DEV Community: Chirag

Why do AWS Certification?

Chirag — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 15:15:12 +0000

I've worked on a lot of Amazon Web Services - AWS over the years and thought of adding this as an experience to my resume, but before that, I also wanted to assure that I have a good understanding of all those services, and what could be a better way to showcase that experience rather than certification, right?.

I went to the official AWS certification portal to find a better certification for me, but after looking at lots of certifications options I was a little bit confused as to which certification I should complete first and which one is not necessary for me as of now.

While finding the best certification for me, I also thought of sharing my experience with others so that it would be easier for others to pick the certification based on their specialization.

What is AWS

Before we jump into “Why to do AWS certification” let’s first see “What is AWS”. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud platform that provides a Platform as a Service for personal use, businesses, and government projects.

AWS provides features like storage services, messaging services, development and management tools, analytics services, content delivery management system, computing, database management, app services, payments services, mobile networking, on-demand workforce, and many more.

AWS is much more secure because currently, it has many data centers around the globe and those are regularly monitored and strictly maintained. They also try to keep their database centers as hidden as possible for providing much better security and reducing the data breach chances.

AWS is available in approx 24 Regions with 76 Availability Zones and it serves 245 countries with its cloud services.🌏

Why AWS Certification

I hope you got some basic understanding of AWS and now let’s see why it is good to do AWS certification.

Starting with the usage I must mention that many of the world’s biggest enterprises like Netflix, Samsung, Airbnb, McDonald’s, ESPN, and many more are now running part or all of their software environments in the AWS Cloud, and every day many more companies are now migrating their work to AWS cloud. That’s why, if you’re looking for a new IT job, a new role in your current organization, or simply want to continue to grow in your current position then earning an AWS certification can be a very smart investment.

Now if we see some statistical data then, out of 100 around 63% of cloud services are provided by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba, and from all of those, AWS’s alone market share is 31%. It means around one-third of cloud services are provided by AWS itself, which means a lot more opportunities to get a job as an AWS DevOps engineer or Solution Architect or Developer or Administrator.🤯

Alright, now let's take a look at some key points that can be impacted if you do an AWS certification, let’s see what they are.

Showcase

If you are certified then you can easily demonstrate your dedication and commitment towards the platform and also showcase that you already have learned the basic benchmarks to get started with that platform.

Earning

With certification on hand, the employer can be assured that the employee they are hiring is capable enough to do the work that they are expecting from an employee, and also the employee can get a chance to be hired prior to the other interviewee standing in the queue. But it doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have certification isn't capable enough to do the job.

If someone who doesn’t have certification, is equally qualified and skilled but that difference is a certified person has already proven their ability by cracking the exam in advance and that would make the employer’s work much easier to choose one from them.

AWS Community

You are eligible to join the AWS LinkedIn community once you get certified in AWS. In this community, the certification achievers can view and connect to the worldwide AWS certified professionals and receive multiple worldwide AWS events or conference invites, free study materials, practice exams, Live coding technical demos, and much more.

Subject Matter Expert

AWS has a subject matter expert program and only AWS-certified professionals are qualified for this program. SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) are responsible for arranging workshops and being a crucial part of the exam development process.

Certifications

AWS currently offers 11 certifications, out of which 6 are core certifications and 5 are specialty certifications and in this article, we are going to focus on only 6 core certifications. All these core certifications are organized into 3 layers, Foundation, Associate, and Professional as seen under the below image. Let’s see a few details about all of those certifications.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

This is a foundational exam and it covers the core principles of the AWS Cloud. This certification is perfect for non-technical roles like IT sales, finance, and management people so that they can communicate more clearly with their IT colleagues, and who need a general understanding of the AWS platform. To clear this exam you must have to be familiar with the basic concepts of AWS billing, support, pricing, deploying resources and services.

AWS suggests having a minimum of six months of AWS experience before taking an exam and this exam consists of multiple-choice questions which take 90 minutes to complete and have $100 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

This exam covers the architectural principles of the AWS Cloud. If you have experience in deploying, configuring, managing computes, network, storage, and database services in AWS then this exam can be easily cleared.

