than conventional VPN connections. Supports dynamic routing between your network and Microsoft via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The connection is redundant in every peering location for higher reliability. Features [...]
Azure Front Door
A service that uses Microsoft's global network to improve the availability and performance of your applications to your local and global users. It works at the HTTP/HTTPS layer and uses a split TCP-based anycast protocol to ensure your users connect to the nearest Front Door point of presence. Supports a range of traffic-routing methods and backend health monitoring options for various application needs and automatic failover models. With URL-based [...]
Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Bookmarks Concepts Roles Best Practices Validate Your Knowledge A role-based access control service to manage user’s access to Azure resources including what they can do with those resources and what areas they can access. It is an authorization system based on Azure Resource Manager, which provides fine-grained access management of Azure resources. Concepts A role assignment is composed of security principal, role [...]
Microsoft Compliance Offerings
Microsoft Trust Center provides access to security, privacy, and compliance information. Security - provides information about identity & access management, threat & information protection, and cloud security. Privacy - provides information on how you can secure your data at rest and in transit. Compliance - provides information about industry-specific requirements, audit reports, and shared responsibility. Microsoft Privacy Statement explains how Microsoft collects personal data, how they use it, and [...]
AWS vs Azure Services Comparison
Bookmarks Compute Other Compute Services Comparison Storage Database Other Database Services Comparison Networking Other Networking Services Comparison Security and Identity To help you learn the different Microsoft Azure services, we’ve come up with this AWS vs Azure services comparison. If you already have some background in AWS (or cloud computing in general) either through work experience or AWS [...]
Google Cloud Certifications Path
Bookmarks Associate Cloud Engineer Professional Cloud Architect Professional Cloud Developer Professional Data Engineer Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Cloud Security Engineer Professional Cloud Network Engineer Professional Collaboration Engineer Professional Machine Learning Engineer In the previous article, we talked about the most in-demand Azure Certifications in the market today. In this article, we'll discuss the certifications offered by [...]
Azure Certifications Path
Bookmarks Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204) Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-303 and AZ-304) Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-104/AZ-204 and AZ-400) In the previous article, we have discussed the different AWS Certifications path. In this article, we will give you an overview of the top and most in-demand Azure certifications today. Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Purpose The [...]
AWS Certification Path
Before going through the AWS certifications path below, it is important to note that AWS has scrapped the prerequisite for Professional-level exams. Previously, you could only take the Professional-level exams (Solutions Architect Professional and DevOps Engineer Professional) after passing their Associate-level counterparts. Now, you can take any AWS exam without the need to pass any prior AWS exam, which is ideal for those who already have extensive working experience [...]
AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials Azure Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification exam is intended for individuals who want to have a foundational knowledge when venturing into the Cloud. Although the AZ-900 test is the easiest to achieve among all the Azure certification exams, you still need to learn and properly understand the concepts on cloud computing, and [...]
Unique Ways to Build Credentials and Make a Successful Career Shift to Cloud Computing
In the previous post, we discussed whether having cloud certifications is enough to land a job. You can view the article here. In this section, we'll share some noteworthy activities that you can do to build your credentials and help you land a cloud-related job. Trying to land a job in the field of cloud computing with no prior work experience can drive people mad. Most entry-level positions on [...]
AWS Certified Database – Specialty DBS-C01 Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials Core AWS Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The global cloud adoption trend will continue to accelerate in the coming years and that will include the proliferation of deploying and managing purpose-built databases. Companies from all industries will look for talents that can manage the challenges of migrating their data and securing them in the cloud. [...]
Azure Virtual Network (VNet)
Bookmarks Key Concepts VNet Use Case Subnets Security VNet Components VNet Peering Pricing How to Connect Virtual Networks Across Azure regions with Azure Global VNet Peering Validate Your Knowledge You can create a virtual network in the cloud dedicated to your Azure account. It is the fundamental building block where you can launch Azure resources. Azure VNet [...]
Azure Container Instances (ACI)
Run containers without managing servers. For event-driven applications, quickly deploy from your container development pipelines, run data processing, and build jobs. Azure Container Instances is a regional service. Features Containers have less overhead than VMs and can be deployed consistently. All the dependencies for an application are included in the container image. Applications running in containers can be deployed easily to multiple operating systems and hardware platforms. Select an [...]
Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL
PaaS relational database services Mitigate database downtime with high availability, redundancy, and resiliency capabilities. Enables you to scale vertically when needed. Receive alerts based on the metrics of your servers. Protect sensitive data at rest and in transit. Automated backups, up to 35 days. PostgreSQL deployment options: Single Server and Hyperscale (Citus) Single server pricing tiers: Basic, General Purpose, and Memory Optimized. Basic - light compute and I/O performance [...]
Azure Virtual Machine vs Web App
Azure Virtual Machine Azure Web App Description Infrastructure as a service, if you need to have full control over your computing environment. Platform as a service, it allows you to integrate the app without managing the underlying infrastructure. Deploy Uses an OS image. Uses a runtime stack. State Management Stateful or stateless Stateless Autoscaling You need to use VM scale sets to support autoscaling in virtual machines. Autoscaling [...]
Interview Tips to Help You Land a Cloud-Related Job
This is the last part of our Introduction to Cloud Computing blog series. In this article, we'll give some interview tips to help you land a job and build a fruitful career in cloud computing. The average time for a job interview lasts around 30-45 minutes. And within this limited time-frame, you must leave an impressive mark and good impression to your prospective employer. We will clear off the [...]
Are Cloud Certifications Enough to Land me a Job?
The sad truth is that getting a job with just a certification alone is difficult or almost impossible to achieve. Cloud Certifications are a great way to display your credibility and validate your knowledge. It also shows that you have invested time and money into improving your skill set. But if you want to pursue a career in cloud computing, having certifications alone isn't gonna cut it; you need [...]
AWS vs Azure vs GCP – Which One Should I Learn?
In the previous section, we outlined the different certifications paths for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. In this post, we will now compare these top three cloud service providers and share the advantages of learning these technologies. Selecting a cloud platform to learn depends on several factors like your current skills or demands in the job market. There is no absolute rule in learning a particular cloud platform, as [...]
AWS, Azure, and GCP Certifications Path
In cloud computing and the IT industry in general, one way to prove that you know what you’re talking about is through certifications. If you are new to cloud, you might be wondering which AWS, Azure or Google Cloud certification exam is suitable for you. The first thing you need to do before you start is to write down your purpose in getting certifications. Is it for career growth, [...]
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
In the previous posts, we gave you an introduction to AWS and Microsoft Azure. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the basics of the Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a global cloud services suite offered by Google that uses the same infrastructure that they use internally for their end-user products. In April of 2008, Google announced its first cloud computing service called the App [...]
Introduction to Microsoft Azure
In the previous section, we gave you an overview of AWS. In this section, we'll give you an introduction to Microsoft Azure. Azure is a cloud computing platform that was introduced by Microsoft in 2010. It gives you the ability to create, manage, and deploy applications across a vast global network. Microsoft Azure also offers a range of services to help your company address the existing and potential business [...]
Introduction to AWS
In 2006, Amazon launched its own IT Infrastructure Services called Amazon Web Services. AWS is a cloud platform where you can create, build, and deploy applications. The different AWS services can be accessed over the Internet and it provides premium support plans to help companies run their business applications and workloads on the cloud. Amazon Web Services also has the biggest market share in the cloud industry and has [...]
Why Should I Learn Cloud Computing?
In the previous article, we talked about the fundamentals of cloud computing. In this section, we will give you three reasons why you should learn cloud computing. We have a long history of how technological advancements have influenced the way society thinks and strives. Needless to say, technology has created and destroyed livelihoods. One good example is the rise and fall of switchboard operators. A switchboard operator is a [...]
Fundamentals of Cloud Computing
In the previous post, we discussed what cloud computing is all about. In this section, we'll talk about the fundamentals of cloud computing. Before you deep dive into the different cloud services, let's first take a look at the summary of the fundamentals of cloud computing. Cloud services are usually classified by their general use cases that make up an IT infrastructure. You can think of them as lego [...]
What is Cloud Computing?
The first time you hear the term Cloud Computing, you probably have asked yourself these questions: “What exactly is the Cloud in Cloud Computing?” and “Why do so many companies use it?” Basically, cloud computing is an on-demand computing service that you can avail over the Internet to host and run your applications. The “cloud” in cloud computing simply refers to the underlying network or servers that run your [...]
I Have No IT Background. Is it Possible for Me to Make a Career Shift to Cloud Computing?
One of the most common questions that we often get from our subscribers is this: “I have no IT background - is it possible for me to make a career shift to Cloud Computing?” It can be quite hard to enter the job market, especially the cut-throat IT industry, if you don’t have any technical background. However, with the right strategy and steps, you can successfully jump to a [...]
