DEV Community: Anurag Kale

Architecting fast is the key, until its not...

Anurag Kale — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 08:23:00 +0000

In my 8+ years career as a developer, consultant and recently as Cloud Architect, I have worked with companies of all scales. I have had a taste of multi national corporates, mid size product companies and startups alike. All these places have had different set of challenges, but there was always a common theme I could see everywhere. Most of these challenges were rarely related to technical complexity. These mostly had developers struggling to understand what they were supposed to produce. The architects, product managers tried hard to be precise, but despite of all the efforts the result wasn't any different.

Looking at those scenario's in retrospect with a trained brain; a brain that has gotten a little better at finding patterns over time, I found root cause for most of the misery pointed to one direction. Someone, somewhere in the organisation decided to put technology before business. This phenomenon occurs when it is decided that the business vision can be achieved by throwing software at it. If you hear "Hey this can be solved with K8s" (insert any other tech) early into the process of defining project, it has already been set on a slow path to graveyard.

As a relatively young architect, the more I reflect on these scenarios, the more I am convinced a dire need in shift of our focus from "it can be solved by tech x" to spending time to understand the intricacies of the core business. Inspired by Domain Driven Design approach, the problem should be tackled in 3 steps. Each step provides a separate set of outcome that helps to realise good software.

Step 1 : Ask questions starting with WHY to domain experts

These would generally look like -

Why are you looking to build this?
Why now? Why not earlier or later?
Why use technology to solve it?
Why cannot it be addressed via processes or new methods?
Why does the business or its end users need this?

These questions will vary a lot from domain to domain, project to project. At the end of the exercise however, you should get a set of reasons that will help you define the Non Functional Requirements for the software system.

Step 2 : Ask questions starting with WHAT to domain experts or end users

These would generally look like -

What do you expect the software to look like?
What are the functions you expect your software to perform?
What kind of operations do you plan to support via this software?
and many more

These questions should set you in the right direction of setting up your high level requirements. This exercise should be strengthened by performing the exercise of Event Storming.

More about event storming

Following the why questions and event storming, you would have

wonderfully descriptive business process that need to be modelled into the software
great idea on how to draw boundaries in software
how the stakeholders envision the end state of the software

This would turn into actionable user stories, which in turn lead to well defined tasks. Everyone is happy!

Step 3 : Ask questions stating with How to technology stakeholders

This is where you should set your inner techie free. Since you now have the elaborate requirements, you can focus on using the right technology for the right job. Now is the time to deliberate technology choices with yourself or tech peers. You have NFR's as well and tech needs. You have been set with right details to make accurate choices for the software.

This isn't a gospel and things might work for you differently. The core message is, we need to slow down a little and make technology work for business, not the other way around.

Happy Architecting!

Moving to Cloud : Prove you expertise

Anurag Kale — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 18:57:57 +0000

Trick 4 - Show your work

So far you have put in a few hours and done some work to hone your skills in cloud. However it is not enough. You need to let people know, that you know cloud. There are a few ways to do it without showing it to everyone's face. Lets take a look at them -

1. Get Certified

Many, if not all employers love certified folks. But keep in mind, the certificate alone won't be enough to get the job for you, but it can open some doors. Let the certification open the door, but let your work do the talking in an interview. For someone who needs a structured way to study, this is a nice way of getting it done.

2. Use social media

Tweet helpful snippets of your notes, share some of your learning on you blog, share how you solved a particular problem at work that involved cloud on LinkedIn, answer a few questions on stack-overflow if you can. The trick is to project your profile as someone who knows cloud and can get things done.

3. Projects

When you study for certifications, make sure you are doing a lot of hands on labs. Mimicking the workflows from your work is the best exercise you could do. If that is not possible, deploy a web app using as many services as you can.

E.g. You could deploy a static website using S3, S3+Cloudfront, Amplify Console, EC2, EC2 + SSL using ALB, Lightsail, Elastic beanstalk etc.

