The AWS Morning show you never knew you wanted

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look secrets management and everything that can go wrong with it. I discuss long-lived IAM credentials, why multi-factor authentication means you’ll end up pressing lots of buttons, why it’s worth paying 40 cents per secret each month to avoid using a product with a silly name, why it’s better when SSL certificates expire quickly, why it’s not worth reading a blog post on a site with an expired certificate, why forcing credential rotation on a cadence is a good thing, and more.

AWS Morning Brief Extras edition for the week of August 3rd, 2020. In this episode, we dive into the world of Multi-Cloud: what it is and what it isn't.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of August 3rd, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at the time I got a job at a web hosting provider and was asked to use the industry best practices I knew to optimize their data center. I touch upon why you should never start such an exercise by pointing out how terrible things are, why Confluence is where documentation goes to die, what the bootstrapping problem is, why it’s important to be aware of how things break and what failure mode looks like, how to avoid the herd of elephants problem during disaster recovery, why you need to have a good relationship with your AWS account manager, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 27, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at org charts and why they are the most disturbing thing to see on any whiteboard at any company. I touch upon Conway’s Law, the pros and cons of companies like Amazon having a ton of different teams, my hypothesis for why so many Google services get deprecated, how all data center architecture diagrams are out of date, how restructures are fundamentally about selling someone on their own irrelevance, the real reason companies go through digital transformations, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 20, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by exploring job interviews for engineers and why they tend to be universally terrible. In this episode, I discuss why open-ended questions are usually obnoxious, how it seems like a question you’re asked in an interview is a problem the company is experiencing at that moment and wants you to solve for free, how awesome it is when companies pay people to take tests, how there are many books written on how to pass an interview and few books written on how to give a good one, how you can tell a lot about a company by the way they hire people, how engineers should be interviewed, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 13, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at the time my friend’s personal AWS bill increased 9,000% month-to-month. I discuss the concerns you’re going to have when you build on Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and AWS, how this monstrous bill came into being in the first place, why organizations might not even notice this sort of billing discrepancy, what AWS should do to make sure this doesn’t happen to people’s personal accounts in the future, what a better approach to the AWS free tier could look like, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 7, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by examining IBM Cloud’s recent widespread outage. I talk about why you should never make fun of someone else’s downtime, how IBM’s response to the outage was abysmal, what cloud providers should do whenever their systems go down, how a cloud provider’s status page can never be dependent on things they are personally running, why IBM Cloud deserves the Oxymoron of the Year award, why it’s important to let the broader community learn from your major mistakes, how this fiasco demonstrates that IBM Cloud isn’t ready to properly service the market, and more.