The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam validates technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include: deploying, managing, and operating scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS, migrating an existing on-premises application to AWS, implementing and controlling the flow of data to and from AWS, selecting the appropriate AWS service based on compute, data, or security requirements, identifying appropriate use of AWS operational best practices, estimating AWS usage costs and identifying operational cost control mechanisms. - Amazon Web Services
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for individuals with experience designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include: designing and deploying scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS; lift and shift of an existing on-premises application to AWS; ingress and egress of data to and from AWS; selecting the appropriate AWS service based on data, compute, database, or security requirements; identifying appropriate use of AWS architectural best practices; estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control mechanisms. - Amazon Web Services
Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of “Beat” watches.
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called “.beats”. Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 (86.4) seconds. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes – Wikipedia
For the last couple of months I’ve mainly been working on automating our product delivery process. From building artifacts with Maven to packaging them as RPM together with generated Puppet modules for configuration, provisioning virtual machines through The Foreman the whole chain is now almost covered.
I delivered a couple of Maven and Jenkins plugins along the way and the Puppet Validator Jenkins Plugin is a simplified version of one of the Jenkins plugins I wrote. It does was its name says it does: the plugin scans the project workspace and validates the Puppet classes it finds against the Puppet parser tool (post-build step).
Pretty convenient when you don’t want to push broken configuration artifacts to whatever repository (Maven, The Pulp, …) they’re supposed to end up in. The source code is available on GitHub.
This is the second part of How to make good teams great. First part is over there.
Feed your brain
In a rapidly changing environment - as the IT world is - you want to stay on top of things and you can’t only rely on techniques, languages, frameworks & technologies you played around with at school or in your current projects.
You must feed your brain with new ideas, new cool stuff (even old cool stuff by the way) and there are various places you can get brain food: conferences (if you or your company can afford it), bar camps & user groups (often free), brown bag sessions over lunch at the office, …
If there was only one thing I wanted to take with me when I changed job in May 2011 it definitely was the book circles a colleague of mine was organizing twice a year. I simply love books and everything that come with them: knowledge, stories, smells, bookshelves, …
But as I started to set such an activity up at my new work place I realized it was much easier to just wait for an email announcing the upcoming titles, pick one up and then attend the sessions than actually make it happen.
As of today we are about to finish our second book and the third one is on the line. Time to reflect on my own little experience I suppose and share my dos and don’ts.
As we are implementing new development processes in the department I work for teams are going through a lot of changes. Attending Sven Peters’ (@svenpet) talk on 7 things: how to make good teams great at Jfokus was an obvious decision and I’m glad I went. It was really nice to hear that some of the actions we are taking right now have proven to be successful and appreciated by teams in other companies.
I’m not going to write about the 7 things at once but will break them down in two posts. Let’s start with It’s flow time and Report robot.
A few sessions at the Disruptive Code 2010 were dedicated to the “NoSQL solutions” trendy topic and I was really looking forward —I have to admit— to what Adam Skogman from SpringSource and Eric Evans from Rackspace had to say on the subject.
Today was the first day of the disruptive code conference in Stockholm and I’m taking notes, a lot of notes. I unfortunately don’t have time to blog live from the event - too busy listening to some really good talks - so I am taking another approach: for the next couple of days, I’ll write about the sessions I have been attending.
Let’s get started then with notes I took during a session ran by Tobias Järlund CTO at AftonBladet, the biggest Swedish newspaper (so he claims at least) : high performance websites, with ads (don’t let third parties make you slow) which was based on AftonBladet’s experience and experiments on website, embedding third party ads, optimization.
I recently got a new laptop and, as often in that case, had to install a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit (to replace a Windows XP) and all the software and tools I need as a developer.
One of the software I had to install was the Tibco Enterprise Messaging Service (an implementation of the Java Message Service, JMS). The installation went fine (I had to deactivate all the visual effects in order to see the content of the dialog boxes though - under System > Preferences > Appearance) but I had some troubles starting EMS.
/opt/tibco/ems/5.0/bin/tibemsd
/opt/tibco/ems/5.0/bin/tibemsd: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
EMS requires libstdc++.so.5 but only libstdc++.so.6 is nowadays bundled with Ubuntu. After some Googling I finally came across a solution that worked.