You can use tools like Hugo to generate these sites.

Similar things can be done to other services too. Use your existing expertise.

These 4 tricks have helped me immensely to reach where I am today. My official title now reads 'Cloud Architect' and I owe a lot of my relative success to the above tricks / process.

Got any questions? Comment here or reach out to me via twitter.

Moving to Cloud : Using social tools

Anurag Kale — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 18:40:09 +0000

Please read the first post of the series to get the context.

** Trick 2 - Get involved in the community. Attend meetups / seminars **

A very underrated and excellent way of learning is to observe people who excel at their craft and learn in the process. It's equivalent to active listening from music. Personally, this is the part where I learned the most from. I observed how people were using the services in their setup. I tried to relate what I observed with things at work. Took notes in meetups and tried researching on them while trying to solve a problem at work. Luckily AWS User Group was in nascent stages when this happened and I got to be a part of the journey to build that user group. I learned a ton in that process.

To validate your skills speak at your local meetups. There are many people who don't know what you know. Share it. This helps you boost your confidence, expand your network and enhance your people skills.

** Trick 3 - Teach Someone **

Write summary of what you learnt at any webinar / meetup and share it with your friends / colleagues / boss. Try teaching them what you learnt. Help a colleague or friend with the cloud basics. Teaching someone will uncover quite a lot of details that you would generally miss while learning yourself.

Moving to Cloud : Taking the first step

Anurag Kale — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 18:29:29 +0000

I wrote a twitter thread in December 2020 in an attempt to collate advice I had given to a bunch of people who made career transition to cloud. It was received relatively well. Its time to convert it into a blog post. Our default choice of cloud for this post would be AWS.

Below is the tweet thread this post is inspired from

Anurag Kale

@ianuragkale

I made transition to cloud a few years ago and shared a part of my journey on LinkedIn. I have since been asked by many folks on they can do the same. The journey is not same for everyone, but I try to help them as much as I can. But it cannot scale. He's an attempt to scale it -

16:01 PM - 13 Dec 2020

This post is indented for developers, system admins, DBA's etc. already working in a professional setting. There is a different thread (which I will convert to a blog post soon) for recent graduates or for people looking to make a career switch.

Anurag Kale

@ianuragkale

Breaking into cloud : For fresh graduates and folks looking for career transition from non IT field

18:52 PM - 16 Dec 2020

Having made that clear, let jump into the actual stuff.

Trick 1 - Gain entry into the cloud from a familiar landscape

You can do this by using a few services from cloud that you could potentially use at work. Use the cloud which is accessible to your at your workplace. If you don't use cloud at work, start with AWS.

Lets look at few examples -

*Example 1 - * I was working as SQL Dev with Oracle/ MS SQL / PostgreSQL. The moment I had a chance to deploy a PostgreSQL DB in cloud ( which was quite new in the org at that time), I volunteered. Played around it for a bit and complemented it with online classes.

Example 2 - If you are a sysadmin, you can start exploring EC2, LightSail and Elastic beanstalk. If your work permits, try running a development workload of an existing application you are handling on any of these services. If it doesn't, create a free tier account and setup a WordPress or ghost blog. It will cost you less than 10$ to have a nice blog with your custom URL.

*Example 3 - * If you are a front end developer, start with Amplify Framework. Take a look at how it can help you accelerate your development. Try a few features in your dev environment or in your side projects.

Once you start working with these services in the area of your expertise, slowly start looking at other services from AWS that are supporting the application. Look at the solution diagram and reason with yourself why they were chosen the way they are. Slowly and steadily as you gain interest gain, take active participation in cloud related tasks. Fill in the gaps by either taking a cloud certification or by implementing a few side projects.

