The Cloud Engineering Thread of Dominance

[StassneyHorn 6573]

How many of you are in cloud engineering? I’ve decided to skill up and got Adrian Cantrill’s course to help learn AWS. Currently a Salesforce admin, but looking to possibly transition into a more IaaS- heavy career.

[immamac 42832]

8 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

How many of you are in cloud engineering? I’ve decided to skill up and got Adrian Cantrill’s course to help learn AWS. Currently a Salesforce admin, but looking to possibly transition into a more IaaS- heavy career.

I know the who's who in that space. There are a handful of cloud or infra engineers on the board. 

[Captainant 27618]

9 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

How many of you are in cloud engineering? I’ve decided to skill up and got Adrian Cantrill’s course to help learn AWS. Currently a Salesforce admin, but looking to possibly transition into a more IaaS- heavy career.

If youre going AWS (or any specific cloud provider tbh) you should start with building towards their entry level solutions architect cert exam. It gives you a good 10000ft overview of the services, what functions they map to, and how to interconnect them. You'll probably need at least one more cert to stand out depending on the type of role you're interested in

[Zepol87 9185]

9 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

How many of you are in cloud engineering? I’ve decided to skill up and got Adrian Cantrill’s course to help learn AWS. Currently a Salesforce admin, but looking to possibly transition into a more IaaS- heavy career.

I just passed AWS SAA and I used his training. Really liked his close and I also did the cloud resume challenge. Switched from a network engineer role last year with my company. Also went heavy with hashicorp training for terraform.

 https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/aws/

Edited May 6, 2023 by Zepol87

[Zepol87 9185]

9 hours ago, immamac said:

I know the who's who in that space. There are a handful of cloud or infra engineers on the board. 

Didn’t know that but PM sent

[StassneyHorn 6573]

@Zepol87 did you only take the Architect Associate course? I know there's that bundle Cantrill offers with the 3 associate courses, and I saw a graphic on someone else's Github that there's only 12-13 hours unique content in the Developer course that is not overlap from the Architect Associate, and 12-13 hours unique content in the SysOps that is not overlap from the Architect Associate. Not sure if where you work is like a consultancy firm where more certs is more money, but figured I'd share.

23% done on the course, so I might just use this thread as motivation

Edited June 2, 2023 by StassneyHorn

[Zepol87 9185]

Yea I only did the architect exam so far. I bought the bundle though and plan on doing dev next. Had to take a break from it and focus on 2 NSE 6 Fortinet exams for some partner requirements regarding cloud security for AWS and Azure.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Zepol87

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

Yeah buddy.  Best thing to do for AWS is to earn "All 3" associates, then hit the professional stack.  I'm hitting the specialties ATM.  Trust me, you won't regret the hard work and effort.

 

[StassneyHorn 6573]

Didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted with the SAA course this month, but am looking at 30% progress. Still haven’t had an “aha” moment yet, but enjoying the Demo work

[StassneyHorn 6573]

Update just to keep myself honest and working towards a goal.
July thru mid August I did not get as much done as I wanted, but since coming back to Texas and not going out for happy hours every day I've been able to lock down and focus more on Cantrill's course. More importantly, all the info is finally starting to come together and make sense. I'm now at 55% through the course. After reading through r/AWScertifications, it seems like the consensus is if you want to get the certs quicker, you should look at Stephane Maarek's courses on Udemy, if you want to understand what you're learning and go through demos and get experience than the Cantrill course is the way to go, though its significantly longer. Definitely had a hit a wall around 30-33% but have made awesome progress the last month. Not going to be at Dreamforce this year for work I currently do, but my boss and our junior hire will be so hopefully it frees up a little time during the week day as well with less meetings.

[Captainant 27618]

11 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

Update just to keep myself honest and working towards a goal.
July thru mid August I did not get as much done as I wanted, but since coming back to Texas and not going out for happy hours every day I've been able to lock down and focus more on Cantrill's course. More importantly, all the info is finally starting to come together and make sense. I'm now at 55% through the course. After reading through r/AWScertifications, it seems like the consensus is if you want to get the certs quicker, you should look at Stephane Maarek's courses on Udemy, if you want to understand what you're learning and go through demos and get experience than the Cantrill course is the way to go, though its significantly longer. Definitely had a hit a wall around 30-33% but have made awesome progress the last month. Not going to be at Dreamforce this year for work I currently do, but my boss and our junior hire will be so hopefully it frees up a little time during the week day as well with less meetings.

Are you going for certs or skill mastery? I've found the linuxacademy course and especially the lab work to be excellent for 400-level mastery. I've never found watching a lecture to be as useful as just building it myself and literally putting the pieces together. 

Also I'd highly recommend doing a practice exam as part of your exam prep so you identify any areas you can spend less time on, or dive deeper to skill-up on your weaker areas. 

[StassneyHorn 6573]

The courses come with practice tests so I don’t think I’ll be blindsided by the associate exam(s) when time to go. My Salesforce cert was scenario based with lengthy multiple choice, so I have experience with that type of test. My plan was to go SAA, then Dev, then SysOps for the 3 associates.

I don’t use AWS in my everyday work, but was looking to make a switch so I’m focusing on learning the course materials then testing for certs. I don’t think I can truly master anything at this point, but the demo lessons are navigating me in Cloudformation, EC2, VPC and subnets etc to get experience using them. The format of the course is introduction, accompanying lectures, demo to follow along with, then quiz.

[StassneyHorn 6573]

On 9/10/2023 at 7:50 PM, StassneyHorn said:

Update just to keep myself honest and working towards a goal.
July thru mid August I did not get as much done as I wanted, but since coming back to Texas and not going out for happy hours every day I've been able to lock down and focus more on Cantrill's course. More importantly, all the info is finally starting to come together and make sense. I'm now at 55% through the course. After reading through r/AWScertifications, it seems like the consensus is if you want to get the certs quicker, you should look at Stephane Maarek's courses on Udemy, if you want to understand what you're learning and go through demos and get experience than the Cantrill course is the way to go, though its significantly longer. Definitely had a hit a wall around 30-33% but have made awesome progress the last month. Not going to be at Dreamforce this year for work I currently do, but my boss and our junior hire will be so hopefully it frees up a little time during the week day as well with less meetings.

Just hit 90% through the course. I started watching the videos at 1.25x speed and that's helping me stay way more focused and not dozing off and having to re-watch. 

[StassneyHorn 6573]

Finished the Cantrill course, and then got the Udemy course from Stephane Maarek. Have gone through 90% of his course in the last month with just a section on VPC left. Will be taking the  practice tests on both courses before possibly getting more from Tutorial Dojo. Hoping to take/pass test before Nov 15th

[MissingInAction 25002]

I'm a moron

Edited November 8, 2023 by MissingInAction
moron

[Slacks 6819]

I never noticed that certs were still a thing. I guess they are. I should list all of my 1990s Certs on Linkedin... For the lulz and whatnot. 

[StassneyHorn 6573]

In a stroke of luck I might be falling upwards into a cloud security role at my employer. My boss got pulled into a Product restructure and our junior employee into biz ops. I already was told I was retained but decided to kick the tires on the role and they seemed fine with someone new to AWS doing more clean up oriented work the first 6 months on a lot of IAM processes and security groups.

Which is good cause my first practice test was astoundingly bad and definitely gonna need more time.

[Slacks 6819]

Cloud and Security are not some secret sauce thing that you can't figure out with a bit of reading and otj experience. 

You'll be overwhelmed with requests to do something most likely, and learn a lot. 

I don't 'do' devsecops stuff, but I manage a sales team that sells to the doers, so I have the conversations every day. The shortage of good people that can figure things out (in any capacity) then execute a strategy or plan is the biggest challenge across the industry. 

If you're trying to change and willing to change, you're ahead of a bunch of people who just want things to be easy and static. 

Edited November 11, 2023 by Slacks

[StassneyHorn 6573]

No we’re just a random company that uses AWS today, nothing exciting like that

[Captainant 27618]

7 hours ago, BeardIP said:

I assume this has to do with the massive re-org leaked last week at AWS? Lots of switching to geo and vertical approach?

Just silly how much tech companies are reverting to mindless following rather than leading. AWS is just following azures lead because they want line to go up forever

[Captainant 27618]

7 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

Andy Jassy, while not a visionary or disrupter, seems like he is a good operator.

It smacks of the technical leadership getting replaced by people who only understand arbitrary KPIs and synthetics dashboards, and not really understanding the value of diversification. I recently worked with a group that had re-orged to specialize on "energy industry verticals" and after the reorg, they lost all the variety of solutions and creativity and just settled on rolling out the same two or three playbooks no matter the customer needs. 

I see moves like that as shortsighted and completely decoupled from what attracted their customers and set them apart from the competition in the first place. It's not growing a business' actual value - it's exploiting customers with a worse experience to drive down costs and make shareholders happy. 

[immamac 42832]

35 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

I can see it from both sides in that I see your point but the argument for the specialization by industry or vertical is that to break through to the S-tier of value realized and customer entrenchment ($$), you have to be solving for specific and strategic problems. The energy industry has it's own unique environments and use cases that AWS addresses from CPG or retail, for instance. Even nuances from discreet manufacturing. To get to that massive, market-moving, Board/C-Suite partnership type engagement, you have to be an industry expert and that's where the re-org comes into play, I think.

In the world of easy money where line goes up no matter what this is true, but captainant is correct in his assessment of people who don't know shit about fuck running things when shit gets real inevitably fuck it beyond repair because they have no idea what the fuck they actually do, they just know money machine go brrrrrrr. It's exactly why amazon is going straight into the shitter and getting eaten alive with regard to market share etc. They have stopped listening to their customers entirely and just look at how to squeeze the most money out of the machine possible.

They have ruined vendor relationships, NO ONE likes working with AWS/Amazon, they just have to because they buy so much. As soon as any capacity at a company comes online that isn't like AWS they prioritize them over AWS. 

They have ruined customer relationships, they are staring in the face of mass customer exodus and are resorting and relying on incredibly unfriendly lock in practices to continue to show any kind of growth out of their captive audience.

They have ruined their public leadership perception, they have laid a complete fucking goose egg when it comes to AI or LLM's and have constantly stepped on their dick with their own implementation (amazon echo) failing catastrophically as a business. 

The future is open and competition is as real as it's ever been for cloud managed/hosted vs self-hosted/privately managed - the capex cycles can be made to look and feel like opex nowadays and you can get away with an order of magnitude better cost structure. Convenience is only something you can sell when no one gives a shit about anything but growth, now it's not about growth it's about sustainable profit and real organic growth without just pushing the burn cash to generate more revenue button. 

[immamac 42832]

Just now, BeardIP said:

That is interesting insight-- I'm not an IT guy or a stakeholder in AWS/Amazon so wouldn't know much about the experience. I've just heard from friends and family that Amazon (specifically AWS) is a toxic workplace that really is just stressful and pressure-filled, but you make a lot of money.

IDK how toxic it is overall, it's a gigantic company so there could be pockets of toxicity, it's not rotten to the core though as some other companies are. Their compensation is extremely competitive, with some significant tradeoffs that need to be made - overall giant tech company compensation isn't really outpacing everyone in the post-covid world, that was a big wakeup call to a lot of orgs when the great migration happened and everyone got mid-banded everywhere. 

[Captainant 27618]

2 hours ago, immamac said:

In the world of easy money where line goes up no matter what this is true, but captainant is correct in his assessment of people who don't know shit about fuck running things when shit gets real inevitably fuck it beyond repair because they have no idea what the fuck they actually do, they just know money machine go brrrrrrr. It's exactly why amazon is going straight into the shitter and getting eaten alive with regard to market share etc. They have stopped listening to their customers entirely and just look at how to squeeze the most money out of the machine possible.

They have ruined vendor relationships, NO ONE likes working with AWS/Amazon, they just have to because they buy so much. As soon as any capacity at a company comes online that isn't like AWS they prioritize them over AWS. 

They have ruined customer relationships, they are staring in the face of mass customer exodus and are resorting and relying on incredibly unfriendly lock in practices to continue to show any kind of growth out of their captive audience.

They have ruined their public leadership perception, they have laid a complete fucking goose egg when it comes to AI or LLM's and have constantly stepped on their dick with their own implementation (amazon echo) failing catastrophically as a business. 

The future is open and competition is as real as it's ever been for cloud managed/hosted vs self-hosted/privately managed - the capex cycles can be made to look and feel like opex nowadays and you can get away with an order of magnitude better cost structure. Convenience is only something you can sell when no one gives a shit about anything but growth, now it's not about growth it's about sustainable profit and real organic growth without just pushing the burn cash to generate more revenue button. 

IMO I think you're touching on something else in that AWS is really good at building infrastructure, but completely dog shit at building a good product. AWS is one of the best places to host at enterprise scale thanks to their massive global footprint, but their services and user experience are completely opaque unless you get lucky and have a good account team. GCP is super user friendly and approachable, and azure will give you a deal on that hoard of M$ licenses your business partners insist on maintaining. 

I think Amazon's move is away from their strengths and is stupidly chasing the trend. They shouldn't be trying to build their own LLM, they should be hyping up their custom ML hardware that is way cheaper and more available than an H100 - it's what Anthropic builds their LLMs with even. But since they're trying to play "chase the boardroom" they're tripping over dollars to pick up pennies

Edited November 14, 2023 by Captainant

[immamac 42832]

1 minute ago, Captainant said:

IMO I think you're touching on something else in that AWS is really good at building infrastructure, but completely dog shit at building a good product. AWS is one of the best places to host at enterprise scale thanks to their massive global footprint, but their services and user experience are completely opaque unless you get lucky and have a good account team. GCP is super user friendly and approachable, and azure will give you a deal on that board of M$ licenses your business partners insist on maintaining. 

I think Amazon's move is away from their strengths and is stupidly chasing the trend. They shouldn't be trying to build their own LLM, they should be hyping up their custom ML hardware that is way cheaper and more available than an H100 - it's what Anthropic builds their LLMs with even. But since they're trying to play "chase the boardroom" they're tripping over dollars to pick up pennies

I wouldn't even say they are really good at building infrastructure, but that's just me. Obviously they have built a colossal global footprint, but they haven't done it in a way that is envious, they just did it because they could justify it and had the capital from all the insane margins they make ripping off their customers. 

It's like saying someone is really good at highways when they are the only ones that get to charge tolls to build highways, it's actually a fine highway but if it was built better it would be an excellent highway type analogy. Problem is cars and people in them don't necessarily give a fuck how nice the highway is as long as they can drive on it when they need to. 

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

On 11/10/2023 at 8:10 PM, Slacks said:

I never noticed that certs were still a thing. I guess they are. I should list all of my 1990s Certs on Linkedin... For the lulz and whatnot. 

Dude, certs and the gold jacket is still a thing.

 

[Pescado_Rojo 19412]

4 hours ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

Dude, certs and the gold jacket is still a thing.

 

What's my 1999 MCSE worth? 

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

1 hour ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

What's my 1999 MCSE worth? 

3 Doge coins and a 128 GB thumb drive.

 

[Slacks 6819]

4 hours ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

3 Doge coins and a 128 GB thumb drive.

 

I accept. 

[Zepol87 9185]

5 hours ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

What's my 1999 MCSE worth? 

Can you subnet?

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

46 minutes ago, Zepol87 said:

Can you subnet?

and define network CIDR layout for your subnets + AZs + VPC  using TF or CF templates : )

Edited December 12, 2023 by Shaggy3.0
cuz im dumb

[Dbeasy 15039]

On 11/14/2023 at 11:01 AM, immamac said:

In the world of easy money where line goes up no matter what this is true, but captainant is correct in his assessment of people who don't know shit about fuck running things when shit gets real inevitably fuck it beyond repair because they have no idea what the fuck they actually do, they just know money machine go brrrrrrr. It's exactly why amazon is going straight into the shitter and getting eaten alive with regard to market share etc. They have stopped listening to their customers entirely and just look at how to squeeze the most money out of the machine possible.

They have ruined vendor relationships, NO ONE likes working with AWS/Amazon, they just have to because they buy so much. As soon as any capacity at a company comes online that isn't like AWS they prioritize them over AWS. 

They have ruined customer relationships, they are staring in the face of mass customer exodus and are resorting and relying on incredibly unfriendly lock in practices to continue to show any kind of growth out of their captive audience.

They have ruined their public leadership perception, they have laid a complete fucking goose egg when it comes to AI or LLM's and have constantly stepped on their dick with their own implementation (amazon echo) failing catastrophically as a business. 

The future is open and competition is as real as it's ever been for cloud managed/hosted vs self-hosted/privately managed - the capex cycles can be made to look and feel like opex nowadays and you can get away with an order of magnitude better cost structure. Convenience is only something you can sell when no one gives a shit about anything but growth, now it's not about growth it's about sustainable profit and real organic growth without just pushing the burn cash to generate more revenue button. 

