DEV Community: Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza

Self taught guide to cloud computing

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 03:14:13 +0000

The other day I tweeted:

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I decided to put a GitHub repo with a learning path, resources, and projects, I would take to gain a junior cloud engineer skillset in about 6 months. Here it is.

learntocloud / learn-to-cloud

Learn the fundamentals of cloud computing

Welcome

What is Learn to Cloud?

Learn to Cloud is a GUIDE (not a book or course) that originated from this tweet. The goal is to provide an outline of skills you need to learn to get into Cloud Computing. At the end of it you should have the technical knowledge for roles like:

System administrator.
Cloud Support Engineer.
Cloud Administrator.

How to get started?

Our website is live here

Questions? Comments? Feedback?

Please open an Issue

Roadmap

Take a look at our backlog for a full list of proposed features (and known issues).

Contributing

We have 2 areas for contribution:

Engineering

We would love to be your first PR! or any PR for that matter. Take a look at our backlog and comment on an issue you'd like to work on and we can get you started.

Content

If you have ideas for updating the guide content, please…

View on GitHub

I also created a YouTube video with an overview of the guide.

This is based on my own experience. Your journey is yours. However, I still wanted to share in case anyone finds something useful.

Create: Serverless 2020 Workshop

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 13:21:53 +0000

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When I tweeted that, I meant it! Create: Serverless is my first time participating as a speaker at a conference, and I can't tell you how excited I am.

When, where, what's the topic?

Topic: Refactor Node.js and Express APIs to Serverless APIs with Azure Functions
When: September 30th, at 11:05-11:55 AM EST
Where: RSVP here

Hangout with us

If you've been joining the #ServerlessSeptember live streams, you can expect that same vibe. I'll be joined once again by my partner in crime, Christian Nwamba

Christian NwambaFollow

Let's make technology and content more accessible to diverse people and culture

We'll walk through the exercise, discuss, answer questions, and no matter where you are in your serverless journey, I'm sure there's something you can learn or share with the rest of us in the chat!

The team and I would love to see you there.

AZ-303 Study notes #5 Azure Service EndPoint and Azure Private Link

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 02:13:54 +0000

Here is the fifth episode of my AZ-303 study notes series.

Video Notes

Service Endpoints

Azure virtual network service endpoints

What are Service Endpoints?

They are a type of configuration that allow us to integrate different services with our VNets. We are providing the private IP address information to the service through the Microsoft backbone.

Why use them?

They provide private and low latency connectivity for services by utilizing backbone routing. This means traffic between the resources in your VNet and connected services only traverses the secure Microsoft backbone.
Many Azure services are built for public accessibility, when you place a firewall in front of the service and utilize a service endpoint, you can remove that public accessibility.

Let's create a service endpoint

Not all services support service endpoints. We can use this Cloud Shell command to list which services we can use with Service EndPoint:

az network vnet list-endpoint-services -o table \
    --location "East US 2"

Keep in mind that Service endpoints are enabled per subnet. Let's add a service endpoint for Microsoft.Storage:

az network vnet subnet update --name "default" \
    --vnet-name "vnet1" \
    --resource-group "integrated-networking-demo-rg" \
    --service-endpoints "Microsoft.Storage"

Let's take a look at what changes. If we visit a VM within the subnet where we created the service endpoint, in the effective routes options we can now see new default route entries, it establishes a different route the for specific services.

Private Link

What is Private Link?

What is an Azure Private Endpoint?

Very similar to Private Endpoints, it enables secure connectivity from your VNet to other services, but it also provides some additional features:

Provides a private IP address to access supported services by.
Can be used for services that are customer or partner owned. In case you have an on-prem service you'd like to provide private connectivity to.
Private Link works cross-region.
Granular protection against by supporting mapping to specific services.
You don't need a dedicate subnet to deploy it.

Architecture

Private Endpoints: The network interface that connects to a supported service. It receives a private IP address from the registered subnet and is configured with DNS.
Connected Resources: The Azure PaaS resource associated with a Private Link.
Private Link Service: Customer managed service operating behind a standard load balancer, enabled for Private Link.

Thanks for tuning in.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

AZ-303 Study notes #4 VNet Peering and VPN Gateways

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:44:06 +0000

Here is the forth episode of my AZ-303 study notes series.