Planning for AWS Community Day Pune 2020

Anurag Kale — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 05:13:36 +0000

A little background of AWS Community in Pune

AWS Community in Pune city was dormant for quite sometime. In July 2019 it rose back from slumber, credits to the efforts of Jayesh Ahire (Twitter – @Jayesh_Ahire1) and a numerous AWS employees. I happened to be working quite actively during that period with AWS and decided to go to the very first meetup. The talks scheduled for the very first meetup were so great that I was immediately convinced to attend every event that this group would schedule in future.

That day I met Jayesh and a few senior folks from various companies. I happened to meet a Sr. Solutions Architect from AWS whom I had met with in the AWS Summit Mumbai that year and expressed my interest to speak in the community and also to be a volunteer in the community. We had a healthy discussion around AWS during the break and also after all the talks were done. During the same period I met with Toshal and Amey, who would become the core part of the organising team in near future.

Me and Toshal (Twitter – @toshalk) were quite regular to the meetups and were helping organise the meetup in whatever area we could over the next 4-5 months. In absence of Jayesh, we took care of couple of meetups and I spoke on a couple of AWS topics as well on this platform. The AWS community grew at a pace that we did not expect. The meetup page soon crossed 5000+ followers and we started getting an attendance of anywhere between 50 to 100 people for each meetup that was organised over the months. During the same time I attended the AWS Community Day Bengaluru and also AWS Community Day Mumbai. After a long time of getting to know the AWS folks from all over the country and attending the community days, we figured it was time Pune gets its own community day. This thought soon became a reality and Pune was given an opportunity to host the first ever community day of 2020 in India in the month of Feb 2020.

The planning phase

While we were organising the meetups, we started working on establishing social media presence for the user group. I helped manage LinkedIn for a few months and later managed the Twitter handle as well for a couple months. Planning the effective use of social media was the first thing we thought we should do. Later we onboarded Divya in our core team and she took over the social media.

Planning for an event where we expected 500+ participants is not at all easy. Below are the important things that we had work on –

*Figure out a place which could be a good fit for technical conferences and would be able to accommodate 500+ people
*Select a ticketing partner for the event tickets
*Arranging of food at the day of conference. [ Breakfast, Lunch, Snacks for 500+ people is a daunting task]
*Opening call for papers for the conference
*Looking out for sponsors for the event
*Figuring out the logistics for things like LED screens, audio setup for multi-track event. We ended up deciding to hire an event management team to get it done for us.
*Designing social media banners, Goodies for participants, T-shirts for volunteers, memento for speakers etc.

As it generally happens that community driven events have one person who takes the lead and others build around him/her. In our case it was Jayesh. He handled majority of finance, ticketing , sponsorship tasks leveraging his existing connections in this space [he is a well known personality in AI/ML space, check out his Twitter/LinkedIn profile]. The Call for papers were live on Papercall.io and we started our hunt for the venue.

Pre-event execution

Venue

It was a difficult task to find a venue that could accommodate these many people and would have good facility to be able to feed so many people. The only choice we had was to lookout at huge hotels which have Banquet halls and could provide the catering service as well. We visited 6-8 hotels in the entire area of Pune trying to find the venue which would suit the requirements. The loop of visits, quotation, negotiations started. We shortlisted 2 hotels that suited our requirements and ended up selecting Hyatt Regency as they gave us the best deal and were a very well known and respectable brand in Pune. Food cost was bundled in the rent of banquet halls.

Selecting ticketing partner

This was a no brainer. All other community events were done in partnership with Konfhub and community had a great experience of using their platform. We ended up using the same. We started selling tickets to the event from Dec 2019.

Call for papers

We started accepting proposals for talk in December 2019 via PaperCall.io. The response was huge. We had 30+ people speaking at our conference from diverse geographies.

Looking out for sponsors

This is the most difficult part. We created a standard deck of PPT with help from AWS design team and used our connections to reach out to corporates, startups that could benefit by sponsoring our event. This was the most difficult part and we were still trying to get the sponsors until two weeks to the event. Fortunately we got the anticipated number of sponsors and hence our costs to the conference were covered without troubles.