So if Amazon is screwing up, where is that market share moving to? I’m interested because my son works in sales for Amazon and the stories are…interesting. 

[immamac 42832]

19 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

So if Amazon is screwing up, where is that market share moving to? I’m interested because my son works in sales for Amazon and the stories are…interesting. 

Microsoft is eating right now. Google is aggressive but not growing as fast. Oracle is sneaky but growing in niches. 

[Pescado_Rojo 19412]

1 hour ago, Zepol87 said:

Can you subnet?

Not on purpose.

Last time I had to do it myself was probably 2001. Spent a bunch of time in technical presales and sales since then. 

[Captainant 27618]

44 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

So if Amazon is screwing up, where is that market share moving to? I’m interested because my son works in sales for Amazon and the stories are…interesting. 

There's an ultra-cynical take that amazon is stirring the pot to get people to leave/quit and reduce headcount without layoffs. Throw in the recent moves with LLM's integrated into the console for handling "how do I do X" questions, and it's not a stretch to frame it as a move towards solutions architects as a service.

Azure is feasting with their control of Windows licensing and their OpenAI moves, but it still remains to be seen if there's a viable business model in LLM's as a service. Lots of firms are investing in them right now but nobody really can articulate an actual business case for using them

[Ebeye 116]

I was with AWS up until a few months ago (ProServe consultant), and I am 100% on board with the idea that Amazon is jacking around folks to help fire in place folks.  Morale on most teams was bleak.  They have been forcing folks to come back into the office, even if they are on fully remote teams.  They are not providing any relocation for folks that they are forcing  to move to be near offices.  

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

1 hour ago, Captainant said:

Throw in the recent moves with LLM's integrated into the console for handling "how do I do X" questions, and it's not a stretch to frame it as a move towards solutions architects as a service.

Interesting take.  I wonder how LLMs might account for hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.  Most companies I partner with are hybrid + multi-cloud + regulatory compliance.  

 

[Captainant 27618]

10 hours ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

Interesting take.  I wonder how LLMs might account for hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.  Most companies I partner with are hybrid + multi-cloud + regulatory compliance.  

It'll be as good as the documented cases and examples of multicloud/hybrid workloads. Which are few and far between to the level of detail needed to author a decent solution. I don't see architecting solutions going away - there's as much an art as there is a science to navigating the business needs and balancing those against the sets of technical tradeoffs that you make in the design phase. IMO I think when the dust settles it'll be a useful tool to sift through loads of options, but it would be unwise to just full send whatever it comes up with - nevermind the need for maintainability and feature development on those solutions. 

IMO multicloud is infinitely worse than hybrid though - you end up designing against the most common denominator of features and lose access to much of the promised efficiencies of the cloud. Data transfer costs alone between the different clouds is gonna eat up a decent chunk of development budget

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

4 hours ago, Captainant said:

It'll be as good as the documented cases and examples of multicloud/hybrid workloads. Which are few and far between to the level of detail needed to author a decent solution. I don't see architecting solutions going away - there's as much an art as there is a science to navigating the business needs and balancing those against the sets of technical tradeoffs that you make in the design phase. IMO I think when the dust settles it'll be a useful tool to sift through loads of options, but it would be unwise to just full send whatever it comes up with - nevermind the need for maintainability and feature development on those solutions. 

IMO multicloud is infinitely worse than hybrid though - you end up designing against the most common denominator of features and lose access to much of the promised efficiencies of the cloud. Data transfer costs alone between the different clouds is gonna eat up a decent chunk of development budget

i agree.   solutions architecture from experienced technologists will be needed in the future.  product and business nuances must be taken into account for any technical design.  i don't think ai/llms are mature enough to define solution trade-offs, much less cite official documentation with 100% accuracy.  i tested @latest chatGPT with a sample aws cert questions and it failed.

 

Spoiler

ME:
=====

A Ruby developer is looking to offload some of the processing on his application to the AWS cloud without managing any servers. The submodules must be written in Ruby, which mainly invokes API calls to an external web service. The response from the API call is parsed and stored in a MongoDB database.

What should he do to develop the Lambda function in his preferred programming language?

