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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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December 10, 2019
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen problems allocating resources in the Google Cloud Platform in the Frankfurt region. The problem seemed to have occurred due to the high requests Google customers made to sustain their businesses during the Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday period. Making some searches on Google, I’ve found out that this is not the first time it occurs, and this is not only a GCP problem since AWS and Azure had similar incidents.
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November 8, 2019
A couple of days ago, I did re-take the AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate exam. This was my second time at this certification (I did it the first time in 2015), and I had to retake the exam since my certification expired in 2017. The exam was fairly different this time from the previous time.
The first thing I noticed is that the certification itself is no longer expiring after 2 years since the validity got extended to 3 years.
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October 10, 2019
As part of my AWS re-certification path, I decided to start from the very begin, with the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials. I was sure to pass the exam, but since in the company I work for other people will be required to become AWS certified, I wanted to check out the exam beforehand, to be able to suggest to the people the right certification for them.
The exam is fairly straight forward and is mainly focused on the advantages of AWS and cloud in general.
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September 22, 2019
Last week, in a previous article, I’ve introduced you to gcsc (Google Cloud Snapshot Cleaner). I’ve just released the version 0.2.0 of it, and it has a lot of clean-ups done, both in the code and the user experience.
There are also some new features, but the one I’m more satisfied with, is the introduction of the http subcommand, to expose an HTTP server. The webserver will listen to any URI and Methods, and the request will trigger the snapshot clean-up.
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September 16, 2019
I’ve just tagged the first version (0.1.0) of gcsc (Google Cloud Snapshot Cleaner). The idea behind this small software is to create a more flexible way to keep the Google Cloud Disks Snapshots tidy.
Google Cloud does provide a very nice way to automatically snapshot your disks, leveraging the resource policies. This is very nice, since it allows you to be sure that the Google Cloud always and reliably snapshots your disks.
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August 30, 2019
After less than a week from achieving the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, I took the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam.
Preparing this exam, I found odd the fact that Google provides three case studies to bring to the exam. I was even more impressed by the number of questions around those cases. It felt odd since it felt like you could prepare very well those three case studies and be advantaged in the exam.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog