From Zero To Hero!

I don’t know, somewhere somehow I keep hearing this line on the headers of courses/services these trainers want to sell. Wow, how enticing is that to someone who’s coming from a zero IT background. Yet, their 6-8 hours of videos on youtube after completion, you come out in a more zombie like state, dazed out and wondering, some how you were far better before watching it than after.

And then, there are people selling courses, informative nice and you get to learn, but the more courses you do, the more you come to realize, these are all primarily geared towards achieving the certification. How to pass that exam, how to become that champion! Get certified and 6 figure income it is. It’s that easy. It’s lucrative. Well is it really that easy? lets discuss what this really is in a bit more depth.

Initially you will learn all that there is to pass and clear the certification, once you clear it, you proudly display it to everyone put these badges on LinkedIn and then the reality sets in. You wonder what now? What the hell am I doing here and how did I get here to begin with? I brain dumped My self into clearing these certifications but does it really truly offer me or give me insights into these topics/subjects. Do I really fundamentally understand what I am certified for?

Well, that’s not that big of a problem, you can put your skills to test when you get that job but wait! Nobody wants to hire me. Everybody wants a 10 year this, 5 years that experience. But how do I get that experience at age 40 when nobody wants to hire me because I have no experience. So now I am in this catch 22 situation. And we’ve all been there. Luckily for me this is more of a passion than a need.

Last year my brother mentioned about Cloud Computing, somehow he sensed I always had this natural urge of understanding how things work. And even at my current finance job I am always doing things which are more IT oriented  to help make my job easier.

And then, the question was where, where do I start? What is IT? its an ocean, its deep and wide. Here comes my brother again and suggests AWS. What the hell is AWS? That’s when I got into this spaghetti bowl. Up until this point, cloud to me meant One Drive, or Dropbox. But then it hit me once I got the concept of what it actually is. 

It’s vast, its horizontal, it touches every aspect of IT. In fact I think the “term cloud” is used so loosely that people don’t understand exactly what it means. And then, to explain to a common joe we top it up by coming up with terms like PAAS, IAAS, SAAS. 

I want to be able to simply walk into a CFO’s office and tell them.. hey, how about we almost completely cut your IT infrastructures Capital Expenditure and convert it into a variable expense?  But wait..there’s more. You will never have to worry about maintenance of that hardware and keep up with the updates. And wait...there’s more. How about we replicate your IT infrastructure in different zones so you never have a downtime and worry about business continuity in case of a disaster. Does that sound good enough? 

Are you worried about security? We are so secure and compliant that we are officially certified by every three to ten letter organization. We have systems in place that you can run in your database, identify anything non compliant that is stored insecurely or could make you liable and it can read patterns and will provide you with a report along with a complete list of instructions on how to remedy the situation. Does that sound good? Proactive compliance at its best. Not so fast..

It can can even detect and identify individuals on wanted list from images, videos or even any credit card numbers stored or any information or anything that can put your company at risk from an audit or law enforcement’s point of view. Our suite of compliance and security products are so vast that your data is more secure with us than the most secured vaults in a bank in any country. It’s encrypted while its static and its even encrypted while in transit. Most of our security/monitoring products are backed by machine learning algorithms which get smarter over time. What about firewalls you said? You’re firewalled at every level from head to toe. At every state. From stateless to stateful, you name it!

 Well, I am not done yet, there’s more...If you throw in an extra $19.99 we will also scale out or scale in your infrastructure based on demand without your IT team ever having to deal with it because its all automated. Are you worried about servers and worry that you need a license to run the software and keep it up to date? Well..how does serverless computing sound to you? Yes, you heard it right. Run codes and databases directly on our platform without the need for underlying hardware.

I hope you get a bit of an idea by now. By the way I am just touching the tip of the iceberg here. The amount of enterprise level products they offer is so vast and their catalogue keeps growing at such a fast pace that by the time you’re done studying and ready for certification, or even finished reading this article there’s already going to be new products lining up.

This is not cloud. The internet itself is a cloud. This is technology on steroids which you can rent.

What AWS basically is offering to you is this; They want to stop you from spending on your furniture each year trying to get the latest and the greatest and instead rent it from them. They will maintain upgrade, design exactly as you need it and the best part is, you only pay when you use that couch.

That’s what “cloud computing” is at its core. It’s a massively scaled subscription based model, and when you consider economies of scale, the price is always cheaper and it keeps getting cheaper. 

So now, lets get back to that lucrative question of easy certification with a 6 figure job. As a solutions architect you have to be knee deep in knowledge in almost all of their products, and as a professional architect you’re in all the way to your head. The point is not to sway you away or scare you.

 I want you to understand the true scope and give you an idea unlike what you get on Udemy, cloudguru, Linux Academy etc. They’re great if you already are in this field and want to quickly get certified. But not so much if you are shifting careers like myself. For that you need to start from bottom up and not top down.

The idea of this blog is to keep documenting my learning journey, post notes for my personal reference and hopefully this might help some of you out there who are also trying put this giant octopus into perspective.

Ciao

See you on the next one.