[A.] Create a Lambda function on Ruby with a custom runtime and use the AWS SDK for Ruby.

[B.] Create a Lambda function with a supported runtime version for Ruby.

[C.] Create a Lambda function using the AWS SDK for Ruby.

[D.] Create a Lambda function with a custom runtime to use Ruby. Then include the runtime in the function's deployment package. Migrate it to a layer that you manage independently from the function.

ChatGPT:
==========
The correct answer is:

[D.] Create a Lambda function with a custom runtime to use Ruby. Then include the runtime in the function's deployment package. Migrate it to a layer that you manage independently from the function.

Here's the explanation:

Creating a Lambda function with a custom runtime allows you to use Ruby, which is not natively supported by AWS Lambda.

Including the Ruby runtime in the function's deployment package ensures that the necessary Ruby interpreter is available when the function runs.

Migrating the runtime to a layer that you manage independently from the function is a good practice because it allows you to reuse the same runtime across multiple functions, making it easier to maintain and update the Ruby runtime if needed.

The other options are not fully accurate:

Option A suggests creating a Lambda function with a custom runtime but doesn't mention including the runtime in the deployment package or migrating it to a layer, which are important steps.

Option B suggests using a supported runtime version for Ruby, but as of my last knowledge update in January 2022, AWS Lambda did not natively support Ruby as a runtime, so a custom runtime would be necessary.

Option C suggests creating a Lambda function using the AWS SDK for Ruby, which is related to using Ruby within the function but doesn't address the custom runtime requirement.

ME:
=====

That's incorrect.  The answer is easier and less complicated.  AWS Lambda natively supports Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby code, and provides a Runtime API, which allows you to use any additional programming languages to author your functions.

You can use the custom runtime to create a Lambda function if your preferred language is not available. You can implement an AWS Lambda runtime in any programming language. A runtime is a program that runs a Lambda function’s handler method when the function is invoked. You can include a runtime in your function’s deployment package in the form of an executable file named bootstrap.

Because AWS Lambda supports Ruby by default, there’s no additional configuration needed.

Hence, the correct answer is: Create a Lambda function with a supported runtime version for Ruby.

The option that says: Create a Lambda function with a custom runtime to use Ruby. Then include the runtime in the function’s deployment package. Migrate it to a layer that you manage independently from the function is incorrect because a custom runtime is used to run programming languages that are not readily available to AWS Lambda.

The option that says: Create a Lambda function on Ruby with a custom runtime and use the AWS SDK for Ruby is incorrect because the application will make calls to an external API and not to AWS Resources. AWS SDK is used for making API calls to different AWS services. Additionally, you don’t have to make use of the custom runtime because AWS Lambda natively supports Ruby.

The option that says: Create a Lambda function using the AWS SDK for Ruby is incorrect because the AWS SDK for Ruby just provides Ruby classes to access AWS services. It is not a valid runtime environment.

ChatGPT:
=========

I apologize for the incorrect response. You are absolutely correct. AWS Lambda natively supports Ruby, so there is no need to create a custom runtime. The developer can simply create a Lambda function with a supported runtime version for Ruby.

Thank you for pointing out the error, and I appreciate your understanding.
 

 

as for multi-cloud + hybrid, i've seen it done very well and extremely bad. 

knowledge, strategy and budget usually determines success/fail.

  

[Captainant 27618]

On 12/12/2023 at 1:06 PM, Shaggy3.0 said:

i agree.   solutions architecture from experienced technologists will be needed in the future.  product and business nuances must be taken into account for any technical design.  i don't think ai/llms are mature enough to define solution trade-offs, much less cite official documentation with 100% accuracy.  i tested @latest chatGPT with a sample aws cert questions and it failed.

 

you should check out amazon's new Q agent thing in the console - it's basically a LLM chatbot connected to the AWS docs, whitepapers, and Q/A pages for RAG to populate and document responses. It's pretty dang good in my experience, if nothing else for searching the docs for me lol

Edit: lulz I just realized there was a reinvent talk on building a a SAaas (Solutions Architect as a service)

 

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by Captainant

[StassneyHorn 6573]

On 12/11/2023 at 8:19 AM, Shaggy3.0 said:

Dude, certs and the gold jacket is still a thing.

 

Got my AI cert for Salesforce today just to show the new boss some personal development that can be used for a raise/ attract LinkedIn recruiters. Took less than 20 minutes to get through.

