(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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August 24, 2019
As for a company certification goal, I decided to certify as a Google Associate Cloud Engineer as well as Google Professional Cloud Architect this month. The Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification is mainly focused around GCP standard operations, such as managing IAM, osLogin, as well as many other core services such as compute instances, Cloud SQL and many more. I found the certification to be fairly well balanced, with maybe a little bit a skew toward IAM and security, which I do appreciate due to the importance of these topics.
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