San Francisco and AWS Loft Adventures

Greetings from San Francisco!

I’m in town this week to learn more about AWS and attend a local tech conference.

On Wednesday, I went to a local coffee shop and did a few Amazon Labs such as Introduction to IAM, S3 and EC2. Amazon Labs are self-paced and give you a real-world context/scenario to configure. For instance, in the IAM lab, I configured users who support EC2 read-only access to EC2 while I gave EC2 Admin’s the ability to View, Start and Stop EC2 instances.

On Thursday, I ventured to the AWS Loft to attend Compute Evolved Week – Serverless. I attended a talk about AWS Lambda and Serverless Applications presented by Shivansh Singh.

I was proud of myself for being able to understand and keep up with the talk. AWS can be complex at times with many different services. It showed me how far I have come and how much knowledge I have gained in just 1 month.

I also realized the rate of change for AWS Services is real! In my
AWS Online Training Course, CloudGuru, the trainer Ryan Kroneberg emphasized that a Lambda function can only run for 5 minutes. At the talk, a question was asked about how how long a function can run and the response was 15 minutes. Just goes to show that AWS will always keep you on your toes!

After the talk, there was a workshop on building your first Serverless Web Application, Wildrydes.

I was short on time, so I used CloudFormation templates to breeze through the sections. I’ve never used CloudFormation before and could immediately see its power. You can quickly interact with AWS Services using pre-defined information. My AWS Online Training Course also talks about the importance on knowing CloudFormation inside and out if you want to be a solutions architect. I now understand why – it makes the job seamless and supports automation. I plan to complete the lab manually on my flight back to Chicago.

The AWS Loft itself was really cool! In addition to hosting workshops and events, it’s just a space where entrepreneurs or people learning AWS can come for free WiFi and get help from real Solutions Architects.

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