(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
January 27, 2020 - Brno, CZ
As it happened at other times in my life, I managed to be present at DevConf. DevConf is one of the best conferences that I attend. The reasons are many and varied, starting from the location that I find relatively stress-free. Another reason is the fact that there are many different kinds of sessions, and many sessions are not overcrowded, so it is relatively simple to participate in any session you would like to.
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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.
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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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. Overall, I think that this is not the case, since having prepared the cases, will only help you not having to re-read the whole case before answering the questions. Also, I found myself to read the case name, read the question, read the answers, choose the answer, and then read the case text again, just to be sure.
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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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July 14, 2019
In the last few days, multiple fines related to privacy have been announced. More specifically:
Even if I talk about them “collectively”, I would like to point out that the third one is very different in nature, in nature and in the jurisdiction, and therefore in the amount of the fine from the first two, which are fairly similar among them.
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June 20, 2019
A few days ago, Facebook presented Libra, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency project.
After the inception of Bitcoin around ten years ago, we got more and more used to new cryptocurrencies being presented every other day. Often those projects are created by small teams of people, often anonymously. Facebook’s announcement is very different since Facebook is a huge company and has partnered with many other huge companies for this launch.
I’m very skeptical of Libra, and I think it will not succeed in the long run. In fact, it already starts with big challenges, including the fact that most people do not trust Facebook. Differently from many companies, Facebook is used by many people, but it is not generally trusted, and the base requirement for the success of any kind of currency is the trust in the entity behind it. Libra will be managed by the Libra Alliance and not Facebook directly. Still, so far, we have seen a much more significant presence of Facebook than any other Libra Alliance member, so easily Libra will still be referred to as “the Facebook cryptocurrency” many years from now.
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