Staying up to date with the Cloud

I have a deadline - in late May my AWS Solution Architect Associate certification will expire. Rather than simply renewing it I'd like to "level-up" to the Professional certification.

Now, I actually had this goal last year before AWS extended their certifications from 2 years to 3, but I was really busy this time last year and it fell by the wayside. This year I'm probably just as busy, but at least I have an extra year of experience under my belt.

I'm planning to write a series of posts about the experience of studying for the certification and the exam itself, but I thought I'd start with a more general topic - how to stay up to date with developments in the different Cloud platforms (but particularly AWS).

In my role as the Cloud Solutions Lead for Leading EDJE I feel a responsibility to stay up to date with the Cloud Platforms we use at our clients. As I also work full time at a client there's a limit to how much time I can spend experimenting with every new technology, so I mostly have to settle for an awareness of new features unless they directly related to a project I'm currently working on.

Here are some resources I've found useful (in particular for AWS).

AWS Resources

• AWS News Blog - this is the primary blog for AWS that highlights the larger announcements, often with examples of how to use them. This is where Jeff Barr often posts.
• What's New with AWS - this is the firehose of all announcements across all services and regions, and a lot of the information here is not relevant to me, but it can include information I might otherwise have missed. For example I just saw this:
  • Amazon ECS-optimized Linux 2 AMIs now come with pre-installed AWS Systems Manager Agent - I was actually just researching this last weekend when I noticed that I couldn't connect using Session Manager to new ECS instances, and after having read some of the comments on the roadmap GitHub issue, I'm a little surprised to see this announced.
• A Cloud Guru: AWS This Week - this long running series of short videos (the last one was #307) gives a summary of the important AWS announcements from the last week.
• AWS YouTube channel - lots of videos, but perhaps most importantly this is where you can watch the replays of the re:Invent keynotes where this year like every year there were a lot of announcements.
• AWS Stash - Searchable index of AWS videos, blog posts, GitHub repos etc. This is a particularly good way to find particular sessions from re:Invent
  • e.g. ECS sessions from re:Invent 2019

Azure Resources

• Azure Blog - highlights announcements and related content.
• Azure updates - the firehose for Azure updates

GCP Resources

• GCP Blog - blog that includes announcements but also customer stories, tutorials and other content
• Individual services within GCP have Release Notes that contain details of all changes:
  • Google Kubernetes Engine Release Notes
  • Compute Engine Release Notes
  • ...(I'm not going to list them all)

I hope you find some of these resources useful. Let me know if you have any resources you use (in particular for Azure and GCP).