DEV Community: Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾

[Ale's Unpopular Opinions - Issue #1] Big Tech battles over ICE contracts & more

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 01:57:27 +0000

Issue #1 - Big Tech battles over ICE contracts & more

Ale's Unpopular Opinions, a newsletter: A Latina's 🇲🇽 bold take on the tech industry and world events. Get ready for a newsletter with some unpopular opinions.

Salary negotiations for Women in Tech

This past week, I talked about salary negotiations for women in tech and shared personal examples of specific $$$ amounts I’ve negotiated before.

Read the twitter thread 🧵 to get more ideas on how to ask boldly for the salary you deserve.

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Big Tech battles over ICE contracts

Per usual, all the Big Tech companies are kissing up to ICE, in search of yet another government contract.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, etc are clamoring to get a massive $300m contract to help ICE deport immigrants. If you work at any of these corporations, it would be pretty badass if you took a stand and demanded your employer not apply for this contract. Talk to your teammates and lateral teams; find out how you can start an internal group or email list for discussing how to take action internally for these issues.

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Afghan Women continue to need our support

Since Biden ended the US exit in late August, the Taliban continues striving to return to their previous brutal regime. Women are especially vulnerable.

You can help this ongoing humanitarian crisis by donating to Women for Afghan Women.

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🚨 DevRel Job Alert

Superconductive reached to me about hiring a Developer Advocate 🥑 , so sharing it with you all cause I’m not on the job market right now.

DM me for intro.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to take action! We all get the opportunity to make a change if we only care enough to take a stand. 🙂

CfP for AsyncAPI Conference is open! 😀 🎉

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 22:33:07 +0000

The Call for Papers (CfP) for our upcoming AsyncAPI Conference is open! 😀

It ends on October 17th, which means you have one month to apply! 😱

Set aside November 16-18! 🦄

AsyncAPI Conference is for everyone in the community! 🦄 The main goal is to share and exchange the experiences between existing users and new community members. And have lots of fun. 😁

The community always needs more real examples/use cases of both the AsyncAPI spec and tools. That said, we don't want to place any limitations on the community and encourage submitters to share any and all ideas, in any way, shape, or form. The most important is to have some time for community members to share their experiences with each other.

Dates to Remember:

CFP Closes: Sunday, October 17 at 11:59 PM PDT
CFP Notifications: Friday, October 22
Schedule Announcement: Friday, October 29
Pre-recorded Video & Slide Due Date: Friday, November 5 at 11:59 PM PDT
Event Dates: Tuesday, November 16 - Thursday, November 18

CfP Topic Suggestions

Remember to ✨ have fun ✨ as you select your topic! 😀

Some ideas could be...

Real examples
Real use cases
AsyncAPI spec
AsyncAPI tools
etc.

👉🏽 Don't forget to apply and submit your CfPs over here.

What if I want to sponsor AsyncAPI conference?

If you would like to take a look at our sponsorship levels and learn more about where you can see your logo placements within the AsyncAPI Conference website, go here. 😀

Want to help with proposals selection?

If you would like to help with the AsyncAPI proposals selection, simply contact us directly on slack or feel free to raise your hand in our public community GitHub Discussion thread 🧵.

We can't wait to read your proposals! 🦄

Let us know if there are any questions we can help with!

How to contribute to OSS AsyncAPI Initiative 🌈

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 01:31:16 +0000

You may remember that I joined Postman, focusing solely on the Open-Source (OSS) AsyncAPI Initiative. 💕

Yesterday, someone on social media asked me what contributions are needed the most for AsyncAPI Initiative. After asking my team, they gave me a comprehensive list of what is most needed. Ready to contribute? 😃

What contributions are needed most

Volunteers and speakers for the upcoming October Hackathon and our Online Conference running from November 16-18.
More docs!
Dev effort in our react component in the 1.0 version so that we can start working on Studio UI.
More hands-on CLI development; we're using TS and Ink.
Regular maintenance for our VS Code plugin.
Continue improvements and add new features to core tools such as our spec parser/validator and code generator.
Test out our new baby Glee and share feedback.
Our website sorely needs a Front-End Dev that is willing to work without designs; we're using React, Tailwind, and Next.js. (Note: Since our OSS team doesn't have a designer, this means being open to improve stuff via trial/error and having the patience to accept that in open source, any contributor can jump into a PR and comment.)

Thank you for contributing 💕

We constantly need help at AsyncAPI Initiative and look forward to regular contributors. In return, we offer any onboarding support you need and a lovely community of people!

Let us know if you need anything to get started! 🌈

👉🏽 Don't forget to join our Slack channel!

I joined Postman, focusing on Open Source 👩🏼‍🚀

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 14:53:10 +0000

Well… the unexpected happened!

I joined Postman to focus on Open Source technologies.

(I've been informed this makes me a Postmanaut 👩🏼‍🚀.)

What is the new job about?

Being hired onto the Open Source (OSS) side of the Postman spaceship means I was not hired to work on the Postman product docs. (So joining Postman all-hands meetings or events are not required, cause I’m in one of the partner OSS teams.)

Rather, I was hired directly by the OSS project maintainer team that owns the AsyncAPI OSS initiative, which moved under the Linux Foundation.

If you're curious to learn more, Postman’s CEO and co-founder Abhinav Asthana wrote a blog post in 2020 to announce their partnership with AsyncAPI.

My job here as Senior Technical Writer will be to own the documentation for AsyncAPI.

That said, I’ll delve in a few streams or conference talks as well, despite not being their DevRel person. New boss just happened to suggest the idea and I decided to remain open to it since it would be only OSS community focused events. (I’ve been taking a purposeful break from corporate/startup conference talks for over a year because I needed and wanted a damn break.)

Thank you for the neat swag, Postman!

But...I'm also awaiting my AsyncAPI swag to arrive soon!

Wait, does Postman offer any cool benefits?

Ooh you bet they do! 🚀👩🏼‍🚀

$240/month lunch stipend: ergo, FREE lunch for as long as I work here 😜🍕🍕
Up to $600/year reimbursed for wellness and health programs; I’m using mine for kickboxing
Up to $100/month for Internet bill
Up to $200/year for Learning & Development (L&D) books 📚: applies to job-related, L&D literature of your choosing
Asynchronous communication via Slack
Remote WFH
Very flexible schedule
Unlimited PTO
Full medical benefits/401K account; they hope to start matching this year or next 🤞🏽
Charity/Foundation donation matching for an organization of your choice 🥰; I will be choosing Women for Afghan Women, because we need to continue supporting Afghan Women during the current humanitarian crisis unrolling in Afghanistan this year.

What is AsyncAPI?

AsyncAPI is an OSS initiative that seeks to improve Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs), asynchronous API standardization, and asynchronous API developer tools.

AsyncAPI was created to describe APIs that don’t use HTTP. AsyncAPI has a specification similar to OpenAPI: it uses JSON schema for modeling published and subscribed objects.

EDAs like AsyncAPI are broker-centric. A broker is a piece of infrastructure in charge of receiving messages and delivering them. Brokers can store messages until they are delivered, making EDAs quite resilient to failures. Some examples of brokers are RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, Solace, etc.

Wanna try an AsyncAPI playground?
https://playground.asyncapi.io

asyncapi: '2.1.0'
info:
  title: Count Signups
  version: 1.0.0
  description: This service counts user signups
channels:
  user/signedup:
    subscribe:
      message:
        $ref: '#/components/messages/UserSignedUp'
components:
  messages:
    UserSignedUp:
      payload:
        type: object
        properties:
          displayName:
            type: string
            description: user name
          email:
            type: string
            format: email
            description: user email

Why am I excited about joining a 💯% OSS team?

Honestly, I am most excited about not having a Product Owner that feels pressured by an Engineering organization.

Why?

It’s been my experience that when Product Managers (PMs) or Engineering orgs own Technical Writer (TW) teams, Developer Documentation often suffers by getting caught between the conflicting priorities of opposite teams.
Engineering orgs tend to assume dev audiences know at least some basics. (For the love of donuts 🍩 🍩 🍩... can we stop assuming what readers do or don’t know, have or haven’t installed, and have or haven't tested before?!?!)
Engineering orgs tend to be arrogant in their programming knowledge and not place enough value on detailed and beginner guides.
Engineering orgs tend to forget that DevDocs need to make sense to non-programmers. (i.e. Not all PMs know how to program and not all readers are developers. I mean, do you want your Sales team empowered for success or don’t you?)
PMs tend to be too opinionated on voice, which consistently leads to stifling a tech writer’s individual style.
PMs can also focus too much on feature driven development that brings in more business vs prioritizing what the actual community freaking asked for.
PMs can lose perspective and forget that documentation should help ANYONE. That includes developers whose first language is not English. Forcing TWs who learnt English as their second language to ✨✨ magically ✨✨ write only in mind for USA audiences or English grammar enthusiasts is the opposite of inclusion and diversity. PMs need to understand that it’s a balancing act to tackle DevDocs and that keeping it simple to read matters!
Having TW teams report into PM (or Engineering) orgs removes true ownership from TWs. TW teams need to have sole jurisdiction to do the job right. As long as TWs are reporting to another department, Developer Documentation goals will always be in competition with the parent org.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.🎤

What’s next?

I’m available for blog posts, articles, workshops, videos, and talks about AsyncAPI, the AsyncAPI community, and how you too can contribute to AsyncAPI.♥️

My main focus is writing our Docs, but new boss supports variety, so I’m open to it.😃👍🏽

I'll also make a point to help with community questions that come through our AsyncAPI Slack channel.

Lastly, we host and record community interest meetings bi-weekly on Tuesdays. Meetings rotate from 4:00pm UTC one Tuesday and then 8:00am UTC the next Tuesday. Rotating the time of our bi-community meetings allows us to meet with community members from APAC, Europe and Americas. If you'd like to join me, all you have to do is add our calendar or join our mailing list to get an invite to the next meeting.

Let me know how I can help!

If you already have some AsyncAPI questions to send my way, I'm only a DM away here and in my social media.

I can't wait to meet and support all of you awesome OSS community members!

✨ I'm getting PUBLISHED ✨

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 13:55:39 +0000

✨ I'm getting PUBLISHED ✨

My most recent book proposal was accepted by not 1, but 2 publishers! I'm humbled to have been given the opportunity to select to work with Apress.

📚 Designing Developer Documentation as a Product
🗓 Early 2022

It doesn't feel real quite yet, but looking at the official Apress contract sure helps make it real! Eeek!

A big thank you to @dabit3 who first introduced me to contacts in acquisitions at both Manning and O'Reilly. Next thank you goes to Corey Quinn for pushing me to not go with the first publishing house that accepts me. He also introduced me to Apress folks.

I've dreamed and had the goal of getting published since I was 8 years old. It still feels unreal to me! I am so excited for the dream to come true! This vid is a little longer than 5mins, but I wanted to tell my story, so worth it.😁

Lastly, thank you all who are responding with such enthusiasm already to my book! 📚🤗

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We're going to 💕transcribe💕 and post each 'Privilege in Tech'🎙️ episode

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 18:26:01 +0000

✨Announcement✨

We've created an organization on the DEV.to platform so that we can 💕transcribe💕 and post each episode!

Alejandra created the #TechPrivilege podcast🎙 under her @sheCodesNow organization in an effort to help the most vulnerable in tech not feel erased. We'll discuss tech media stories and how to support diverse teammates with less privilege.

Our co-hosts @alejandra_quetzalli, @maggiecodes_, @devpato, @ovflowd, and @lisaychuang, are excited to talk about tech privilege.

We're also excited to let you know that we recently became a 🟣Twitter Spaces host, and we'll continue to host safe rooms for people to talk about what it feels like to be less privileged in tech.

p.s. Give us a holler if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast!

Expedia Adventures as a Developer Educator owning a Jira Board & Backlog

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 15:52:51 +0000

As some of you know, I posted previously that I just started a new role with Expedia Group.

I accepted a role as a Developer Educator (DE), which means I will be writing and maintaining lots of engineering documentation, API refs, and tutorials.

I had been feeling for a while that I needed a new challenge that felt more like me. This new role felt perfect for my next learning adventure.

Little did I know

In my first week on the new job, I was given 2 mentors to ramp me up on the platform and the new role. To be honest, this is the MOST mentorship any company to date has given me! It was awesome!

But, a few days into the role, my primary mentor pulled me aside to explain that she and her fiance wanted to move back closer to home in Europe. (She is Romanian.) She told me she wanted me to know asap so that I wasn't shocked that she only had 2 more weeks with me.

In essence, the previous Senior DE was telling me she was leaving and passing the baton over to me.

Eeeek! AAAAH!!

What did this mean?

Well, one of the main things this previous Senior DE was in charge of was the Backlog Board and she was also kinda our Scrum Master.

Suddenly, I was in charge of maintaining our Jira Sprint board, the backlog, and more!

Not my actual team's backlog, yo! Got this from google somewhere...

Even though this meant an increase in responsibility I had not anticipated, I found myself excited at the opportunity. I have been Scrum master before for smaller projects and I missed this area of responsibility.

The truth is, there is nothing like being left in charge of a Backlog board to REALLY get to ramp up on your new product.

Do you feel ready for the added responsibility?

Yes!

I will probably make many mistakes and learn a lot. And that is what keeps a job interesting! 😄

Kid Me wouldn't believe I got an iMac in 2020

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 19:47:02 +0000

If we were to time travel to the early 90s when I was a kid, and you were to tell me that one day I would be able to afford an iMac, I wouldn't have believed you.

(Granted, iMacs specifically didn't obviously exist when I was a kiddo, but you know what I mean.)

We grew up poor

I was never one of those kids who got to own Mac laptops all through high school and college. In fact, I did not even touch one until I was in my early 20s! The first time I was able to afford a MacBook Air laptop was in my late 20s.

Today, I am privileged. I can afford an iMac!

My iMac arrived literally on the last day of the year for 2020. 2020 was a hard hit financially in so many ways, all over the world. I cannot believe my privilege, in being able to buy an iMac in what will probably go down in history as one of the most insane world criseses faced by humanity.

Because that is what it is! It is a privilege to be able to own fancy cool tech gadgets, at a time when many people around the world have lost their jobs due to COVID-19 closures.

Do you know someone who has less than you do?

Of course you do!

We all know someone who has less than we do. If you are like me - a techie who is living a fairly privileged life in 2021 - then I know you can give to others more.

Don't take your cool stuff and life for granted! Think of those who have less, and think of how you can give back in 2021.

We have a lot of reconstruction work ahead of us. It's time to give back even more and get to work. ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

~Alejandra💁🏻‍♀️ y Canela🐾

Let's Discuss 💳 Stripe's Docs & APIs: Day 1 of Docs

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 14:27:11 +0000

👉🏼 Do you have opinions on tech docs?

Let's talk! In the next weeks, I'll be sharing several doc sites. I want to hear what you do/don't love about each one. My new role as a Developer Educator involves improving my team's docs, evaluating what updates are most needed.

Ready?

Day 1 — Stripe's Docs & APIs 💳

Do you like the UI? Does the Information Architecture make sense? What about their code snippets?

What is one thing you would change about Stripe docs?

📑 https://stripe.com/docs/api
📑 https://stripe.com/docs

🙏🏾 Like for reach and/or comment below 🙏🏾

My team is hiring 2 more Developer Educators! ️

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:39:22 +0000

🚨 Are you job hunting? 🚨

Then search no more, cause my org is hiring! 🥳

We need 2 more Developer Educators for the Expedia Group Conversation Platform org's Developer Experience team.

Do you love maintaining API documentation and/or training content? 📄📑 We need folks dedicated to each in our team, and this is such a fun role to be in!

👉🏼 Also... least you be concerned this is yet ANOTHER Senior role, I am here to give you some good news! This role is not another Senior role!

The Director for this org is trying to hire 50/50 of women/men in his org, and so far I've seen this team loves nurturing and mentoring anyone with a curiosity to learn and grow.

Please apply! We need you!❤️❤️❤️

👩🏻‍💻 APPLY HERE

https://lifeatexpediagroup.com/jobs/job?jobid=R-57647

Where can I send you questions about the role?

📑 Comment below
📑 DM me on Twitter or LinkedIN

I'm a Developer Educator now! 🥳

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:09:41 +0000

Today, I start a new job as a Developer Educator for the Conversation Platform Developer Experience team at Expedia Group.