AWS suggests having a minimum of one-year of experience under deploying distributed systems at scale using different AWS services and this exam consists of multiple-choice and multiple answer questions which take 130 minutes to complete and has $150 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional

This exam covers the deployment principles to multi-tier applications to the AWS Cloud and if you are taking this exam and have at least 2 years of experience in multi-tier application deployment using AWS services then AWS doesn’t recommend taking the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate prior to this exam.

This exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 180 minutes to complete and has $300 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified Developer - Associate

This exam covers the ability to use the AWS SDK and interact with other AWS services as a developer and also demands knowledge about core services, principles, and best practices associated with services on AWS. One should also have some experience in AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon DynamoDB.

AWS suggests at least one year of experience in maintaining the applications in the AWS Cloud and this exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 130 minutes to complete and has $150 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

This exam covers the ability of DevOps Engineer to manage the distributed applications in the AWS Cloud, from provisioning to full operational management. In this exam, you will face questions on CI/CD and best practices for automating security and compliance checks.

This exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 180 minutes to complete and has $300 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate

This exam covers the ability to deploy, manage, and operate resources in the AWS Cloud. It also includes an understanding of what it takes to migrate the on-premises workloads to the AWS Cloud.

AWS suggests at least one year of experience in managing AWS-native applications and this exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 130 minutes to complete and has $150 fees. Check out more details here.

I hope you got some clarification on all the core certifications and apart from these, there are still 5 more specialty certifications which can be seen in the image below. Let’s see a few details about all of those certifications.

AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty

This exam covers the ability to design and deploy machine learning solutions to solve practical business problems. To clear this exam you’ll need to understand which AWS services are relevant to deliver a machine-learning solution.

AWS suggests at least one to two years of experience using machine learning or deep learning on the AWS Cloud. This exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 180 minutes to complete and have $300 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty

This exam covers the ability to manage a network architecture for any service on the AWS platform and automate most networking tasks.

AWS suggests at least five years of experience managing networks and a firm understanding of networking concepts and best practices related to the AWS platform. This exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 170 minutes to complete and have $300 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified Security - Specialty

This exam covers the ability of data protection and encryption techniques for AWS environments. The person who is appearing for this exam must demonstrate a mastery of AWS tools for implementing and managing cloud security.

AWS suggests at least two years of securing AWS workloads and a minimum of five years of IT security experience. This exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 170 minutes to complete and have $300 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified Data Analytics—Specialty

This exam covers the ability to design, build, secure, and maintain analytics solutions on AWS data lakes and analytics services.

AWS suggests at least five years of data analytics technology experience and two years of AWS Cloud experience. This exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 180 minutes to complete and have $300 fees. Check out more details here.

AWS Certified Database - Specialty

This exam covers the ability to design, recommend, and maintain various AWS
database services.

AWS suggests at least five years of experience with database technologies and two years of AWS Cloud experience. This exam consists of multiple choice and multiple answer questions which take 180 minutes to complete and have $300 fees. Check out more details here.

How to give an exam

Well, I have given all the exam links with their basic details so please check out each certification’s exam pattern by visiting those links and as far the concern about the scheduling exams, you can do that from the provided links itself or by visiting the official AWS portal only and as a part of the study material and some tutorials you can always check the AWS’s official training partner portal.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve now got some basic understanding of the AWS certification and why it is useful for your career growth but keep in mind that certification doesn’t make you eligible or the best candidate from others as you still have to prove yourself in front of hiring managers. Certifications just help us to put ourselves one step ahead of others.

Please feel free to comment with your thought and if you liked this article then please follow me on Twitter and here for more posts like this.

How to Rename Local and Remote Git Branch

Chirag — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 18:26:59 +0000

Have you ever wondered or come across a situation where you want to rename a Git branch? If yes then this article will help you with that. Earlier, I faced the same situation where I wanted to rename the git branch locally and on remote, and luckily I found that git allows us to rename the branch very easily, lets see how.

