What I’ve Been Studying
Since this log begins in the middle of study, here’s a quick recap:
I’m currently studying AWS concepts in preparation for the Solutions Architect Associate certification. Before this, I went through the study guide and coursework (Stephane Maarek on Udemy; A Cloud Guru) for the Cloud Practitioner foundational certification, since I knew very little about the cloud and fundamental cloud concepts.
The last chapter I studied was on Route 53, a DNS service from AWS. The current chapter is on ELB (Elastic Load Balancing). Some other concepts I’ve studied so far:
- Shared Responsibility Model- Well-Architected Framework- IAM (Identity and Access Management)- S3 (Simple Storage Service)- EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)- EBS (Elastic Block Storage)- EFS (Elastic File System) & FSx- Database services (RDS, DynamoDB, etc.)- VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) NetworkingWhen and How I Study
Typically I study in 1-2 hour blocks during the day, but I also review video content whenever I have free time throughout the day (like when driving for work or errands). My method for learning new things usually involves immersing myself as much as possible in the topic; I’ll watch/listen to training courses, tutorials, or walkthroughs on Youtube or Udemy or ACG, read books/articles about those topics, think about the topics I’m studying, and review what I’ve learned to figure out where I lack understanding so I know where to continue to focus my efforts.
Immersion is great and I find it helps a lot to get my head around the ideas and to see how others think about them, but the real progress comes from implementing projects hands-on. This website is a perfect example---I already have a blog for projects, so I didn’t really need a second blog. This gave me a great opportunity to use AWS services I had learned about already. I used IAM to set up an identity for my Github Action to build this site onto an S3 instance, which is where the website files are hosted. Hosting a simple static website is a pretty common use for S3 and it was pretty easy to implement, but actually doing it gave me real experience and validated the concepts I’d been learning—it made it real.
Anyway, that’s it for now. Going forward, these posts will likely be less structured and more freeform note-taking.