How I got here and what lies next.

I arrive at week 5 of boot camp with some delay on the activities and homework cause of some field work and my job taking more time than anticipated. Although I have assisted almost all sessions live and reviewed all videos I needed to structure my learning up to this point. For that I write this report so I can have the forest view instead of the individual and complicated solo view of each subject.

I first stumbled upon exampro.co by looking up some courses to prepare for my AWS certs. I found Andrew’s exampro training courses on several subjects (free and paid) very valuable since provided examples, labs and decks which reinforced my learning. As most companies are moving into the cloud, no surprise I got sucked into three new and shiny cloud projects at my job at the same time I was studying these training courses. Luck is forged they say.

Since I came from tech infra and operations (called sysadmin back in the day) I understood all the backbone of the cloud but did not have a broader perspective of a cloud-native project.

Then Andrew came up with the AWS Cloud Project Bootcamp and realized that this was a great opportunity to gain a wider perspective on a cloud native application project, involving ALL the moving parts. I mean all of them.

The outline of the project is so good. Using SQL and NoSQL databases, dev Frameworks, modern CDEs, CI/CD, and to make the project a real-life example, it comes with input from the CTO and CEO (which by the way surely are Andrew and Bayko) so we can understand how the decisions are coming to the technical team. I appreciated this input.

It is important to say that in real life some companies do not care so much to provide all the tools required for the job: having a cloud CDE that costs per hour of usage, having the source code centralized for a greater team to pitch in, or even having each role (Front End, Back End, Infra, Monitoring, Debugging, etc.) sourced in a team.

So we make do with what we have, usually open source and free, but all these tools can make a difference in quality and efficiency.

This is where I find the Bootcamp a very valuable experience: having a broader view of all the different aspects to make into account when building a cloud-native app in a very updated and modern approach: Gitpod CDE, ChatGPT to troubleshoot, best-in-class instructors to help with each stack, containerization with Docker, and all the time taking into account Security and Spend Awareness.

Still halfway there, but I can say that this is a very valuable experience.

While writing this report there is a big hype around ChatGPT, new “A.I.” tools, Microsoft Copilot and others that inspire me to continue my learning and going deep into our Bootcamp. Thanks to Mr. Brown that is leading, teaching and producing this boot camp and all my fellow boot-campers that are sharing so much valuable knowledge.

written by human-Mau-Cloud