(FYI, not to be confused by Expedia, the online travel agency and metasearch engine owned by Expedia Group.)

Wait, who is hiring for Developer Educators?

So far, I've seen it placed under Developer Experience orgs. It appears to be a hybrid role that also bears a lot of similarities with Developer Advocacy (DA), which is how I accidentally got interested in this area.

What are my new job duties as a Developer Educator?

Here's a snippet of what my new job entails... 😄

Build, maintain, and own the Conversation Platform documentation and training content.
Write programs in a variety of different programming languages: Java, Kotlin, Swift, JavaScript, and Python (I think once I dive into the actual docs I'll know better which ones I'll use more...).
Build quick start samples, demos, example apps, and other developer productivity tools.
Contribute to and provide feedback on APIs, SDKs, and platform functionality.
Provide developer support for the Conversation Platform concepts, tutorials, and APIs.
Maintaining support channels such as Slack, GitHub, etc.

Can you tell us more about the Expedia Group Conversation Platform?

This is the blurb that originally caught my eye and I thought it would be cool to share it directly with you too.😃

"Do you want to work with state of the art technologies such as real-time streaming, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning? Our goal is to build the best conversational bot platform that can meet customers on any channel (social, SMS, web, or voice), use AI/ML to understand/anticipate their needs, and deliver unparalleled service."

The Conversation Platform enables millions of travelers to have natural language conversations with an automated agent via text, Facebook, or their channel of choice. It lets you book trips, make changes or cancellations, and asks questions:

-“How long is my layover?” “Does my hotel have a pool?” How much will I get charged if I want to bring my golf clubs?”-

Then it takes all that we know about a customer across all of the Expedia Group brands and applies machine learning models to give customers automatically a straightforward answer or a complex new itinerary.

Why did I make a career transition into Developer Education?

Well, there were mainly 2 components of this decision.

One, I am autistic and tired of DevRel teams acting "iffy" about me being an out-of-the-closet autistic woman with the need for a service dog. Oh, they all pretend that there isn't prejudice in the world about "being autistic," but it's a lie. DevRel still has a lot of growing up to do, and it's still largely run by egos and techies obsessed with being seen on stage. Until the DevRel world truly diversifies more, I really needed a break. At least for a little bit.💕

Two, you've probably noticed by now that the Developer Educator job sounds extremely similar to the Technical Writer job also found at the big tech companies.

For a long time, I have been DYING to transition into owning API Docs and training content. But even though I applied to quite a few Technical Writing roles at several of the big tech companies, nothing was really moving forward. (Thank you, Corona🦠.)

I was starting to feel disappointed about this when I came across these Developer Educator roles popping up. (In the past 2 months, I interviewed for this role at 3 different companies.) When I saw how that role fit under Developer Experience and that it would allow me to own developer docs, I basically FREAKED OUT with excitement!

Just like that, I KNEW that I wanted to try this out.

Why Expedia Group?

One, it helps when they actually give you an offer.

Ok, I snark. 🙃

Two, the hiring director and interviewers started the interviews by asking about Canela🐾! They even wanted to see her! I don't think any other company started their interviews by getting excited about my service dog?! LOL!
It's the little things 🙃...

Three, I didn't run into any of the typical 🚩red flags🚩 I look out for as a #WomanInTech. You know, things like arrogant team members in the interview loop or a hiring manager that comes across as less than stellar.

I also have to add that because during the past 2 months I'd been talking and/or interviewing with 10+ companies, I was EXHAUSTED. When I jumped on the Expedia Group interview loop, I remember being particularly brain dead.😂 And yet, each of the interviewers made me feel valuable! They also really showed concern about me getting breaks between the interviews.

When they sent me the offer, it was a great and fair one. But, I of course asked for 10K more, since I honestly felt that was fair to ask. At this point, I waited to see if any 🚩red flags🚩 came up. What I mean by this, is that I have actually had several bad experiences with male hiring managers acting surprised when a woman asks for more money. I wanted to make sure the New Boss wasn't one of those, if you get what I mean!

To my surprise, they approved my extra 10K in 2 days!

