Week 2 - Getting Started with AWS CloudFormation

In this post, I'll be sharing a recap of my notes from Day 8 to 14 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 wrapped up course 1 with the last parts on AWS CLI and provisioning services via the CLI. As with other materials I’ve come across, I’ve already bookmarked the CLI commands reference for further referencing.
I also checked out the first career webinar and while it was over an hour long, I was able to highlight some points that should be helpful later on. Besides, I can always return to it.

I had a hectic commute schedule so I tried to gain something by taking some lessons on-the-go with a tablet device. I started with the second course (Deploy Infrastructure as Code) and studied a considerable part of lesson 1.
However, most parts included running commands on the terminal (which I couldn’t do of course).I would go through those parts again to run the commands and continue with my learning.

I had quite a bit to catch up on, with work yesterday (no thanks to Thursday) so I barely spent any time in the classroom. I did manage to run the commands from the previous lessons and get a hang of what’s going on. I imagine I’m a bit more set up for further lessons.
I have another connect session scheduled and I plan to do some “deep dives” into more AWS compute services before (and after) it.

I took a nice “weekend off”, although I still studied for about 3 hours.

Another connect session was held on Saturday and my main takeaway was taking note of more storage services like EFS and also the “common” services to get well-acquainted with. Then, I completed the first lesson on the IaC course and I got to experiment with writing CF scripts.

(Sidenote: Can you actually call CF templates, scripts?)

I was able to go through documentations to figure out what properties to specify, what to configure to give a result I had in mind, CLI commands to run; overall, it was a good learning experience.
Apart from the exercises, there was also a challenge and before I checked it out, I created a “what-if” scenario. I wanted to try creating a VPC, a subnet attached to it and then a security group with the same VPC, before provisioning an EC2 instance with said resources. It was really interesting to navigate my way to a successfully running template.

I started the lesson on infrastructure diagrams on Day 13 but I studied for less than an hour, so I could not cover much.
There were more networking concepts to grasp so from one reference article to another, I spent more time catching up on the necessary detours. Afterwards, I had a better understanding of VPCs, subnets, internet gateways (Direct Connect for more private access), etc.
I also had a career session in the evening (this is different from connect sessions). Although I couldn’t stay the whole period, I was around for the discussion on personality types. I remember taking the test in previous years and always turning out as INFP-T. However, I took it today again and it looks like I’m now INFJ-T.

I still think I should take it again but I’ve gone through quite a number of changes since 2020, that might have had a hand in the result change!

Fun fact though, I was INTP-T in 2016!

Day 8-14: 18th May, 2022 - 24th May, 2022.

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Airat Yusuff