VNet Peering

Like I mentioned in the Intro to VNets section, each VNet is an isolated and secure space. Each one has connectivity inside of itself and to the internet but by design there is no connectivity between VNets in a subscription or across subscriptions. What if we wanted to enable that? We can use VNet peering for this, it allows us to establish low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity between VNets and works over the Microsoft backbone, that means that this connectivity avoids the public internet and is more secure.

Capabilities

Provides connectivity over private IP.
Supports cross-subscription connectivity.
Supports cross-region connectivity.

Limitations

Address space cannot overlap.
Does not support transitive routing by default. You could setup a Network Virtual appliance. A VM acts as a router and that could forward traffic.

Advanced options

Allow forwarded Traffic: Allows forwarded traffic to pass through the VNET peer. Commonly used with Azure Firewall.
Allow Gateway transit: Allows a VNet to be used to access other resources through a VNet gateway
Use Remote Gateway: Configures a VNet to make use of a peered VNet's gateway, to access other resources.

VPN Gateway

VNet Peering vs VPN Gateway

You can also use VPN gateways to establish connectivity between VNets.

Components

VPN gateway within a special subnet called GatewaySubnet.
Public IP addressing for each VPN gateway to establish the connection.
IPSec IKE site-to-site VPN tunnel that ensures all traffic is encrypted.

Which one to use?

VNet peering: Designed for VNet-to-Vnet connectivity. Typically used for private low-latency interconnectivity.
VPN gateway: Designed for hybrid connectivity. Generally used where encryption and/or transitive routing is needed.

Thanks for tuning in.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

AZ-303 Study notes #3 Azure Storage Services

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:43:32 +0000

Here is the third episode of my AZ-303 study notes series.

Video Notes

Azure has 4 storage services.

Azure blobs: A highly scalable, object oriented storage. Suitable for modern cloud application object storage.

Azure Queues: Messaging and integration service. Aids in integration of loosely coupled solutions, like micro-services.

Azure files: a cloud version of q traditional file share.

Azure tables: simple storage for non-relational semi-structured data, kind of like a watered-down version of Cosmos DB. Useful for storing key pair information.

All these are grouped together because they share one thing in common, a storage account.

Create a storage account in the Azure Portal

Like any resource in Azure, a storage account will exist inside of a resource account. Let's create one using PowerShell via the Azure Portal.

# Create an Azure Storage Account using PowerShell

$rgName = "gps-storage-rg"
$storageAccountName = "gpsstorageaccountdemo"
$location = "East US 2"

# Create a resource group
New-AzResourceGroup -Name $rgName -Location $location

A few properties we should highlight.

Account Kind: Influences the features and pricing. GPv2 most of the time you'll work with this one, the others are legacy options or premium kinds.

Performance tier: Determines performance characteristics. Standard or Premium.

Replication: Configures redundancy and high availability for the underlying storage and infrastructure.

Locally-redundant storage (LRS lowest cost option): Synchronous replication to three other scale units within the region. Low cost option.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): Synchronous replication to three availability zones within the region.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS): Asynchronous replication to a secondary region. Also includes LRS-like replication.
Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS, highest cost option): A combination of ZRS and GRS (without LRS replication).

Access tier: Changes pricing models based on access levels. Hot (modified frequently), cool (less frequently), archive (remains offline for long periods of time).

# Create a new Storage Account
New-AzStorageAccount -Name $storeName `
    -ResourceGroupName $rgName `
    -Location $location `
    -Kind StorageV2 `
    -SkuName Standard_GRS `
    -AccessTier Hot

Storage Account Connectivity

Public Endpoints: Storage services are built for public accessibility first, by default all services have a publicly accessible endpoint.

Firewall: Aids in restricting network access to all services that exist within a storage account.

Network Integration: Other services like Service Endpoints, Private Link, etc, allow you to change the network accessibility of Azure Storage services.

Storage Account Security

Data layer: Access keys and account and service SAS (shared access signatures).

Management layer: RBAC roles. ****

Let's spend some more time covering blobs and storage as those are the most relevant for the AZ-303.

Blob Storage

Object oriented storage. Think of a bucket, you can put anything in it, unstructured or semi-structured data. Built for scale and performance and designed to be accessible.

Block blob: Optimized for streaming content.

Append blob: Optimized for append operations (log files)

Page blob: Optimized for random read/write operations. Used for VM disks.

Access level: keep private if you can. Change access level.

You can also host static websites on azure, I have a video covering how to deploy a Blazor project.

Access tier: hot or cool. Can be configured on blob level, not just container.