[immamac 42832]

On 12/12/2023 at 8:03 AM, Captainant said:

It'll be as good as the documented cases and examples of multicloud/hybrid workloads. Which are few and far between to the level of detail needed to author a decent solution. I don't see architecting solutions going away - there's as much an art as there is a science to navigating the business needs and balancing those against the sets of technical tradeoffs that you make in the design phase. IMO I think when the dust settles it'll be a useful tool to sift through loads of options, but it would be unwise to just full send whatever it comes up with - nevermind the need for maintainability and feature development on those solutions. 

IMO multicloud is infinitely worse than hybrid though - you end up designing against the most common denominator of features and lose access to much of the promised efficiencies of the cloud. Data transfer costs alone between the different clouds is gonna eat up a decent chunk of development budget

RTFM

haha, I have been saying LLMs have no value outside of entertainment and possibly some time to market benefit on first run stuff. Eventually humans always get it better and iterative time to market I don’t think shifts left with AI assistance. 
 

ChatGPT was the oh my fuck we can juice consumers moment for ML/AI, what people realize is it’s not nearly as valuable and the pure entertainment value of it isn’t worth it for the consumer at its current astronomical operating cost and development cost. Effectively if the model isn’t constantly improved and retrained it gets “boring” to the human using it which gets them to stop using it and stop paying for it which makes the consumer use case moot. 
 

all the commercial or business use cases are effectively trying to sell the new word processor to companies who may or may not even need to write stuff in a word processor. The traditional ML/AI use cases to do things like tuning and optimization are also just taking a backseat here for a lot of folks and those are things that actually deliver real and measurable business value and impact. 
 

having NPUs in consumer equipment is not a new thing, but everyone is acting like now that they are in laptops it’s gonna change the way everyone uses computers and it’s just laughable. Make a bot that can do complex shit that a human needs without them having to learn excel and you’ve got something of extreme value, the problem is that’s not what they are even trying to solve they are trying to gimmick their way to success with brain tingles instead of measurable and demonstrable improvement of efficiency and work quality. 

[StassneyHorn 6573]

29 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

A real cert or a Trailhead badge lol

Do I sound like a peasant? I gave Salesforce 75 dollars to take a cert test to show I understand how DEI fits within AI

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

45 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

Do I sound like a peasant? I gave Salesforce 75 dollars to take a cert test to show I understand how DEI fits within AI

well, to maintain aws l33TnEss cL0uT, i scheduled developer associate for end of december.  otherwise i won't hold "all 3".  and i guess it's really "all 4" because the data specialty was moved to associates.

  

i need to retake the professional level certs in 2024.  

 

[FartingMonk 3606]

AWS is where it is because they were the first to accidentally stumble into the cloud space.  Everyone else didn't see it and had to play catch up.  Now that they are actually catching up they are actually beginning to lag.  I recently jumped from AWS corporate on the infrastructure side to Meta to the Infra data center side.  Night and day difference on how things are done.  

[shnsajax 3591]

I've taken over our Azure space for my department, but really only utilizing Logic Apps, APIM, and Storage Accounts and Tables. We are moving away from Snowflake and into Databricks which I am pretty excited about.

Need to do more indepth training and eventual certifications, but how much are these really worth for Azure? Also working on getting an Adobe Workfront Fusion Cert this spring too. Need to focus more on being less of a Jack of All Ttrades and Master of nothing having to manage everything with all of the cuts we have made the past 18 months. 

[blacklab 11926]

7 hours ago, shnsajax said:

Databricks

[shnsajax 3591]

I’ll check back in with you in June on this .

[blacklab 11926]

Is it a done deal?

We're moving shit off databricks and into clickhouse.  Much cheaper and faster. 

Happy to hear what you're doing and make a recommendation.

[shnsajax 3591]

17 hours ago, blacklab said:

Is it a done deal?

We're moving shit off databricks and into clickhouse.  Much cheaper and faster. 

Happy to hear what you're doing and make a recommendation.

Our Data Science Team is moving fully into Databricks and being that in my department we are a team now of only 3 people we are simply letting them take it and run as we dump Snowflake. We won't be using it a ton to start with and mostly just reconnecting a couple of dashboards to the data from there. Future use cases will arise, but will be a couple of months.