I had the blessing to come from a family where love, support and affection came from my parents and siblings. I was always encouraged to do my best, and this increased my creativity through games. I grew up in Colombia during the 80s, and there was a game called “Estralandia”, which was quite similar in functionality to Lego figures. Dinosaurs, houses, helicopters, buildings... Everything I could think of, I tried to create with its red and white figures. My imagination was really the limit!
That’s why, when I was at an AWS event for the very first time, the following phrase struck me:
“Imagine that AWS is a big box of legos with which you can create things…..”
And it is a quote that I still agree with. AWS is a big box with a LOT of things that allow you to build EVERYTHING.
But perhaps due to stress, rush, or the day-to-day routine, you forget that these toys are not only designed to perform functions in companies, solve corporate problems, or optimize processes in industries. They should also entertain those who use them!
I guess that’s why Jeff Bezos once said:
“Work hard. Have fun. Make history”
So, how do I keep having fun with AWS? How can I continue to marvel at the huge possibilities it allows? When I tried to answer these questions, I recalled my childhood and one of the activities I most enjoyed: creating things with my Estralandia.
Immediately a new question arose: would it be possible that ‘Adult Me’ play together and have fun building stuff in AWW with ‘Inner Child Me’? Even better, how could a person over 40 years old explain to a child under 10 years old, concepts that sometimes seem so complex and unwieldy for an adult?
¡Let’s give it a try!
The first thing would be to tell him that in AWS we are going to work on a surface, and that this surface (despite the fact that we are going to do it on the floor) can be called ‘cloud’. In order to better explain the picture I’m trying to paint, I am going to use the LeoCAD software (https://www.leocad.org/):
Then I would tell him that we would have to put up a ‘security fence’ so that our creations would not be invaded or attacked from the outside. We could do this with a barrier around what we are building.
At that moment I would say that by having ‘fenced’ our cloud, we have made it private, either for our exclusive use or to give permission to those we want to access it.
From here I can also explain that this functionality is not just for us, but we can also invite other children to play. By putting their figurines in our ‘virtual private cloud’ (as long as we allow it —thus introducing myself to the term ‘VPC’). We could put up a figurine in charge of letting more figurines (people) in, or not.
This figurine would be responsible to confirm whether someone has a ‘username and password’ (this is especially meaningful to me because I used to love the show “Mission Impossible”). Then we can call this “combination of Username and Password” Identity, because they are precisely going to allow us to identify that person.
Whoever wants to enter our VPC must first have a username and password we give them. After this, an ‘entry authentication’ to our VPC would be carried out. Also we can decide what allowances we give them, giving them ‘authorization’ within our VPC and restricting them to others. This way, if someone wanted to enter our cloud the first thing that they would find would be our gatekeeper, our “Identity and Access Manager” (IAM for short):
When our little friend IAM allows the user to enter, we can encounter the following scenarios:
First scenario they can be a little ‘frustrated’, scratching their faces and saying:
“How stingy! Nothing else will fits in there!”
At this point, I would explain that the cloud can grow as much as we want. We could occupy the entire floor of the living room, plus the dining room, plus my parents’ bedroom, my siblings… And so. As much space as we would like to occupy! Or on the contrary, if we do not want to occupy the entire floor of the house, we could play with very few pieces. I would explain that this is one of the many advantages of the cloud, that we are able to ‘scale’ according to our needs.
I would tell them that since we are not the only ones in the world playing with these tiles, there could be discounts on the tile prices for the number of children playing, and that this is called ‘economy of scale’.
In my childhood I did not like mathematics very much. So then I would choose a tile that represents a calculator, so that I can perform basic functions (add, subtract, multiply and divide integers). And to confirm that these operations needed to be done quickly, we could use a rabbit to represent these functions. We can call this rabbit the “Lambda Function”, and it would allow us to use the calculator only when we need it. As long as it’s not running, this calculator isn’t going to consume any battery (or money).
Once again, our IAM gatekeeper would be in charge of allowing a visiting figurine to reach our Lambda function.
As a child I liked to read a lot (before I was 10 years old I had already read “The Bible” for the first time). I could spend whole afternoons reading books, with a lot of information in them, and therefore being able to find something was sometimes a real feat (at that time the Internet was not even a thought!)
With that in mind, I would take the opportunity to explain the concept of being able to store information, to control it, to control who can access it, or how quickly and easily a piece of information can be found. This could be the perfect opportunity to introduce the concept of ‘databases’ and, considering that I really liked dogs, I would use this animal figurine to represent how I could find information, just as a dog would find a bone to play with.
To review everything thus far, let’s start with 2 figurines that would represent the people who want to use our ‘virtual private cloud’. First they’ll encounter the entry rules, and can only go to the parts of the cloud that we have allowed them to.
Something to keep in mind is the importance of knowing who is doing what and where. Having that ‘ability to record’ (groups of logs) what happens in our cloud is vital. For that purpose we could have a ‘little notebook’ on the important points.
These records (or logs) could go to a single central point throughout our cloud, so that our ‘watchman’ could have a broader viewpoint of our entire system. We are going to call this watchman (represented by an owl) “CloudWatch”, and we can ask him for each event that has happened and that has been registered in our cloud.
Finally, I would keep in mind that some of the figurines could potentially have associated cost. Typically, the figurines would only incur a cost for as long as they are used (‘on demand’). All these values should also be centralized in a single point of billing and costs, which we can call “Billing and Cost Management”.
It would be great if, at the end of playing, my ‘Current Self’ asked my ‘Child Self’:
“Did you like the game? What do you think of AWS? Would you like to keep playing with AWS and keep building and learning more?”
I think that last question applies consistently to all of us who are currently developing solutions with Amazon Web Services.
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