Getting an event manager

Tech event needs things like LED screens or projectors, collar microphones for speakers, Handheld microphones for anchors, stage lightening, banners of sponsors and tons of other stuff. We are general IT folks like you and it made sense to hire the experts who do this thing for a living. We made some calls, got some recommendations and started our conversations with event management companies. We zeroed in on one after an intense negotiation round which lasted over 10 days.

Procuring things required for event

The last thing remaining was to procure things like lanyards, name cards, T-shirts, Memento’s etc. These small things suck most of the time and energy [ Jayesh would agree here wholeheartedly]. These things were all work in progress until the night before the event.

Conclusion

There are a lot of thing which I have not yet addressed and would do it the an upcoming blog where I share the details of event day. Also there are many thing that could not be covered in this blog post. There are so many moving parts in arranging the conference. People like me, Jayesh, Toshal, Amey etc. do it totally out our passion for the community and are not compensated in any ways by anyone involved in the event [AWS, Sponsors etc]. Hence a request, the next time you see a volunteer driven event and if something goes wrong, be a little kind to the organisers and defer from giving them shit (this was the best way I could put it).

I hope you had a great time at AWS Community day Pune. The intention of the post is to highlight the hard work people do behind the curtain. To all the unsung hero’s !

Clearing AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam

Anurag Kale — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 19:02:13 +0000

Dec 6, 2019, I appeared for the exam AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam and cleared it. I scored 800/1000. The pass score was 720. The exact scores are not shared by AWS, but they do provide some feedback in the form of a PDF which highlights the areas where you performed well and the areas where you could do better. I will try to address FAQs around the exam and share my journey of preparation for this exam though this blog post. This post only reflects the path I chose to take, and it may or may not suite everyone out there.

Some background of my experience

It is important to point out that I have been working with AWS for more than 2 years designing solutions on AWS and also migrating applications from on-prem to cloud for a few customers of the company. In the process I had skimmed though a lot of online documentations, blogs and videos out there on the internet to get things working for projects. I have also gained significant insights by attending local AWS Meetups, Community Days, AWS Summits and interacting with the speakers at these meetups and conferences. All this experience came in real handy during the exam. This exam was on my radar from last 2 years, but I could not find enough motivation to appear for it as I was already getting to work with AWS at work. The desire of my company to setup Cloud practice vertical gave me the boost to register and appear for the exam.

How I prepared for the exam?

At work, I already had experience of working with core AWS technologies like EC2, S3, VPC, Route53, SQS, SNS, RDS etc. I knew services I had practiced or used at work. I had to fill the void in above services off the things I did not use and learn the other services required for the exam.

I used 5 major resources during the last couple of years while working with AWS as well as to prepare for the exam –

Linux Academy’s multiple courses [ Hands on labs, challenges, cert prep courses etc.]
A Cloud Guru’s course on Udemy
Neil Davis’s hands on course on Udemy
AWS documentation, YouTube uploads
AWS’s official preparation guide for SAA exam.

Off all these resources, I used LA [Point 1 above], AWS Docs [Point 4] and Book [Point 5] regularly to learn and clear any doubts I had while working on projects. I purchased ACG [Point 2], Neil’s [Point 3] courses more recently to focus on exam. For someone who is coming practical experience with AWS, I recommend you take either ACG or Neil’s course. Two resources that I learned the most from were LA and the official book.

Experience of the exam

There is an NDA that you sign at the beginning of the exam that you won’t share any questions of the exam. Abiding to that, I am only going to share the sections which I was quizzed the most on in descending order of their weightage–

Amazon EC2 and Security Groups
VPC [ Subnets, NACL, NAT, VPC peering, load balancing in VPC]
Load Balancers
DynamoDB and RDS
Serverless services [ Lambda, SNS, SQS, APIGW]
Scenario based Cost optimization questions
CloudFront
REDSHIFT Etc.

