Aws

A few weeks ago, recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time, the course covered AWS Fault Injection Service, and it made me think about a company where the backups had been failing for a long time and nobody knew. The backups ran weekly to a server at a remote site, and the tapes were swapped by someone there whose job had nothing to do with infrastructure. Every swap the job had failed and the screen had shown a red line saying so, but the person doing the swapping had no reason to know red meant the backup had not worked. The job ran every week and the light was red every week. Nobody who could read the light was looking at it. ...

The biggest change I made for this AWS recert isn’t which AI I’m using, it’s that I moved my study notes out of OneNote and into Notion. Back in March I wrote about studying with custom GPTs for the AI Practitioner. The note-creation GPT had grown a system prompt that read like a software spec, the coaching one had stayed simple and useful, and the post ended with me saying I’d try Claude as a study partner for the SA Pro and figure out whether to move my notes out of OneNote. ...

The AI Builders Breakfast Before the main programme opened there was a smaller invite-only session called the AI Builders Breakfast, which I hadn’t known about when I wrote the pre-Summit piece and only found out about after. It ended up being the part of the day I got the most out of. The room was smaller than anything else I sat in all day and the conversations were about what’s actually hard rather than what’s being announced. ...

I’ve been to plenty of vendor events and briefings over the years but never an AWS Summit, so heading to London on Wednesday for the first time I genuinely don’t know what to expect. I’m planning to get there when doors open at 8am partly to beat the keynote crowds and partly because I’ve already had to make some hard choices about how the day runs. Picking the Sessions I had four sessions I wanted to attend: the keynote on agentic AI, a workshop on rapid prototyping with Kiro, a zero trust for AI security session, and a fast-track VMware migration workshop. Some run 2–3 hours, the zero trust session clashes directly with Kiro, and doing all of them would mean spending the entire day in rooms with no time to actually see any of it, so I’ve cut two. I’m skipping the keynote, which at my first AWS Summit feels like it should be a bigger deal than it is, and dropping the AI security session because it runs at the same time as Kiro and that’s not a close call. The keynote will be streamed and I’ll catch it later. The VMware workshop and Kiro are what I’m actually there for. ...

I’ve held AWS certifications since 2019, starting with Cloud Practitioner and then working through Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps, Developer Associate, and Solutions Architect Professional within about a year (It was Covid year after all). I recertified the SA Pro in 2023 and passed the AI Practitioner in February this year. The SA Pro is due again, exam’s booked for end of June, so I’m back studying. My study method has been the same every time, which is watch a Stephane Maarek course on Udemy, make notes in OneNote as I go, grind practice exams. The notes are dense and compressed, topics separated by slashes, exam questions dropped in wherever they’re relevant. The formatting is all over the place because it’s written for speed of recall, not for anyone else to read. I’ve used this approach for every cert I’ve passed and never had a reason to change it. ...

I’m recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time right now, so when I decided to build a personal site the temptation to go straight to Route53, CloudFront, S3, and Terraform was real. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini what they thought before starting, and while they disagreed on a few things they all said to use GitHub Pages and not overthink the hosting. Gemini included a cost comparison that had an EKS cluster as one of the options at £150-200/month, which is overkill for basically any website, but it helped make the point that GitHub Pages with a custom domain was the obvious starting point. I could have spent weeks on infrastructure before writing a single post, or I could just start writing. ...