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AWS Explained: The Basics
- k__ 9y agoPretty cool! I'm trying to get AWS certification next month and sucking up all info I can get :D Doing a cloud guru courses right now. It's a whole new world for me coming from 10 years of front-end development.
- davymac 9y agoCloud guru courses seem like something I want to do but the first time I watched one on Udemy (via work subscription), I couldn’t stand the presenter because he spent half the time promoting his other products. I’ll have to give it another go and see if I can make an “ignore this sales pitch section” for others to save their ears/time.
- justadudeama 9y agoNot sure which course you took, but my Certified Solutions Architect wasn't that bad. He obviously has a platform he promotes but to me it was only about 10% or less of the actual course.
- hiddevb 9y agoYeah, i feel you. I had the same problem in the beginning, but the promoting mostly stops after the 10000 feet overview videos. However, He likes to ramble on about stuff not so relevant to the course, so setting your player speed to 1.5x is a good tip.
- justadudeama 9y agoYeah, the only thing I really found annoying by the end was him apologizing for the same pronunciation at the beginning as at the end.
- gaius 9y agoEdX has one now too https://www.edx.org/aws-developer-professional-series https://www.edx.org/aws-developer-professional-series - generally the quality of the content on EdX is much higher than the other platforms, I find. Definitely prefer it to say PluralSight.
- mkirklions 9y agoGee, I feel bad enough putting a link to my website(everything is free) in my youtube description...
- k__ 9y agoI found them pretty good, they did promo for other courses, but since I already got a full subscription it doesn't feel like they selling me something... "We also got a full dynamodb course, check it out!" is just one click away...
- rconti 9y agoI thought he did very minimal pitching. I took 3 of his classes. I did typically watch at 1.5 or 1.75x though.
- joncrane 9y agoProtip: the player has different speeds. 1.75 was my sweet spot, but I could do 2x in a pinch with high focus. The guy talks so slow!
- k__ 9y agoyes, I'm already on 2x :D
- justadudeama 9y agoWhich AWS certification? I just did acloud guru courses as well and got my certified solutions architect associate.
- k__ 9y agothe three associate certs.
- justadudeama 9y agoGood luck!
- tekkk 9y agoYour CSA associate cert? I recommend taking notes and going through your test exam multiple times and looking up correct answers for everything you got wrong. It's harder than you may think and although i find knowing specific tidbits about AWS services quite meaningless it's still a measure of some sort. Didnt even raise my salary, hah. I had 5 pages of AWS notes of sorts after i had finished cramming.
- eropple 9y agoI think you're overhyping it. It's a memorization test, and not of a lot that's difficult. It took me about twenty minutes to blast through it and I got something like 63/65. It was more a disappointment than anything--I was going to then go pop through the rest of the AWS certs, and came away instead thinking they were a waste of time. Read the intro doc to Simple Workflow Service, because for some reason the test oddly fixates on that, and basically everything else is something you should run into in your day-to-day work.
- k__ 9y agoI'm trying the 3 associate exams mid next month. As far as I know the ACG practice exams should pretty much cover the real thing, but I'll probably some whizlabz tests to be safe.
- tekkk 9y agoIt is but memorizing facts by rote is still some work, right? When you get deep down to it many exams are just that - regurgitaging a set of facts and nothing else. The practical side is often omitted and the level of your understanding never fully checked. Having said that I have come to the conclusion that AWS certs are compared to lot of other certs actually decent ones (or at least some). Even as a meter of your skill memorizing AWS facts. If you found Associate level too easy Pro cert is probably more suitable for your level. I think you're again downplaying it a bit maybe to give yourself a little egoboost.(not knowing your experience level of course) It might come as a surprise to you that not everyone think they are such easy tests.
- bproven 9y ago
- rconti 9y agoNice work! I did the 3 associate certs over about 3 months last summer using ACG. I've been in the industry for decades but never bothered to get a cert. Starting a new role and wanting to get into AWS was the impetus to learn; I figured a formal class was a good way to do it, and I might as well set the certifications as my goal. Really enjoyed ACG and found it quite helpful.
