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.
As I did the previous day, I decided to use my Lenovo Bluetooth Laser Mouse.
The exam started without any hiccups at 15:00.
At around 15:30, I moved the mouse wheel to the left, triggering a “back” signal, equivalent to press the “back” button in a browser.
Kryterion Sentinel decided that the proper way to handle such a signal was to interrupt the exam.
I tried to call the Kriterion call centers, but a recorded voice informed me that the fastest way to access their customer care was via chat.
I opened a chat with their support and got put in a queue of about 20 people.
After 40 minutes, I managed to chat with a support representative, and they managed to schedule a new exam session for me a couple of minutes later (16:15).
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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.
Having had experience with Red Hat remote certifications, I was expecting at least the same level of user experience with Kryterion.
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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.
The topic I would like to focus on is why, today, the x86 platform is not that appealing as it was in the ’90s when it became the de-facto standard.
I think that there are two primary causes for this change of direction:
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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.
When a VPN is used in this way, it is very common to incur in an IP space collision, and therefore it becomes required to use some form of NAT.
Let’s see how to implement this scenario in Google Cloud without terminating the VPN directly on an instance (which is possible but has its problems, and maybe we’ll be discussing it some point in the future).
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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.
I think this is very interesting, since shows that AWS now has far more confidence in the stability of their platform.
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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.
There is a high amount of questions around the advantages of cloud in scaling, reliability and costs profile.
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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.
The tool also allows you to auto-delete the snapshots after a certain period, but I found this feature a little bit too limited.
The main reason is that it does not allow you to have complex retention policies.
In fact, the tool only allows to set a single expiration date for all snapshots.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog