Reviewing the AWS SysOps course

This week I had the opportunity to attend the AWS SysOps Administrator training in London supplied by Global Knowledge, courtesy of Kainos. And despite having to swap the rarity of constant 24 degrees and sunshine in Belfast, for a dismal, blustery 13 degree London, it was 3 days well spent.

Expectations

The projects I have been working on over the past few years in my WebOps role have involved working mostly on VMWare vCloud platforms provided by a number of different suppliers. I say mostly as I have been using some AWS features, such as Route 53, SES etc, during this time, but have never really been able to use AWS as the main platform for a project.

I’ve been looking forward to getting the opportunity to work with AWS as it has a huge catalog of awesome features that is constantly growing and evolving. And In the next few weeks I am getting to do just that by starting a new project that will be based in AWS. So my main goal of attending this training was to gain an understanding at a high level of the AWS ecosystem, but more importantly, learn how to design and build an infrastructure to serve a web-based application primarily using EC2.

Organisation

Unfortunately, this aspect was a downfall of the course.

The course start time was delayed by an hour on the first morning due to “Technical Issues”. It was a part classroom — part virtual course. Getting the people attending virtually up and running proved difficult.

Once we got up and running we were encouraged to “click along” with both the presentation and the lab guide, both of which had to be accessed via a link that was sent to us a week before the course. The only problem was no-one was aware of this link and it turned out it had gone to most peoples junk folder as it came from an address nothing to do with the course or the vendor we had purchased the course from.

So after about an hour and a half of sorting all these problems out, the next half hour was spent asking the attendants what experience they had with AWS and what they were hoping to get from the course so that the content could be slightly tailored to suit where possible. This is something that I think should have been done in priming before you get to the training. A simple, short survey would cover this and allow for the time in the classroom to be better spent.

All in all, I think that the organisation of a course such as this is easy to do right, with the slightest bit of preparation. It just felt like no effort or forethought had really been put into this, which was disappointing.

Format

As I mentioned above it was a part classroom — part virtual attendance for the course. There were 5 people (myself included) attending in a small classroom in London and 4 people remoting in. To be honest, after the initial setup issues, this worked rather well. The only issue was remote attendees tended to ask questions via a chat window, instead of just turning their mic’s on, which I think would have helped the course flow more freely, instead of pausing when we saw someone was typing on screen, waiting for the question they were going to ask.

The course was delivered in 9 modules over 3 days, although I’ll summarise these in 5 main sections later on. All of the modules contained a presentational element, where the instructor would talk you through slides, adding additional notes quite often. Then 7 of the 9 modules had a practical session attached.

Content & Delivery

The content and delivery of the training was great. The slides didn’t flood you with text but at the same time contained comprehensive information in the notes section for later referral. The instructor was incredibly knowledgeable, able to answer most questions that were asked of him and the ones that he couldn’t, he looked into that night and answered the next day. He applied real world scenarios, based on his own practical experience with the technology, which I found refreshing from some training I have attended where the instructors have learnt to teach the subject, rather than the subject itself. He also frequently split away from the slide deck to have a more interactive whiteboard session which I found very useful for breaking up the flow and peaking the attendees interest again. Some of the whiteboards did get quite busy and colourful.

As I mentioned above, I think the 9 modules are best grouped into the 5 sections below.

AWS Overview

The course began with a detailed overview of the AWS topology in terms of Regions, Availability Zones, Data concerns etc. The material then moved onto a high level overview of the AWS Service Stack, splitting all of their services into groups such as mobile services, deployment and management etc. It took several practical use cases such as a startup wanting to get a site up and running quickly and showing various ways this could be achieved in AWS. We then covered some global aspects of AWS such as IAM, the AWS console and the CLI.

Compute

This element of the training covered various elements of the EC2 service within AWS. The content and practicals covered the creation, configuration and security of instances. Usage of AMIs and template strategies were also discussed. Similar to most of the sections it finished with pricing considerations and common troubleshooting scenarios.

Networking & Storage

This section focused on understanding the VPC and best practice network design within AWS. We spent time on understanding Security Groups and Policies and how it all links together. We also covered various options for storage such as EBS, S3 and Glacier. Here we focused on practical examples of when each should or shouldn’t be used as well as how each can be accessed. We also discussed best practice in how they should be utilized and of course, the pricing associated with each.

Monitoring

Here we focused on 3 areas. Cloud trail, CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Alarms. We covered what each provided and how to make best use of each of them. We also touched on how 3rd parties can be implemented to get the most out of the services such as integrating Cloud Trail with ELK. This section was incredibly interesting as in past projects, to obtain the functionality that these services provide as standard, it has taken a considerable amount of overhead, implementing multiple 3rd party packages.

Automation

We covered two aspects of automation, Auto-Scaling and Orchestration using CloudFormation. The Auto-Scaling section was awesome, AWS makes scaling your infrastructure out automatically so easy that my attention was captured completely throughout this section.

The section on CloudFormation was also interesting as it was my first look at the service. Having experience in vcloud-tools and Terraform, I was interested in seeing if CloudFormation would bring anything new or different to the table. We went through some examples of CloudFormation templates and talked briefly about best practices in structuring your template topology. I was left a bit underwhelmed by CloudFormation, from what I saw, there are no added benefits over the likes of Terraform and at a glance, I wasn’t thrilled about the DSL in which templates are written.

Practicals

I haven’t really mentioned the practicals much until now and thats because I was really disappointed with them.

When on a training course, I want the practicals to provoke me to think about the section I have just learn’t. I want to be challenged to apply that knowledge to achieve a goal.

Unfortunately these practicals where more “paint by numbers” in that you were given detailed steps (and even a file to copy commands from) to go through to illustrate what was learnt in that section. Most of the practicals where set for an hour long but were able to be completed in less than half that, which i think shows the amount of thought that was required to complete them.

Definitely an aspect that could be approved.

Summary

I realise I’ve rambled on far more than I intended to when starting this article, so I’ll make this summary short.

If you are looking to gain a high level understanding of the AWS ecosystem as a whole, focusing attention on how to design and configure the infrastructure to run a web based application in the cloud, with an introduction to automation, then I would highly recommend this course, even despite the disappointing practicals.

Now onto the AWS DevOps & Associate Architect courses…..