Week 1 - Cloud Fundamentals

In this post, I'll be sharing a recap of my notes from Day 1 to 7 of learning in the Udacity Cloud DevOps Engineer Nanodegree classroom.

These are compiled from my daily IG posts, as part of my #3MonthsOfCDE series and only slightly edited for platform suitability.

I made it to the kickoff session (that’s a first) and completed the first lesson of the first course - Introduction to Cloud Computing. That part pretty much gets you into the "zone" and you look forward to actually getting into the real deal.
Started Part 2 already and I should make an update for Day 2 by EOD today. There are 9 Parts (courses), with each one containing lots of sections (lessons), and each section containing lots and lots of concepts.

I completed the first lesson in part 2; basically an intro to cloud computing - types, deployment models, some available services from cloud service providers (with focus on AWS).
I guess you could say I’m starting out slow to get a feel of things before picking up the pace. Also, I was quite tired from a really long day but tomorrow will be better.

This lesson took a lot longer than the estimated “1 hour” timeline. Quite a lot of words and terms to take all in at first, but definitely ones I should get used to in the long run.
There were also a number of exercises involved and I ran into issues starting up some of the services, but those were eventually resolved. Tomorrow is a weekend, which means more time to cover more than 1 full lesson.

I had my first connect session today (throughout the program, I’d be having these sessions weekly).

“What is DevOps to you?”

This was a question that led to many colleagues sharing their thoughts, and as a DevOps noob, I found their opinions quite insightful.

The session lead was also quite upfront; one needs to be highly skilled to work in the field and also always up-skill. He advised us to get through the course as fast as possible and pick up several other things, so guess who’s going to be working harder to get through the course while understanding most concepts.
Then, I completed Lesson 3 on storage and database services, and CDNs. The lessons only covered a few, so I’d be checking out the rest of them (of course). Finally, I started another lesson but decided to take a break afterwards.

We go again later.

From learning about security in the cloud to lab exercises on auto-scaling groups and load balancers, I was able to cover quite a bit today. Rounded up with messaging services and it was a well-spent day.
The closer I get to completing the Fundamentals course, the more I see just how much more there is to learn. We’ll keep at it though!
Oh, I’ve also been monitoring the Billing dashboard (Udacity literally hammered it into our heads to take note of costs, no extra budgets available!) Last I checked, I was already at $0.14.

Let’s see what the new week holds.

It’s a new work week and as expected, I didn’t get enough free time today and I could barely focus in the classroom.
I did manage to complete lesson 6 but I’d most likely be taking a look at it again tomorrow.

We keep going.

I did a revisit of the container lessons and ECS, and moved on to the last concept for course 1. While trying to create an ECS cluster, I encountered an error about service-linked roles and that launched into a different learning session on IAM.
By the time I was done, I had learnt more about Identity Providers (IdPs), SAML 2.0, etc. I also had a better understanding of what “federated users” meant and what goes on under the hood that grants us access to the AWS console directly from the Udacity environment.
For logging and auditing, there was CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and we also got introduced to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) services like CloudFormation.
I also got to submit the first project (FINALLY!) and the review came back in an hour or so. I’d recently worked on something similar for my portfolio so it was easy to put together. I did it over the weekend but couldn’t submit due to some server error.

The comment in the review felt a lil too much, but it’s the thought that counts.

Day 1-7: 11th May, 2022 - 17th May, 2022

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Airat Yusuff