Category: Cloud Cadet

Cloud Cadet Episode 8: Student Interview About AWS Certifications

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Today’s episode is hosted by Anthony James, founder of Linux Academy, and by AWS instructor and co-host, Christophe Limpalair. In this edition, we are joined by Thomas, a student based in Portland, Oregon, who has gone through and absolutely nailed the various AWS certifications through the use of Linux Academy.

Thomas has spent the last few months truly diving in AWS to brush up on his technical chops and learn how to be more technologically independent. He is been on the forefront of new technology for a while now, with his involvement in virtual reality, but with everyone migrating to cloud computing, he explains his thoughts about why AWS will be a big opportunity for growth shortly.

Thomas’s interest in AWS was sparked by wanting to what the forefront of hardware entailed, and by his desire to truly understand how the internet and the cloud work. He felt led to learn about AWS and discover more about its inner workings, which is what brought him to us at Linux Academy.

Today’s topics include:

  • Thomas’s involvement in the development of an OculusRift game
  • The best points to memorize to ace your certification
  • Why he powered through the exams as fast as possible
  • The importance of paying attention to detail
  • How to know when you’re ready to move on from a topic
  • Tips to getting through the exam effectively and efficiently
  • Thomas’s experience interacting with the LinuxAcademy community
  • Being inspired by other people’s success
  • His study process and how he prepares the night before

Thomas currently holds four certifications, has completed five of the courses and passed all three associate level certifications – all in about 10 weeks time. It is safe to say his study methods are Linux Academy approved, as well.

That being said, our focus today is finding out the best tips and tricks that Thomas applied while preparing for his AWS certifications and exams. Not only will you discover one of the best techniques to solidify the information you’ve learned, but he gives expert advice about the most effective way to begin your exam, and much more!

Take advantage of the resources we have at Linux Academy so you can be prepared, too! Also, be sure to check out Christophe’s podcast, Scale Your Code. Thank you for tuning in to another edition of Cloud Cadet!

Cloud Cadet Episode 7: Serverless Architecture in action with Sander Nagtegaal Co-Founder of Teletext.io

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“We learned from previous startups… Because even as Teletext became a company, we learned from experience that one of the most important things if you launch a product that you’re still testing and not making money with, is for it to be cheap. If it’s cheap, you have a much longer runway and you can keep up with the competition much longer. The quickest way to let your startup fail is to spend too much money, too soon.” – Sander Nagtegaal, CTO at myTomorrows, co-founder of Teletext.io and Peecho

Welcome to episode seven of Cloud Cadet! Hosted by Anthony James, founder of Linux Academy, and Linux Academy instructor Christophe Limpalair, this episode features an interview with guest, Sander Nagtegaal. (more…)

Cloud Cadet #4: AD and LDAP services within AWS

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Welcome to episode four of Cloud Cadet. Today we are joined by instructor Stephen, and our co-hosts Anthony and Christophe. Stephen will be showing us some content for his course Active Directory and AWS.

This course stems from the need many enterprises have for Active Directory, which allows for credential management. Active Directory is stored on-site, but many need to extend their Active Directory environment to AWS. Today, you will discover the what, why, and how of Active Directory on AWS.

Topics include:

  • Setting up and managing services for AD with AWS solutions
  • Gaining fine-grain control by getting rid of permissions
  • Spinning up VPN instances
  • Looking inside site to site VPN
  • Binding Windows and Linux servers

Stephen first shows us an existing environment he has created by building two separate AWS accounts with separate VPCs. In them, he has spun up VPNs. For more details on how to perform these actions, please see the course itself.

He then uses an already existing AD domain controller located in one of these environments and shows us how to bind a Linux server using an AD credential to the AD environment. Additionally, both AWS accounts are tied together with an openswan VPN.

He walks us through a variety of options for these accounts and on-premise networks. The idea is that regardless of whether it is between various AWS accounts and regions, or an AWS account and on-premise servers, you can certainly have a site to site VPN connection set up. Stephen also explains how to work between various VPCs in different regions.

Stephen moves on to bind a Linux instance into his AD domain. This is done through an EC2 instance setup in AWS, where he sets up a user to use as a Linux credential, versus using local instance authentication. A step-by-step narration of this is also provided within the course.

Stephen then jumps into a Linux instance that he first had to bind with the domain. He joins this particular instance to the domain using a realm command.

We also learn that we have the opportunity only to allow certain users to bind through AD to our server, and have the chance to allow only serving groups in AD to log onto the domain.

This is where some of the power of managing Linux servers comes in, using existing enterprise solutions such as AD.

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s edition of Cloud Cadet. Be sure to stay tuned for all-new episodes coming soon.

Cloud Cadet Episode 3: An Introduction to Lambda

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Welcome to episode three of the Cloud Cadet Podcast. Today we’re joined by our co-hosts, Terry Cox and Anthony James. They’ll be interviewing Linux Academy AWS instructor Christophe, who talks about the relatively new AWS service, Lambda.

Lambda is exciting; you can plug it into mobile and web applications, such as chats, games and more. The way it works is that it removed the need for servers, so you don’t have any of the security and update issues; it’s event-driven code execution. Christophe tells us what that means and how it works. (more…)

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Cloud Cadet Episode 2: Advanced AWS Security with Barracuda’s WAF

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Welcome to this episode of the Cloud Cadet Podcast. Today, Anthony and Christophe sit down with Linux Academy’s core OpenStack instructor, Stephen. Stephen has been an instructor with us for just about two years. He features our Linux Essentials course (which is where we suggest everyone should start), but today he’s going to be talking a little bit about AWS.

We’re going to set up a web application firewall, specifically, Barracuda’s WAF. Stephen shows you just how easy it is to use the marketplace to spin up the WAF and configure security groups to get it up and running. (more…)

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Cloud Cadet Episode 1: Ansible and AWS

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Welcome to the first episode of the Cloud Cadet podcast, brought to you by the Linux Academy. Our goal is to provide you with good how-tos, talk about the current technologies in the cloud, and help you run your cloud to perfection. Meet your hosts, Anthony James, and Christophe.

Anthony is the founder of Linux Academy while Christophe just joined us a few weeks ago and is super excited to keep going. He is the founder and owner of the Scale Your Code podcast, where he interviews all kinds of people from Twitpic, Google, Netflix, and more about the scalability of web performance, web performance, and web security. It is a lot of fun – click here to check it out.

Every episode, we’ll have a guest instructor who’s been working on content for Linux Academy. They talk about what they’ve been doing, the goals behind their courses, and they’ll show us comprehensive step-by-step demos so you can follow in their steps.

All three of them are AWS instructors, so maybe you have an idea of where this is heading: You’ll get a lot of useful knowledge from this show, and you will be particularly interested today if you like Amazon Web Services and Ansible.

We sit down with Terry, who’s been with Linux Academy for about three years. Today he is covering Ansible and the details of using it with AWS. He walks through a quick demo about how to instantiate an EC2 image and explains some of the environmental setup that you have to go through if you are going to use it with AWS. (more…)

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