2020 — Sophomore (2nd) Professional Year

Following 2019’s trend, I comeback to document my professional year of 2020. It was pretty neat to have a reference that I can look back and see where I’ve been and set clear goal to where I want to go.

2020… What a year, am I right folks? Well, my focus here is not to mumble about what happened on 2020 but rather focus on the positive things that happened on the past year regarding my career. This year, I will write in English, as my network is now multi cultural.

December 19/January

In December 2019, I joined AWS as a Cloud Support Associate. I was very excited about this opportunity, I would describe the feeling as a “pat in the back". After all, getting an abroad job from a big Tech Company it is a dream for most people that decide on the IT/Engineering career path.

The team I joined was focused on deployment (DevOps) related services which included ECS, EKS, Code Services, Elastic Beanstalk, AWS X-Ray, Batch.

Coming from a DevOps Engineer Role, I already had experience with most of these services but AWS on-boarding includes a great learning experience. Basically, everything you need to know to perform your role, AWS will teach you.

February

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate.

March

• Not big achievement.
• Unrelated Suggestion: If you are ever visiting Ireland, be sure to add Cliffs of Moher to the itinerary, cool place!

Picture taken from the Internet. When I visited the place, it was raining ice. Reminder: Always have rain gear in Ireland.

April

• Deep Dive Session for an AWS customer

A Technical Account Manager at AWS had an University customer ready to take their research to the cloud, so they could focus on their research and leave the underlying server management for AWS. The research team was expecting a rapid growth on their website due their most recent research publication which was relevant for authorities dealing with the pandemic.

So two colleagues and I, decided to put together a Deep Dive Session for Elastic Beanstalk covering three main areas of the customer needs: Auto Scaling, Storage (EFS), Containerized Applications on the Cloud.

I took on the scalability area and suggested two auto scaling configurations for the customer: one based on the Network Traffic (appropriate for current scenario); one based on the Request Count (appropriate for expected growth). So I made an assessment of their application and started simulating both scaling configurations with a similar WebApp of mine.

• AWS Certified Developer — Associate

This completed my AWS Certification Trifecta (SAA,SOA,DA). Honestly, if you took the SAA and SOA, the Developer Certification will be a walk in the park. From the three associate level exams, this is the easiest as it covers less AWS services.

The focus on this exam is to make the developer more complete by knowing the available possibilities the AWS services and its integrations offer. The biggest take away for me on this exam was DynamoDB.

Coming from a non-developer background, I always thought NoSQL=NoSense, but after taking this exam it was clear to me the advantages on certain use cases and I even started using it on my personal projects.

May

• How do I protect my Elastic Beanstalk environment against attacks from known unwanted hosts? — AWS Premium Support Knowledge Center article. This was my first time writing publicly for AWS and it was amazing! Within a few weeks after my article was released, I found myself and other team members using it as technical reference to customers looking to increase their security on Elastic Beanstalk environments.
• AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) — Social Quantum. This was a Cloud Migration project. I reviewed the auto scaling policies and architecture. The company needed an aggressive scale-out for online game sessions and a slow and steady scale-in. Additionally, I was active to support the customer once they experienced production issues.

June

• 5 Star Hero Award for Dublin Deployment Team.
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

When I first started working with the AWS Platform, the DevOps Certification was the certification I had my eyes on. It is a professional level certification and it is TOOOUGH! Seriously, this is a test that you cannot pass without hands-on experience.

July

• Changes to the AWS CodeBuild Troubleshooting section — Error: "Unable to verify JobWorker identity" when opening the CodeBuild console. Turns out IAM roles with a Tag jobId will cause issues on CodeBuild. I found the issue and pushed the changes to be available on the CodeBuild documentation.

August

• Promotion to Cloud Support Engineer.

September

• RDS IAM Authentication in a Cross Account Environment. A little background on the scenario:

Account A: RDS Database
Account B: Batch Environment authenticating to RDS in Account A.

A simple scenario and what could’ve been a simple support case to resolve the customer’s issue. However the situation escalated after the customer was unable to get the help they needed from AWS Support in their previous interactions. So when I got called to assume the ownership of the case, it was extremely important to deliver an excellent technical reference and also try to regain the customer trust. After a step-by-step on the configuration, a python script to simulate the customer’s Batch Job and a full replication on my side….. drum rolls…. I GOT 5 STARS from the customers! They got exactly what they needed to set-up their Batch Jobs and they learned how to use boto3 and assumed-roles!

This was definitely the most difficult case I dealt with because of the customer relationship that I needed to rebuild. Everyday, thousands of customers turn to AWS Support when not even StackOverflow has the answers they are looking for, so it is of extreme importance to AWS to have a highly technical support, it was my duty to go above and beyond on this situation. In the end, it was all worth it and I got a feedback that I will take with me for many years:

I wanted to take a minute to write this while the sentiment is fresh. I truly valued the kind, friendly yet completely professional way that Thales made himself available to assist with what was becoming a major problem for my customer. He was willing to adjust his schedule and did so without even a hint of irritation, which during critical times when the customer is so frustrated and unwilling to meet with support goes quite a long way. The short of it was, that Thales brought exactly what was needed to the table to unblock a major production release. In fact, he went well above even my expectations in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge because he wasn’t just an expert in the one area of the ticket stated but in all the right areas to truly resolve the matter. — Feedback from the Customer’s Technical Account Manager.

October

No big achievement.

November

• AWS Blog — How to configure AWS X-Ray tracing for your AWS Batch jobs.
• AWS Samples for the blog —aws-samples/aws-batch-xray.

Writing a public blog with my name on the AWS website is a big achievement for me. I was very happy to see through what was an idea and actually became relevant enough to make it available and possibly help customers looking to increase the observability of their environments.

AWS Blog — Tracing context on Batch Environments

December

Even thought I was making great progress on AWS, I decided to take my career in a different direction. After all, I remembered my boss saying something about Regret Minimization Framework and something clicked on my mind saying: “Hey, this is not what I want to do”.

Disclaimer: I haven’t met Jeff Bezos… yet. But his leadership principles are great, if you don’t know what I am talking about, check it out here. Regardless of being an IT professional or not, these principles are rock solid.

However the lessons I learned at AWS definitely helped me become a better professional .

As I mentioned earlier, this post is to document my professional year. The target audience is myself 10 years from now.

Regarding my career’s new direction, when I left AWS I was ready to move to Germany to become a SRE at Joyn.de but life took an unexpected turn and now I am in my home country Brazil working on the DevOps field but for a new company. I started the year taking on a Python Developer Freelance job, which was a great learning experience for me…. Well more about this on next year’s professional year overview. Stay safe my friends! Cheers!