This speedy turnaround honestly made me feel that the hiring director did, in fact, value my work experience and knowledge. And having leadership that values you is seriously the most important part sometimes.

Aren't you gonna tell us about the 10+ companies and how that all went?!

Sure!

But that's another blog post, for another day. 😉

On to new learnings and wish me luck!

~Alejandra💁🏻‍♀️ y Canela🐾

What the Cloud are Virtual Machines and Amazon EC2?

Alejandra Quetzalli 🐾 — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 22:57:22 +0000

¡Holaaa! 😁

Welcome to the transcript of our latest "What the Cloud?” episode! And lucky for you, this post has WAY MORE DOODLES than the video itself. 😁

If you happened to watch the previous episode, we talked about Cloud storage and the Amazon S3 service. You may even remember that I mentioned we were going to learn about Virtual Machines in Episode 5. So let’s do that today!

We’ve explained what servers are before, but at this point, you’re probably wondering.. what the cloud is a Virtual Machine?

A Virtual Machine (VM) is an emulation of a computer system. In other words, creating a computer within a computer. It uses software instead of a physical computer to run programs and deploy apps. One or more virtual “guest” machines run on a physical “host” machine.

Before VMs existed, what you had was physical hardware. Servers. Do you remember how in Episode 1 we explained that a server is a physical piece of hardware? So let’s pretend to time travel back in time about 15 or 20 years ago... and these servers, this physical hardware, they had maybe 1 xCPU. Maybe 1 Gig of ram. What you were able to do back then was install 1 application on it. Perhaps something like a web server to host a website. This is not a lot of space, is it?

Now servers get stored in racks, in Data Centers. Each rack holds more servers. And then these racks of servers are what is being stored inside those Data Centers (DCs).

If we count the amount of servers I may have in my drawing, it really isn’t that many. Let’s count! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... times 4 racks... that’s 20 servers. Which means, if we calculate each of these pretend servers to have only the aforementioned 1xCPU and 1 Gig of ram... it will mean 20 web servers. Or 20 applications. Again, it doesn’t sound like a lot to us today, but back then, that was enough.

So what started happening? What changed? As companies and business requirements changed, 20 servers... 20 web applications was no longer enough! So what do you do? Well now inside of your server, instead of storing 1 application, now you start storing 2 applications. 1 web server and 1 mail server. Now we have more than 1 application per server.

But again, this is not that much. Now let’s fast-forward to only 10 years ago. Heeeyyyy, now these servers are getting better, fancier. They don’t come with only 1xCPU of storage, now they have 64xCPU and 128 Gigs of Ram!

Now, earlier we said you had that 1 web server... If you try to put that 1 web server into your server, and you use that entire hardware server for only 1 OS (Operating System) for that application that only needed 1xCPU and 1 Gig of Ram... then you are effectively wasting space! Your current hardware server still has over 125xCPUs left of space! Think of the amount of waste that you are creating. Your servers are being wasted.

Let’s go back to look at our 4 racks of servers in our DC. Now someone comes to you and says, “Hey, we have a new requirement now. We need to run more than 20 apps now. From now on, we want to be able to run 100 apps minimum, but we don’t want to increase our numbers of servers. We still want to stick to 20 hardware servers because we only have enough physical space in our DCs for that amount.”

What would do you do? Well, you can try to convince them to buy more DC space, or you can start to think of how to fit 100 apps in only 20 servers. If we do this last option, then we have to figure out how to fit more than 1 app per server.

But now software segregation comes in and it could cause a problem.

Wait, I bet you’re wondering “what the cloud” segregation means here. It is a separation, a splitting of a larger network into smaller network segments via something such as firewalls. One of the major advantages of such splitting is improved security.

Let’s get back to our drawing example though. If you have a web server and a mail server — 2 applications — on the same server, what prevents them from talking between each other? What happens if someone hacks our mail server and then reads all our emails? That would be pretty bad!

So currently, we have 2 problems: (1) Too many apps for the amount of physical servers we have; and (2) We are wasting our servers, because we don’t need as much capacity as these modern day servers come with for just 1 individual app.

🙌🏽 Enter the Era of Virtualization!

Virtualization takes that physical server and splits it up. And then each one can have it’s own OS. Here’s one OS, and here’s another OS, and here’s another OS.. and now I can have all kinds of apps in a single hardware server. Look, here’s my web server, here’s my mail server, and here’s my game server.

Ah, now this is segregation! And now you also get to have better utilization of each individual server, because now you have more than 1 app that runs per server.

So this Era of Virtualization that introduced VMs was two-fold. ONE, it allowed us to finally add segregation between our applications, so that they can’t talk between each other. Again, this is good to help prevent hackers!

TWO, it allowed better utilization of the resources of our servers. So even though we only have 20 servers, if we do the proper separation and have say... 3 VMs per server, we now have 60 VMs. And if we can have 60 VMs, then that means we can have 60 apps, because 1 app x OS.

Ok, but now we have a different kind of problem! Do you notice all the duplication that is happening here? OS, OS, OS...

We have 3 different OS here and this is a waste of memory too! The problem began because we were trying to fit more than 1 app per physical server, so we created VMs and separated the OS. But now we accidentally ended up with a lot of duplicate OS. So we are still being wasteful! We definitely have better utilization now, but it’s not exactly great just yet.

This is when containers joined this era.

I know, I know... you’re wondering, “what the cloud” is a container? Well, we will actually go into a lot more detail in Episode 6 on this, but for today, all you need to know is that a container is a form of operating system virtualization. It packages up code and all its dependencies so that your application can run quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.

Ok. Let’s get back to explaining what containers have to do with VMs. What containers finally allowed us to do was to only have 1 OS and then on top of that OS, you have all of your apps that run as containers. So containers now solved the next level of the utilization problem that VMs originally helped improve in the past.

Now what I want to do is briefly head over to the AWS Management Console and go to the EC2 console.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the Amazon Web Service you use to create and run virtual machines in the cloud (we call these virtual machines 'instances').

Let’s click the Launch button. All you need to do is follow these 7 steps to launch your 1st EC2 instance.

Step #1 is to Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Think of this as our OS. Look at all our options, all our flavors. We can pick from Amazon, Ubuntu, Windows, Red Hat and more! These OS all have Pros and Cons.

We are going to launch a Linux virtual machine on Amazon EC2 that falls within the Free Usage Tier.

For Step #2, we need to choose the size of our Instance. Remember... Instances are virtual servers that can run applications.

We are keeping it simple, so 1xCPU and 1 Gib of Ram should be more than enough for what we want to do. The size you decide to pick for your Instance Type will depend on your workloads. Let’s click Next.

For today, we won’t go into extreme detail on Step #3 Configure Instance Details. We can configure items such as adding an IAM role.. determine shut down behavior.. enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring.. But again, for today let’s leave the default configs.

We move on to Step 4: Add Storage. Again, we have many options to pick from. Today we are keeping it simple so 8 GiB is more than enough. We could also add New Volume Types of storage. Do we want to Delete on termination?

Now we can move on to Step #5: Tags. Ah yes, tags. Metadata.

I can put in ‘Name’ and ‘Web Server 1.’ I can add another tag. A Cost-Center and the Cost-Center number.

Now it’s on to Step# 6: Configure Security Group. A security group helps you add rules to allow specific traffic to reach your instance.

I’m going to pick HTTP type and pick a beautiful name for my security group.

Finally, the last step! Step 7: Review Instance Launch. We review our instance launch details and click the* Launch *button.

A pop modal asks us to “Select an existing key pair or create a new one.” AWS is basically saying, “Heyyy... I am not going to give you a username and password for this.”

This key pair is comprised of a public key and a private key file. I ‘create a new key pair’ and pick a name for it. Now I click the button, Download Key Pair. What I have downloaded here is my private key, in a file format called pem format.

This key pair is what will allow us later to connect to this EC2 instance.

Ok. Time to finally Launch our instance!

Success!

If we go back to all of our Instances, we can find this one we just created!

Wow, that was a lot to cover but I hope that Servers and their relationship to VMs make a lot more sense now!🎉

All right everybody, thank you for joining us in today’s episode of What the Cloud? ! In the next episode, we will talk about Containers. I can’t wait to see you there!

~Alejandra💁🏻‍♀️ y Canela🐾