Azure Files

Azure files is built for centralized data, designed for SMB connectivity. In contrast to blob, it does provide a true folder hierarchy.

You can connect to the file share with SMB 2.1 (only Within region) , SMB 3.0+ and REST/HTTP.

You want security in transit (encryption). When you enforce this, you can no longer use SMB2.1 even from within the region.

Account keys and SAS can be used via rest.

Account keys and Azure AD domain Services can be used via SMB.

Thanks for tuning in.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

AZ-303 Study Notes #2 Intro to VNET and VMs

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:43:00 +0000

Here is the second episode of my AZ-303 study notes series.

Video Notes

Virtual Networks

A VNET is an isolated container within Azure that provides network connectivity to resources.

Important components

Subnet: A VNET has one more more subnets. Resources that require network connectivity must reside in a subnet.
Address space: VNETs require one or more address spaces to provide private IP addresses to resources.

Important Considerations

Default connectivity: After creating a VNET, some connectivity is enabled by default. (Internet access, inter-subnet access).
Address range restrictions: Private IP address ranges are allowed. The smallest allowed is /29 and the largest is /8.
Reserved IP addresses: 5 IP addresses are reserved in each subnet. This includes the first 3 and last one. (x.x.x.0-3, x.x.x.255).
DNS and DHCP: Custom DNS can be configured for your VNET. DHCP is built-in and cannot be custom deployed.
Supported Protocols: VNETs support TCP, UDP, TCP/IP protocols.
Integrated Connectivity: VNETs are also built for various forms of integration. Including ExpressRoute, Private Link, VPN, and more.
Routing and Connectivity: NSG are more like a firewall, VNET routing is more about the actual pathway.
System Routes: Default routes configured by Azure to allow specific connectivity to work automatically.
Any subnet within a vnet will have outbound access to the internet.
Subnet to Subnet connectivity.
Custom Routes: User-defined routes which allow custom paths of communication to be enforced or blocked.
Route priority when you have multiple routes: Custom > BGP > System. The longest prefix match is always going to precedence first. a /32 will override a /24 when the other octets of the IP are matching.

Virtual Machines

A VM allows you to deploy virtualized Windows or Linux machines. They are helpful when you want to migrate existing compute workloads to the cloud and deploy advance compute solutions.

Key Components

Belongs to a resource group.
Created in a specific region.
Is configured with a given size that you can change also once it's created (requieres restart).
Built from an image of an OS.

Virtual Machine Sizes

The size of a VM influences several characteristics:

CPU resource allocation
Total available memory
Network Interface Card (NIC performance
Storage (Azure Disks) performance
Graphics capabilities
Influences limits (maximum NICs, disks)

Available sizes for your VM depend on Whether the virtual machine is running and the location of the virtual machine.

Thanks for tuning in.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

AZ-303 Study notes #1 Intro to Azure AD

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 01:40:35 +0000

Time to start studying

I've decided to start studying for certifications again. I've been a cloud engineer for about 2 years now and finally know what path I want to take my career in. I am a big fan of IT certifications and am aiming to take 3 this year.

Documenting my learning journey

To document my learning journey and help keep me accountable, I've decided to start a new series on my Youtube. Each video will have an introduction to the topic I am studying, some footage of me studying and going over the material and then a summary of what I learned that day.

Let's start with Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies AZ-303

Here is the first episode, the topic covered is: Intro to Azure AD for the AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies

Study notes

Azure Active Directory is sort of like a container that stores all the identity information for our organization. It is separate from your Azure Subscription.

Important components

Tenant

The environment where we create our users and register applications and devices.

Domain

When a tenant is created, it will have one initial domain (domain.onmicrosoft.com) and zero or more custom domains (added using TXT or MX DNS records).

Association / Trust Relationship

The link between an Azure AD tenant and one more more Azure Subscriptions. An AD tenant can be associated with multiple subscription, but a subscription can only and must be associated with one AD tenant at a time.

Thanks for tuning in

Next video we are covering virtual networks and virtual machines.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

Serverless database computing with Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 20:24:36 +0000

What is Cosmos DB?

It's a globally distributed multi-model database service. It provides APIs for SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables, or Gremlin so you can access your data. There's a free tier now, which was made available in March 2020.
Azure Cosmos DB free tier is now available | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure

Why use Cosmos DB?

Key benefits
- Global distribution: You can add or remove any of the Azure regions to your Cosmos account at any time.
- Provides 99.999% high availability for reads and writes.
- The database engine is fully schema-agnostic.
- A bunch more

Why use Functions with Cosmos?

