May 24, 2023
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has evaluated the legality of Facebook’s (now Meta Platforms) data transfer for over 10 years. In those 10 years, we have seen the Irish DPC trying to avoid ruling on the matter multiple times and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) forcing them to do it. We now have a final ruling on the matter, which is unfavorable to Meta. In fact, in addition to having to stop the data transfer within 5 months and having to move back all data within 6 months, Meta has to pay a € 1.
Read More 
October 30, 2022
Three years passed from the last AWS exam I took, and my AWS certifications were due a renewal. The first thing I checked was what was the exam code and which one I had taken three years ago. It turns out that the last time I took SAA-C01, this time, the only available version for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam was SAA-C03. SAA-C03 is still very new since it got released last month, so not much third-party material is available.
Read More 
October 10, 2022
Every so often, I have a conversation with someone, and we end up in a sub-conversation around the differences between products and technologies. This phenomenon frequently happens to me because I consider a product and a technology two completely different things. At the same time, many people use them interchangeably when discussing IT products and technologies.
I think this distinction’s value is clearly distinguishing the solutions that are resilient to a single entity failure and those that are not.
Read More 
May 23, 2022
We have seen a massive increase in the “real world” dependency on digital services in the last few years. This process will probably continue in the future, and we are not ready for it. In the same few years, we have seen a lot of cases where digital services went offline or got hacked. In a society that relies more and more on digital services, we can not afford such services not to be available or secure.
Read More 
October 31, 2021
I often see people and companies moving their workloads to the cloud. Speaking with them, they explain that the cloud is cheaper, more flexible, and more reliable than their current infrastructure. To further increase investment return, they often target a specific (single) cloud to reduce management costs and complexity.
By itself, this trend seems a very reasonable one. The risk is that, sometimes, people do not consider the less immediate risks around this move.
Read More 
September 20, 2021
After having renewed the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, it was the moment to renew the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification as well.
Since I wanted to keep Windows on my laptop for the smallest amount of time possible, I decided to book the Professional Cloud Architect exam the day after the Associate Cloud Engineer one.
On the exam day (18th of August), having had experience the previous day, I ensured to set up everything correctly.
Read More 
August 25, 2021
A couple of years ago, I obtained the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, so it was re-certification time.
Since it is August and probably also due to the whole ongoing health situation, I’ve not found any test center at a reasonable distance. Therefore, I’ve decided to use the Online Proctored option.
Google relies on Kryterion for their exams, as many other companies do, since Kryterion has more than 1100 associated test centers and, at least in the ICT certification space, it’s one of the most commonly used networks.
Read More 
August 20, 2020
This year I managed to partecipate to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020. As you can imagine, the conference did not happen in real life, but it was converted to an online conference. More virtual conferences I attend to, more I understand the limits and the advantages of them compared to real conferences. In this particular conference, I realized that one of the biggest problems I have with virtual conferences is that, during the conference, the conference events and talks add to your usual events and meetings, making it impossible to follow all events you wanted to follow.
Read More 
June 25, 2020
In the last couple of months, we have seen a lot of news around ARM. More specifically, the most relevant ones, in my opinion, are (sorted by date):
On May 11, AWS announced the availability of new instance types (M6g, C6g, R6g) based on Graviton2, a new version of their in-house developed ARM processor On June 17, Ampere announced a 128 core ARM processor that will be added to their current line (that includes 32, 48, 64, 72, 80 cores ARM CPUs) On June 22, was made public that Fugaku, an ARM-based supercomputer, is the most potent publicly disclosed supercomputer On June 22, Apple announced that Macs will move to ARM Those pieces of news demonstrate how much the processors' landscape is changing, and how fast the rate of change is.
Read More 
March 1, 2020
Google Cloud provides the capability of terminating a VPN connection with a VPN Gateway. The problem is that the VPN Gateway - at the moment - is relatively limited in capabilities. One of the missing capabilities I would have liked to see implemented is the NAT capability.
VPNs can be used to connect the machines of two different parties. Although this is usually not the best architectural pattern, since a connection on the public internet encrypted at the Transport Layer is often a better option, it’s relatively common in more legacy environments.
Read More 
(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog