Mid-2024 updates

25 Jun 2024 • ~700 words • ~4 minute read

With the longest day of the year just passed, I thought I'd post some minor updates.

Promotion!

I was promoted at work, which is nice. So I'm now called an Engineer. It's not the most descriptive job title, but that's probably not a bad thing! I do currently fall somewhere in the awkward-to-define devops/platform engineering world right now, rather than classic application engineering, so it works for me.

AWS Solutions Architect Associate certificaton

I sat my AWS SAA-C03 exam in May. I passed with 867/1000, which I was pretty pleased with.

Probably the resource I have to call out first is the set of practice exams on Tutorials Dojo. This was recommended to me by our team's AWS account SA. The platform is great for supporting/reinforcing learning, as each question comes with a thorough write-up on why x is correct and why ys are incorrect, and often highlighting the 'gotchas' that may catch you out. The write-ups usually include links to official documentation, cheatsheets, YouTube videos, etc.

Once I got to the real exam, I found that these Tutorials Dojo questions were incredibly well pitched in terms of types of scenarios, options available and focus.

As mentioned previously, I used Udemy and learn.cantrill.io. I think if I did this again, I'd only do the Cantrill one. His course is much better all-round, as he's more thorough, better at breaking things down, and crystal clear on what you need to know for the exam.

Just for interest's sake, this is an outline of the money involved in the certificate and the materials I used in preparation:

Stephane Maarek Udemy course£12.99
Learn Cantrill SA bundle$50 1
Tutorials Dojo practice exams$11.99
[ AWS exam$150 2 ]

So, not including the cost of the exam which was covered by Sage, I spent around 60 GBP / $79 USD on learning and practice materials.

NixOS

I've been playing around with Nix and NixOS recently and am quite taken by it from a conceptual point of view.

bunny.net

I've been using some of bunny.net's services (CDN, storage, DNS) and, on the whole, I am super impressed. I think there'll likely be a few posts dedicated to this in due course, but three or so months in, I think there's a lot to like here, especially if you

  • pay for a service, rather than wonder how the flip they make money
  • want to diversify the web, rather than continually putting our eggs in the ever-growing monopolised basket

Kubernetes

Minikube and Linode Kubernetes Engine

I dedicated some time in early 2024 to learning (high-level!) some Kubernetes. I really like it and wish it was less of an expense to use in ernest.

Just learning how to deploy this tiny static website, I learned a bit about:

  • Helm
  • Ingress
  • Cert Manager
  • Secrets
  • GitOps

That's quite a lot of things to get familiar with to deploy the simplest of apps, so I can only imagine the complexities (both fun and frustrating) involved in something with more moving parts, like stateful sets, etc.

AWS EKS

Through work, I've been doing some EKS training too. It definitely feels like someone could make a specialism out of k8s and/or EKS. These are mahoosive areas with lots to learn, lots of depth. I've barely scraped the surface!

The training was sort of like a London tour bus: we got exposed to a hefty amount of EKS features, controls, concepts - but never got off the bus to take a proper look around.

Notes

1

This price for Cantrill's bundle of AWS SA courses is a steal as it's typically meant to be $120 USD, but if you want the lower price I paid you have to pay for it using BTC rather than USD.

2

My work paid for the exam itself, which is much appreciated. I was committed to doing the exam regardless, though, and would have paid this myself if needed.