Ian's blog

Not a bad achievement for September. Three more titles and more to come.

Why cloud? Why so many buzz words about cloud? Does cloud cure cancer? A survey conducted by Harvard Business Review has a good view on it.

1. Cloud provides business agility and flexibility to quickly respond to opportunities or risk in a low-code and work flow enabled infrastructure.
2. Cloud transcends the limitations of legacy technology and breaks IT complexity. This is even more important for SMBs who cannot afford complex IT environments.
3. A multi-cloud approach is favored due to concerns about security, costs, integration and customization. But multi-cloud also brings challenge for interoperability.

This chart could help you understand the key components of a fully automated devops setup in AWS.

There are three key components for fully automated devops. They completely modernize SDLC and make this world a better place.
1) A development pipeline for CICD. Plenty automation tools out there like CircleCI, Jenkins, Github Actions, AWS/Azure Pipeline …
2) Containerize the application using Docker. Ansible plus Packer are a good combination to build docker images.
3) Deploy the code to dev, test and staging environment using IaC (infrastructure as code). Terraform is a multi cloud solution and able to deploy docker images to provisioned infrastructure.

Below is a pet project to demo the nuclear power of automation empowered by AWS, Jenkins and docker.

Some good books to help your data, cloud and security related studies.

Today it marks a key milestone for my multi cloud journey. I have passed all professional level Solutions Architect exams by AWS, Azure and Google. Have always been planning to do it. During COVID19, it’s probably the best time to complete this challenge.

It’s the new version of AZ500 and released on 29th July. I guess I am first batch of people taking the exam. My score is 823.

Plus AZ300, now I am officially Azure Solutions Architect Expert! My hard work is paid off. So happy~