There is a total of 65 questions, and you get 140 minutes to solve them.

Tips for the exam

Know the use cases and design patterns of the widely used services asked in the exam. Compare services and ask yourself which you would use in which cases. Take help from people on twitter, LinkedIn, reddit etc. to get you specific queries answered. Reddit’s AWS subreddit is a great place of helpful peoples.
Since the questions are scenario based and 4-5 lines long, to avoid confusion, jot down the key design considerations (e.g. Highly available, most cost optimized, minimum impact to current implementation etc.) on the piece of paper provided during the exam. At the end of question, just compare these key words with the services mentioned in the options. Eliminate options that do not fit with the key words. You will have much more time concentrating on the similar options in few cases and in most cases, you will end up with the right answer.
Choose a time slot for the exam in which you are most attentive and productive. Reading the questions with attention is really important to clear the exam.
Hydrate before starting exam. Try not to take break in between the exam.
Have a good night’s sleep a night before exam and eat adequately.

I hope that I have answered a few questions in this blog. If you have any more queries, shoot me a message on twitter (@ianuragkale ) or on LinkedIn.

Getting started with AWS - A layman's guide

Anurag Kale — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 15:15:51 +0000

Often when I meet friends, colleagues I get asked how I transitioned into AWS. I started as a Database Developer and currently work extensively with AWS. I am often asked advice on how can one get transition into AWS if they are working with some other technology. While there is no one size fits all answer, I will try to create a path for people with basic IT knowledge or experience to take the first steps. Please note this is no way meant to be a comprehensive guide but rather just a starting point which will give you enough confidence to start exploring the AWS world.

Prerequisite - A cloud computing 101 course will come in very handy and kind of will give you a head start, but is not required. Understanding of basic IT terminologies will come in handy and make it easier to understand a few jargons that are often used.

A crude way to look at AWS is as a computer provider who can give you new computers and accessories within a few clicks. These computers are "setup" at a remote location and you get to access them via internet.

Imagine you are launching a "technology" company. You will need at least the following things to start creating products and services -

Compute [ CPU and RAM]
Storage [ Hard disks, Google Drive like storage]
Database [ RDBMS, NoSQL, Graph etc]
Networking [ To connect the above resources with one another]
To create the above resources in AWS, all you need is an AWS account and you are ready to launch any of these resources. Below are the name of the resources that AWS identifies them with -

Compute - Elastic Cloud Compute [EC2], Storage - Elastic Block Storage [EBS] as HDDs, Simple Storage Service (S3) as object storage which will function something like google drive to store images. music, documents etc. Database - Relational Database Service (RDS), DynamoDB [NoSQL DB], Neptune [Graph DB] etc. Networking - VPC

EC2 - gives you the ability to create computers which when given access to EBS gives you a computer where you can install software and host a website or any web application.

S3 - gives you the ability to store multimedia files, documents in a reliable and cheap fashion.

RDS - Allows you to create database with engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Maria DB and MS SQL Server. They are sold as managed service which mean that the tasks like backup, recovery, upgrades and patching are taken care for you by AWS. You can also create databases that follow design structures of NoSQL, Graph etc as per your application need.

VPC - Allows you to create an isolated environment which is cutoff from all other resources in the cloud. You can govern the way the resources inside the VPC can or cannot communicate with the outside world [internet, other VPCs]

I highly recommend you start reading about these services. A very good stating point is reading "Overview of AWS Services" white paper followed by "storage options on the AWS cloud" and "architecting on the cloud". You can also refer many courses that are available via Udemy or Linux Academy. Personally, the Official Study guide for AWS Solutions Architect Associate helped me a lot to understand and create a solid foundation.

I hope this gives you a fair knowledge of how you can start with AWS. Once these fundamentals are strong, I have observed that learning other services is not that difficult. All the best!