Head in the clouds
November was filled with immense amounts announced throughout multiple cloud platforms but also notes when I’ve finally accomplished a well sought after goal of mine, achieving all three CSP’s Architect Pro. It would be of note that the landscape is constantly changing and staying at this pace of bleeding edge you have to be able to learn concepts quickly and understand nuances rapidly. Capping off the month of November I’ve completed Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect Professional (Which is referred to the toughest IT exam currently) on my first attempt. While the exam itself was challenging, in its approach from my experience, this exam is the most straightforward exam that really bridges Google Cloud Platforms exam outlines. It would be of note I’ve done this exam after passing the Solutions Architect Associate previously so the overlap wasn’t hurting in that regard.
2023 Reflections in the Industry
The economy writ large has forever been altered with the emergence of generative AI disrupting various industries and doesn’t appear to be slowing down as more models are surfacing from closed-source, to open-source. The innovation will continue to expand as in the CNCF’s KubeCon has shown self-hosting open-source LLM’s is already upon us and Microsoft has provided Azure architecture of orchestrating OpenAI on AKS. The wins noted are areas I’ve crossed off my list this year as Wins and Losses. Platform Engineering is underway at large and being acknowledged by Cloud Service Providers with areas of expansion in the CNCF I can see Backstage and other platforms similar becoming at this forefront at least in popularity. Cloud native if a company is adopting platform agnostic or platforms that are largely able to be supported by CSP’s this could be also how you are starting to see managed Prometheus, Chaos Studio and others similar that are running some form of open-source or based on those services.
Wins
AWS Solutions Architect Pro (First attempt)
AWS Solutions Architect Associate (First Attempt)
Google Cloud Platform DevOps Professional (Second Attempt)
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (Third attempt)
Google Cloud Security Engineer Professional (First attempt)
Certified Cloud Security Professional (First Attempt)
Certified Cloud Security Knowledge (Second Attempt)
Oracle Cloud Certified DevOps Engineer (First Attempt)
Losses
Oracle Cloud Security Engineer (Failed two attempts) – Awaiting to retake likely middle of next summer.
Reflections on the endless journey
ISC2 has been at the forefront of my mind mostly because failing the CISSP the first attempt right after a larger exam the previous month felt like a blow to previous attempts. I’ve thought about capturing CCSP primarily to solidify my breadth of knowledge in the cloud but also because the CCSP really represents currently the cloud security landscape in the industry. It would be without saying much of what is taught by each cloud provider as far as security complement this certification well and CCSK is also a warm up you can do if you can swing it. 10/10 Recommend to all those in the industry with focus on cloud security, cloud security architecture, devsecops.
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist – this exam tested my wit and knowledge but mostly my spread in the command-line. If you haven’t heard of the CNCF they are the go-to for enterprises adopting cloud native technologies and at the forefront of bringing kubernetes certifications in the fold. While this was the end goal I wanted to go right into CKS however, the pre-requisite of CKA stood in the way but I’m glad it did because to understand a platform you have to really go in-depth and these two exams sure do it. If you’re considering adopting kubernetes for your organization the go-to hero on this topic will take you far and wide as you want to go.
2024 Predictions
This year most of the headlines centered around the explosion in popularity of tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E and Hugging Face and other models that are available to use. Microsoft and Google have Generative AI and joined a little later to the occasion was AWS its likely this will commercially have significance on personalization as creating a LLM is more accessible. Security and Red Teaming to expand to understand the sophistication that has been unleashed with AI is powerful and relatively new space of expansion but its likely this will gain more attention as we’re seeing threat modeling make its way its a good practice to familiarize ourselves with the bleeding edge. Orchestration and Financial Operations will significantly take a front seat as more organizations are rapidly adopting microservices across various cloud providers the biggest stakeholders from my view will be the platforms who can adopt to adapting open-source native integration ArgoCD, Flux etc for out-of-box deployments. Financial optimization in the cloud grows exponentially but as interest rates have tested even the largest organization I could see from a macroeconomic view this is going to be a on-going addressable market. If I had any recommendations for staying in the cloud it would be if you aren’t doing cloud native start yesterday and get yourself up to-date on the use cases as organizations will span this space relatively in the next few years.