- k__ 9y agoDo you think doing the thee associate exams with 1 1/2 months fulltime learning is possible?
- bproven 9y agoIts possible. I had zero exp with AWS beyond spinning up an EC2 instance and finished all 3 assoc certs in 3-3.5 weeks. However, I wasn't working at the time...
- rconti 9y agoAbsolutely. I have a hard time remembering because I was working remotely part of the time, but I was actually working, so virtually all of my study time was after-hours (hour or two most evenings) over the span of a few months. I had no prior AWS experience and did very little additional work. That said, I do have a couple of decades of sysadmin work under my belt, so most of the concepts were not particularly new.
- mijndert 9y agoNice! Keep up the good work and good luck with your next certifications!
- mooreds 9y agoThis is a good high level overview of AWS, though like all overviews there are some details glossed over. I was asked at an interview what developers need to know about AWS. I think there are three things to keep in mind: Consider higher level services for operational simplicity. Unless you are at a certain scale, you'd never run your own object store, you'd use s3. I always say if you are thinking about downloading and installing any software system on a server, see if AWS has a managed offering and at least evaluate it. Use the elasticity of the cloud. Shut things off. Build scaling systems but make sure they scale both ways. If you aren't automating you aren't doing it right. Tools like cloudformation and terraform let you really treat your infrastructure like software and force attitude changes. Bonus: keep an eye on bandwidth costs, especially between AZs as these can be shocking and can drive architecture. Source: user of AWS for 10 years and former AWS instructor.
- pluc 9y agoCompletely agree, which is why I think Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation and OpsWorks are great ways to introduce people to the AWS ecosystem. I think of them like frameworks for programming languages.
- mooreds 9y agoDefinitely. I think that eb is a great fit for certain applications. One of the other hidden benefits of AWS is the API which is available for every service (I can only think of one thing you can do from the UI that you can't also do via the API) and maintained by them. (I know that cloud foundry offers this as well, as do other cloud providers.) Leveraging that API really unlocks the value of the cloud.
- mijndert 9y agoHi, Mijndert here, the writer of the article. Thanks for sharing your insights. I agree I glossed over a few topics. I will expand on these from here on out and go into more detail on some of the points you touched on.
- 9y ago
- jypepin 9y agoYou know what I think is missing on internet? A good guide to transition from heroku, where everything is handled and you don't need to know anything, to AWS (or similar) where you end up having to either manage everything, or at least be aware of how things work and what are all the tools available (beanstalk, etc). I find it missing, and it makes me scared of transitioning, while still be interested in learning more about server management / linux.
- ryanmerket 9y agoThere seems to be quite a few: https://www.google.com/search?q=migrate%20from%20heroku%20to%20aws https://www.google.com/search?q=migrate%20from%20heroku%20to...
- kgoutham93 9y agoDon't you think OP would have tried that.
- rhizome 9y agoAre any of those "good?"
- mkirklions 9y agoMind if I dream too? I want to see a react-native based full stack. I feel like every app needs: css, html, javascript/react native, data management/redux, json, (LAMP is easy enough), PHP, larvel, mysql/mongo Getting everything set up(IDE, servers, debuggers, and the code) for the first time has taken weeks, despite the actual programming being pretty simple. Surprises me these dont exist since so many people have apps that require login and payments.
- mooreds 9y agoHave you seen https://bullettrain.co/ https://bullettrain.co/ ? Or something like https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/ https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/ which is slightly lower level. That might get you part of the way there. I suspect there's no business model for the full stack because every developer is going to say "it'll take a few days to set up and then we'll know the stack from first principles."
- robohoe 9y agoI think a good bullet point would be to stress the differences between Region vs Availability Zone vs Global services.
- mijndert 9y agoHi, Mijndert here, the writer of the article. From here on out this will be a series in which I will go into detail on more AWS services. I will make sure to include Regions vs AZ's in future articles. Thank you!