I will share the solutions to rename the git branch locally and under the remote.

Rename local git branch

If you are already in the local branch which you wanted to rename, you can hit this command.

git branch -m <new_name>

If you are under another branch and want to rename the branch then hit the below command.

git branch -m <old_name> <new_name>

Now check your current branch name by hitting

git status 

or

git branch

you will see the changes, isn’t it is so simple 😉

Rename remote git branch

If your local branch is already pushed to a remote repository and you want to rename it and reset the upstream branch then this command will help you to rename it.

git push origin -u <new_name>

git push origin --delete <old_name>

Now if you want to check the changes then you can login to your GitHub or GitLab or whatever the git client portal you are using and see the changes there.

Conclusion

Renaming a local Git Branch is just a matter of running a single “git branch -m” command. However, you can’t directly rename a remote branch as you need to push the renamed local branch to the remote repository and then delete the old branch from there.

Hope you liked this article and found it useful, feel free to comment with your thoughts and opinions and stay connected with me here and on Twitter🐦.

Easy way to exclude files during git add

Chirag — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 16:00:58 +0000

Every day we use the "git add" command a lot to add our changes to the index for new commits, but have you ever wondered how we can add all the changed files with some files excluded during the execution of this command (not with .gitignore)? If the answer is yes, then this article will help you to understand how certain files can be excluded during the git add command.

TLDR; command to exclude specific file

git add -A ':!<file_path>'

Problem

One day I was put in a situation where I need to add some files for my new commit but I also need to exclude a few files during that execution and those files will get added later on once my work is done on those.

One way to do this is to hit the below command

git add <file_path> <file_path> ... <file_path>

Basically, If I have done changes to under 13 files and wanted to exclude only 3 files from those, that means 10 files need to be added with the git add command, then I have to copy all those 10 files path and paste it to the terminal manually and it will have become little bit tedious task. Let’s look at the example.

git add Dockerfile \
README.md \
nest-cli.json \
package-lock.json \
package.json \
src/app.controller.spec.ts \
src/app.controller.ts \
src/app.module.ts \
src/app.service.ts \
src/main.ts

After this command, you can now check for the staged files by hitting.

git status

Solution

But what if this process can be done inversely🤔? Like instead of passing 10 files paths I could just pass 3 files path, 👀 yes you heard it right this can be possible with git add with the below example.

git add -A ':!.eslintrc.js' ':!.gitignore' ':!.prettierrc'

And now when you hit git status it will show all 10 files added to the index apart from the 3 excluded files. It's like a NOT (!) operator under the git add path option.

Hope you enjoyed this content, please share your thoughts under comment and also get in touch with me on Twitter.

Learn to push an empty commit

Chirag — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 15:22:52 +0000

Today I faced a problem while triggering the delivery pipeline and this article is about the solution to that problem.

Have you ever faced the need to push a commit to a Git branch without changing any files in order to re-run your integration process? If yes then you are landed at the right place, my friend. 😉

TLDR; Create an empty commit

git commit --allow-empty -m “Message”

Problem

For continuous integration, we are using Buddy delivery pipelines which allow us to build, test and deploy applications on a single push to a specific git branch. It helps us to reduce the manual overhead of deploying code to the server and handle all the actions automatically.

But today I faced a problem where I needed to re-run my delivery pipeline of a branch without adding any extra space or changing any files in the repository, so I searched for the solution for a while and It turns out that Git is allowing us to push an empty commit without adding any staged files to the branch, by using one option --allow-empty during git commit.

Enough of the problem, let’s jump on to the solution

Pushing a commit with staged files

git add .

git commit -m "changes on app controller"

git push origin master

The above commands will add all unstaged files and add commit and push the code to the master branch, after that our delivery pipeline will be started.

Once the pipeline process fails or you need to run the process again, you will have to push something to the branch but as I mentioned earlier, we will not make any changes to the files, and even then, We will be able to commit the branch with this command.

