My AWS Rocks!

AWS Certified Global Community ChallengeIn June I was asked to participate in creating a challenge as part of a series of challenges for the AWS Certified Global Community. The idea of the challenges was to provide example of code that had been broken by hackers with the goal of remediating the issues to return the system back to a fully functioning state. By completing the challenges, individuals not only gained points for the community leaderboard, but also were able to learn new skills and real like usage of code.

You may see in my designs and discussions that I always use an AWS Transit Gateway for connections outside of the VPC. While there are use cases where this does not make sense, which I'll describe, for the majority of organisations' use cases I believe that using Transit Gateways is the preferable solution. Cost 💰Firstly lets address the cost implications of using an AWS Transit Gateway over VPC Peering, as many will use this to justify using peering because they see it directly on their bill.

So you may have seen some of the AWS Certification SME badges on peoples profiles and asked what is an SME?, how do I become one?, and why should I become one? The goal of this post is to give you some insight into the programme, how and why you should apply, and what I've gained from participating. What is an SME?So the first real question is what is an AWS Certification Subject Matter Expert (SME)?

So this is the first in my posts walking through how to deploy a solution in AWS. Hopefully you find it useful as VPCs are the foundation for private and secure networking in AWS and an area many struggle. This guide is designed to ensure that your VPC deployments can be Well-Architected and provide a base level of network security but is only one option for VPC layout. While it will meet a vast majority of workloads you might want to review the structure and reduce, or increase, the number of subnets as well as other components.

Cheat Sheet, Quick Reference, Key Facts, Quick Start Guide, the list of names for similar types of reference documents are as varied as the topics they cover. So why do Cheat Sheets seem to be the most popular name and format? In this post I'll give my view on the use of cheat sheets, and the term in general, and why I think they've become popular. I'll also explain why I hate them (cheat sheets) and the misuse of term.