- niemyjski 9y agoAWS Explained ELI5: User Interface was written by an interns intern with the only thing being consistent is how bad it is.
- balls187 9y agoYet, it's still heaps above better than their nearest competitors in Azure and GCP. The UI is great for learning about services, but automating via CLI (or related services) is the ideal goal.
- dijit 9y agoCan't speak for Azure as I don't use it, but I really have to call bullshit on AWS UI being better than GCP. GCP is discoverable and follows the principle of least surprise quite consistently, and they show REST/CLI references for everything you're doing in the web UI too. I mean imagine you're a new user and ask yourself "what does route53 do?". Then ask yourself "what does cloud DNS do?"
- whorleater 9y agoGCP's services are nicely named, but the console dashboard is still a mess, with them shifting around the items all the time. The half-foot into stackdriver is also kinda weird.
- mooreds 9y agoFor naming in AWS, this is a must have resource: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
- tomc1985 9y agoAmazed that S3's web UI fails at both pagination and search.
- querulous 9y agothey're both wretched to use, does degree really matter?
- maroonparty 9y agocan some one do the same with openshift, kubernetes and docker or can point me in the right direction to understand them i have an idea about them but it's a bit blurry and want to clear some things
- balls187 9y ago"Security groups allow you to set inbound and outbound firewall rules on your network." This is not correct. A SG is used to define per-instance inbound/outbound firewall rules. To say this applies to the network is misleading. To use an analogy--SG is like Windows Firewall. Network-level "firewall" rules are done via Network ACL.
- rellimevad 9y agoYes and no. NACLs are, indeed, associated with a subnet so more of a networking construct. It's somewhat a firewall, but it's also stateless which is different than many (non-network engineer) people's mental model of a firewall. Security Groups have some key differences from a host-based firewall. A packet destined for an EC2 instance will not make it to the instance IP stack and be evaluated there, it will be evaluated before it gets there. It depends on your audience. A web dev that's relatively new to syadmin tasks... sure, it's like a host based firewall. For a syadmin or network admin, that explanation might be more confusing than helpful.
- felipelemos 9y agoBut SG are related to a network interface, not with your network (which would the VPC).
- mijndert 9y agoHi, Mijndert here, the author of the article. What you're saying is completely true, it's not factually accurate. What I was trying to achieve was come up with an analogy that's understandable for people coming from more traditional infrastructure. So while I agree this would cause some confusion for people who already know something about AWS, the intended audience will (hopefully) feel comfortable with this analogy.
- giarc 9y agoI'm reminded of this site, AWS In Plain English. https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
- gamina 9y agoAs a next step, check out this guide which dives in details within the multitude of AWS components and their purposes, strengths, weaknesses, and alternatives: https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws
- Androider 9y agoOne thing I've noticed having worked with many clients, is that legacy architectures that get moved to AWS start by creating subnets, NACLs, etc. while for almost all AWS-first developed applications the Security Group is the smallest unit you tend to address. So a legacy architecture will for instance specify the "frontend servers subnet" (and a unique SG, hopefully!), while a cloud-native architecture will only specify a SG. I think, asking which subnet some machine is in, is kind of like asking which core some process is running on at the moment: any one of the subnets for any one of the availability zones in that region, and the next one will automatically and on purpose be assigned to a different one by the ALB/ASG combination.
- k__ 9y agoDoes anyone know how the PSI test centers work? Can I schedule 3 exams at the same time and simply take them all at once?
- syndacks 9y agoHi, Thanks for putting this together. I think you did a good job conveying a high level overview of AWS while also giving enough detail to satisfy those who want/need it. This balance is a tricky thing to get right. I have a few pieces of feedback I'd be happy to share with you if you'd like. Grammatical and story-arch wise, not technical. As a teacher turned developer who loves writing, these things fascinate me.
- mijndert 9y agoThanks for the kind words. I will gladly take your feedback. You can reach me on [my hn username]@mijndertstuij.nl.