Tekhead.it

Now that’s what I call… Tech Predictions 2017

Posted on 31st December 2016 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off

At this time of year, it is customary to look back at the past 12 months and make some random or not-so-random guesses as to what will happen over the coming 12. As such, what could be more fitting for my final post of 2016?!

Here’s a few of my personal best, worst, and easy guess candidates for 2017…

Tekhead Predictable Tech Predictions 2017

Easy Guesses

Come on Alex, even Penfold could have predicted these!

AWS will continue to dominate the cloud market, though the rate at which they deploy new features will start to slow (over 1000 a year is pretty unsustainable!). Their revenues will continue to grow at gangbuster rates, however their market share will be slightly eroded as people experiment more with their competitors too.
Microsoft Azure will grow massively (not quite 100% but not far off it). Their main growth will probably be in hosting enterprises and typical line of business applications as people move their legacy junk into the cloud. The recent announcements of the Single Instance VM SLA of 99.9% will definitely accelerate this as customers will feel less include to refactor their applications for cloud.
Distributed everything!
Docker will start to become more mainstream production and less Dev/Test.
Google will kill off at least one popular service with multiple millions of users.
The homelab market will reduce as people do more and more of their studying in the cloud.
Podcasting will become the new blogging (if it hasn’t already!)
DellEMC will continue to hack off bits of its anatomy to pay back that cheeky little $67Bn debt.
I continue to use memes as a crutch to make my otherwise lifeless articles marginally more interesting!

Best Guesses

Its on the cards… maybe?

Google will continue to be ignored by most enterprises for Cloud IaaS. They will gain some reasonable growth in the web application space after another mass marketing activity to developers, ISVs and hosters.
Oracle grows Cloud revenues 50% or more but market share remains small. Their growth is mainly driven by IaaS revenue as customers begin to move their workloads to be closer to their data in the Oracle PaaS and SaaS services.
There will be no major storage company IPO in 2017, i.e. over $200m.
Many storage startups will run out of funding and die on the vine (depressing I know!). Their IP will be snapped up by the old guard storage companies in the proceeding fire sales…
3D XPoint will begin to creep into storage arrays by the end of the year, fuelling another storage VC funding bubble for at least another 12 months for any company who claims to have an innovative way to use it.
A major cloud provider suffers a global outage.

Worst Guesses

These probably won’t happen, but if any of them do, I’ll claim smugly that I knew they were always going to!

Pure Storage will make an acquisition of a storage startup to create their third product line, perhaps a secondary storage company (i.e. not just all flash) along the lines of Cohesity.
Cisco will buy a storage company. They will be more successful at integrating it than they were with Whiptail! (Which wouldn’t be difficult… 😮 )
Spanning a single application over multiple clouds becomes a real possibility, as one or more startups come out of stealth to provide innovative ways to span clouds. Nobody buys into it, except maybe for DR.
Tekhead.it becomes the most read blog in the world in 2017
Cats take over the planet and dogs are forced to form a rebel alliance which is ultimately victorious when a chihuahua takes out the entire cat leadership in one go, with a stolen reaper drone.
Jonah Hill wins Strictly Come Dancing, narrowly defeating Frankie Boyle and Charlie Brooker in the final.

And finally…

Here’s wishing you all an awesome, fun and prosperous 2017!

Cloud, Life, Storage 3D XPoint, AWS, Azure, blogging, Cisco, Cloud, DellEMC, distributed, docker, Google, homelab, Multi-cloud, Oracle, podcasting, Pure Storage, storage, Whiptail

AWS Certified Developer Associate (CDA) Exam Study Guide and Materials

Posted on 6th December 2016 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off

Following on from my previous AWS exam experience post for the AWS Certified Developer Associate (CDA) exam from Amazon, the following describes the study materials I used towards the exam.

As a reminder, this is my second AWS exam, having completed the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate exam earlier this year. As such the materials I used to study towards the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam are more sparse, due to the level of knowledge I already have.

For a really full picture of all of the materials I’ve used over the last 12 months, I highly recommend you check out the Certified Solution Architect Associate exam experience and the Certified Solution Architect Associate study guides, along with a number of tips, tricks and gotchas I have posted over the past few months. I also did a podcast recently with Scott Lowe on the subject of learning AWS. If you are new to AWS, I highly recommend you check it out!

Study Materials

Whilst studying for the exam, I used the following study materials:

Exam Blueprint
- This is always the go-to document for almost any current industry certification, and should be used as your primary guide for resources and areas to study. In the case of the AWS Exam Blueprint, they actually direct you to specific white papers to review as well as the content areas to study.
- AWS CDA Exam Blueprint
ACloud.Guru AWS Certified Developer Associate training course.
- As with the CSA course, the quality of the production (especially as Ryan and co are a small startup) is excellent. Remember that as Ryan says, they are focussed on teaching you the knowledge to pass the exam, not teaching you everything in AWS. There is no substitute for labbing and working with AWS day to day to become an expert, but you can certainly pass the exam based on this course! This might then help you get your first AWS job and gain the experience you need to be a real Cloud Guru! 🙂
- The course has around about 10-12 hours or so of content, but I would say it took me 15-20 hours in total between all of the lab work, coming up with my own scenarios to practice configuring different elements, completing the quizzes, and researching any areas where I got a quiz answer incorrect or wasn’t sure of the reasons for a specific answer. Ryan also speaks quite slowly and very clearly, so I find that watching it at 1.5x speed or above can help get through the videos on the areas you know well already. Remember to slow it back down for new content areas of course!
QA Architecting on AWS & Advanced Architecting on AWS compressed training course
- Myself and a number of colleagues completed both of the 3 day architecting courses (standard and advanced) in a rather intense, but very informative 5 day week! This was an awesome course, and really helped my gain breadth and depth of knowledge, but I would not say it was critical to passing the Developer exam itself.
White Papers
- The AWS white papers are a great source of information, though they can be a bit dry at times. I highly recommend using them to augment any particular areas you feel less confident in. See my AWS CSA guide for a list of which to read.
AWS CSA Official Practice Exam and Sample Exam Questions
- I would say this is a good indicator of the level of difficulty of the actual exam.
- Sample AWS CDA Exam
FAQs
Other Articles and Resources – The AWS documentation site is an absolute goldmine of information, and most of the articles are well written and easy to consume. Significantly more so than some of the best known “kb” and documentation sites in the industry IMHO. The following is a list of some of the articles I dipped in and out of while researching for the exam as well as my AWS Tips and Gotchas blog series:
And finally…
- I say this about every single exam I have ever taken – lab it, lab it lab it! It is a million times easier to answer a question based on something you have actually done yourself! Don’t try to just learn the theory, spend a bit of time doing it in practice and you will reap the benefits in both the exam and real life!

Want to Learn More?

Don’t forget to check out my other AWS articles tips here:

Index of Tekhead.it Blog Posts on Amazon AWS

AWS, Certification, Cloud Amazon, associate, AWS, Blueprint, CDA, certification, Certified Developer Associate, CSA, education, Exam, Exam Prep, experience, FAQ, guide, QA, Solutions Architect Associate

Scale-Out. Distributed. Whatever the Name, it’s the Future of Computing

Posted on 28th November 2016 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off

We are currently living in the fastest period of innovation in the technology space which there has probably ever been. New companies spring up every week with new ideas, some good, some bad, some just plain awesome and unexpected!

One of the most common trends I have seen in this however was described in a book I read recently, “The Second Machine Age” by Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee. This trend is that the majority of new ideas are (more often than not) unique recombinations of old ones.

Take for example the iPhone. It was not the first smart phone. It was not the first mobile phone, the first touch screen, or the first device to run installable apps. However, Apple recombined an existing set of technologies into a very compelling product.

We also reached a point a while back where clock speeds of CPUs are no longer increasing, and even CPUs are scaling horizontally. Workloads are therefore typically being designed to scale horizontally instead of vertically, taking advantage of the increased compute resources available whilst avoid being locked to vertically scaling clock speeds.

Finally, another trend we have seen in the industry of late is inexpensive and low power CPUs from ARM, being used in all sorts of weird and wonderful places; often providing solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had. Up until now, their place has generally been confined outside of the data centre. I am, however, aware of a number of companies now working on bringing them to the enterprise in a big way!

So, in this context of recombination, imagine then if you could provide a scale-out storage architecture where every single spindle had its own compute directly attached. Then combine many of these “nano-servers” together in a scale-out JBOD form factor on subscription pricing, all managed from a Meraki-style cloud portal… well that’s exactly what Igneous Systems have designed!

One of the coolest things about scaling out like this, is that instead of a small number of large fault domains based around controllers, you actually end up with many tiny fault domains instead. The loss of any one controller or drive is basically negligible within the system and replacements can be sorted at the convenience of the administrators, rather than panicking about replacement of components asap. Igneous claim that you can also scale fairly linearly, avoiding the traditional bottlenecks of a dual controller (or similar) system. It will be interesting to see some performance benchmarks as they become available!

It’s still early days, so they are doing code deployments at some pretty high rates, around every 2 weeks, and to be honest I think there is a bit of work to be done around clarity of their SLAs, but in general it looks like a very interesting platform, particularly when pricing is claimed to be as low as half the price of Amazon S3.

Now as you might expect from a massively distributed solution, the entry point is not small, typically procured in 212TiB chunks, so don’t expect to use it for your SMB home drives! If however you have petabyte-scale data volumes and are looking for an on-prem(ises!) S3 compatible datastore, then its certainly worth looking at Igneous.

The future in the scale-out space is certainly bright, now if only I could get people to refactor their single-threaded applications!… 🙂

Further Info

You can catch the full Igneous session at the link below – it certainly was unexpected and interesting, for sure!

Igneous Systems Presents at Tech Field Day 12

Further Reading

Some of the other TFD delegates had their own takes on the presentation we saw. Check them out here:

Disclaimer: My flights, accommodation, meals, etc at Tech Field Day 12 were provided by Tech Field Day, but there was no expectation or request for me to write about any of the vendors products or services.

Storage, Tech Field Day Amazon, ARM, AWS, Chip, CPU, distributed, Igneous, Igneous Systems, Intel, Object Storage, S3, scale-out, storage, Tech Field Day, TFD12

Tekhead.it