Pushing empty commit

git commit --allow-empty -m "rerunning the delivery pipeline"

git push origin master

After the above commands, you can see that the commit has been pushed to your branch and the delivery pipeline will be started.

You learned that you can be able to push an empty commit with the --allow-empty option of git commit. let me know in the comments if there is any other way to do this.

Music players built using VueJS

Chirag — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 06:35:42 +0000

Nowadays almost every industry has adopted an online portal to share their content and one of them is the music industry. Yes, around 70% of the music industry has already adopted an online streaming platform to share their music content by offering a subscription based streaming platform.

Are you planning to design a streaming platform for yourself or for customers? Then you might need an awesome music player to integrate into it. And if you are choosing Vue JS as your front-end stack then my friend you have come to the right place.

In this post, you are going to see some simple, lightweight, intuitive and easy-to-use designs of music players made using Vue JS. So without delay let's get into our list.

Music Player - One

This music player is designed by Phil it has a very simple design with a play, pause, next, previous, shuffle and repeat buttons on it and a gramophone disc rotating on it to give a decent look to the player.

Check out it in action here

Music Player - Two

This music player is designed by Ahmed Elsakaan and it has a very lean design with music cover image on top and play, pause, next and previous button on it.

Check out it in action here

Music Player - Three

This music player is designed by Davi Guimarães and it has two card designs, one for music player and one for playlist.

Check out it in action here

Mini Music Player - VueJS

This music player is designed by Muhammed Erdem and it is by far my favorite music player. It has a minimalist design and have some decent animation effects added to it.

Check out it in action here

Bruga Music Player

This music player is designed and developed by Andrés Brugarolas and it is not just a music player it is a complete web portal with playlist, search bars, music player, album view and much more.

Check out it in action here

I hope you like my curated list of music players built on using VueJS. Please share your favorite one in to comment box and do follow me here and on twitter

Best Firefox Extensions for Web Developers

Chirag — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 11:40:29 +0000

The browser extension plays a vital role to simplify our day-to-day use of browsing, especially for developers. There are lots of useful extensions available to play around with during our development but in this article, I’m gonna show you my top five extensions which I personally use daily during development.

Page Speed Monitor

This extension will help you to know how much time your web page took to load whenever you hit the URL under the Firefox browser, the results are in seconds which will help you to further optimize your web page as per your requirement.

If you are looking for some quick insight about web page speed then this extension will be a perfect pick for you.

Download extension from her

Fake Filler

Fed Up of filling lengthy forms continuously during development, need some kind of tool to ease your efforts? Then go and install the Form filler extension to your Firefox browser.

This extension helps to fill out the forms with some dummy values as per the type of the input boxes set inside the form. It comes in handy when you are testing some form-related task continuously and don’t want to fill out it manually.

Download extension from here

JSON Lite

Got a JSON response from a GET API and wanted to see the data in good presentable format? then this extension will help you to solve that problem.

JSON lite extension helps to format any JSON data directly to the browser screen without clicking anywhere and also adds the filter, collapse, expand, copy and save objects options for that JSON data.

Isn’t it a handy tool for viewing JSON data? Show your thoughts in the comment section.

Download extension from here

Clear Browsing data

Working on web page optimization and wanted to clear browsing history continuously for testing the actual speed of a web page? This will be a little bit tedious task as you have to go to the browser settings and clear out all the cache from there but this extension provides you a quick option to remove all the cookies, cache, history, and many more with just a single click.

Download extension from here

All-in-One Page Speed Test

Earlier we have seen the Page speed test extension but this one is a little bit different from that extension as this extension will open up your web page into 3 different portals like Google PageTest Insights, GTmetrix, and Yellow Lab Tools with just a single click in order to run the performance test for that web page. Simple but helpful ;)

Download extension from here

Conclusion

There are tons of extensions available in the Firefox add-ons portal but these are the best five picks that I personally use during my web development. If you are using any other extension which can be useful during web development please mention that in the comment box.

Please don't forget to follow me on twitter