You can create event-driven serverless apps with low-latency access to data.
Keep in mind that currently, Azure Functions trigger, input bindings, and output bindings for Cosmos DB are supported for use with the SQL API only. For all other Azure Cosmos DB APIs, you should access the database from your function by using the static client for your API.
Serverless database computing with Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions

Bindings

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-bindings-cosmosdb-v2

In this video I provide an overview of the trigger, input and output bindings for Cosmos DB and Azure Functions.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

How to become a Cloud Engineer in 2020

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:30 +0000

What is a cloud engineer?

Someone who builds, monitor, maintains, and/or architects cloud solutions and infrastructure.

You see the and/or in here and that's because your responsibilities will depend on where you work. Larger companies will have more engineers and you'll be able to work on just building, or architecting, whereas at smaller companies, you might have to work on each piece. It can get overwhelming, but trust me, cloud engineering is a very exciting field to be working in currently.

Okay, let's dive in

Area 1: Choose a cloud platform to learn

As a cloud engineer, you will live and breath inside one or multiple cloud platforms.

Area 2: Learn DevOps methodology

DevOps is a set of practices that if you implement, you will shorten your development lifecycle, improve your software quality, and provide continuous delivery of your software. All of this means you to better serve your customers and your time to market is shorter.

Area 3: Learn a programming language

The power of the Cloud really comes into play when you learn how to automate your tasks.

Side note: This isn't really programming but learn some terminal skills, knowing how to use a terminal well will save you time.

In this video I provide an overview of each area, resources and a few project ideas to get you started!

I plan on creating more content around Cloud Engineering; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

Real-time communication with Azure Functions, SignalR service and Blazor Wasm

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Sun, 17 May 2020 18:31:57 +0000

What is ASP.NET Core SignalR?

It is an open-source library that adds real-time web functionality to apps. Apps that require high frequency updates from the server, social networks, gaming, dashboards, monitoring, apps that require notifications, are all great candidates for SignalR.

SignalR:

Handles connection management automatically.
Sends messages to all connected clients simultaneously, or to specific clients or groups of clients.
Scales to handle increasing traffic.

Transports

Transports are methods of handling real time communication.

SignalR automatically chooses the best method that is within the capabilities of the server and client.

The following techniques are supported:

WebSockets
Server-Sent Events
Long Polling

Hubs

SignalR uses hubs to communicate between clients and servers. In the server code, you define methods that are called by client. In the client code, you define methods that are called from the server and a hub is a high-level pipeline that allows a client and server to call methods on each other.

SignalR provides two built-in hub protocols: a text protocol based on JSON and a binary protocol based on MessagePack.

Azure SignalR Service

Is the hosted on Azure version of SignalR.

Removes the need to manage back planes that handle the scales and client connections.
Simplifies web applications and saves hosting cost.
Global reach, SLA, scales to millions of connections, all the security and compliance goodies that are standards when using an Azure service.

Azure SignalR service and Azure functions

A Function of any trigger type can push out messages to clients using Azure Functions SignalR bindings.

Azure SignalR Service and Azure Functions are both fully managed services and we're going to use the two together to provide real-time communications in a serverless environment in this demo.

You'll need an instance of Azure SignalR service to get this working

madebygps / signalr-functions-blazor-demo

In this video, I walk through a simple example of SignalR service, Azure functions and Blazor Wasm.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

Azure Functions Output bindings

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Thu, 07 May 2020 22:16:52 +0000

Binding to an Azure function is a way of declaratively connecting another resource to it; bindings may be connected as input, output, or both. Data from bindings is provided as parameters.

Bindings are optional and a function might have one or multiple input and/or output bindings.

In this video, I walk through a simple example of using a Table and Queue output bindings with Azure Functions.

I plan on creating more content around Azure; it's great to share what I've been learning.

If you have any feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!

Nintendo Switch Midi Controller with Max MSP

Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 18:04:23 +0000

Thanks to all the free time lately, I've been dabbling into a different kind of development, one that bridges my passion for music production with programming.

Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. You can learn now about it here

In this video, I'll show you how to turn a Nintendo Switch JoyCOn into a drum rack sample trigger!

If you'd like to try it out for yourself, code is here:

madebygps / m4l-game-midi-controllers

If you have ANY feedback at all, please let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on socials.

Thanks for reading and possibly watching!