DEV Community: Rohini Gaonkar

Get into Cloud computing with no experience

Rohini Gaonkar — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:30:00 +0000

I have been working in the IT industry for almost 14 yrs now, in multiple roles, across the world, and luckily all of this experience has been with Cloud Computing technologies. Over the years hundreds of people have asked me same question - how do I get into Cloud based roles?

A lot of folks want to get into Cloud Computing roles BUT companies want to see experience on your CV/resume. It is a dilemma for lot of folks.

If you don't get hired into Cloud Computing projects, you can't get experience and without experience companies won't hire you

So I thought I should talk about this in detail and help folks who want to make switch to Cloud Computing, because Cloud is the new normal now and it should have a place on your resume.

Watch this short YouTube video on how you can build your skills, your resume and your brand to apply for jobs.

I do provide subtitles, and chapters so feel free to watch content you like.

Let me know in the comments section, if you have any questions or any topics I should elaborate more about. I am happy to guide folks so we all are successful in our own lives! I hope these give you a fair idea of where to start and motivate you to take your first steps into a successful career!

How to ‘Be your own cheerleader’

Rohini Gaonkar — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 17:12:08 +0000

Let me start by asking you a question -

do you feel unskilled at advocating for yourself and unsure of how to be proud of your work and accomplishments?

If you answered yes, then this blog post is for you.

Over the years, I have seen a common thread while mentoring tech community members – they do the hard work but they have poor self-esteem and self-worth. They do some amazing work, they have positively impacted so many lives, however, they don’t know how to showcase their work.

We humans tend to get demotivated over time and lose confidence in our own abilities. This impacts relationship with co-workers and even job interviews. Now some might not agree with me, but it is a harsh reality of today’s world; If you do not talk about your body of work, who will?

If you have attended my talks, then you would have heard me say this hundreds of times – BE YOUR OWN CHEERLEADER...!

If you do 99 things right and 1 mistake, which one do you obsess over?
Well, we typically obsess over that 1 mistake, because we are hard-wired to look at that one negative comment. Our memories are fickle, we tend to remember things that have stronger emotions associated with them. So how do you ensure that our minds do not obsess only on the negative, but also see the positives?

It’s simple, WRITE IT DOWN!

Trust me on this, I have done this activity with many of my mentees and it works EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Identify the broad categories of your body of work – projects, volunteering, public speaking, blogging, social media, soft skills, certifications etc. Once you have identified the broad categories, list down all the achievements you can think of in these categories. It doesn’t matter if it is significant or not. This is YOUR list, and you don’t have to be ashamed of anything.

Are you usually quiet and you spoke up in your team meeting? Write it down! Pat on your back for overcoming the shyness, the fear. No one is going to judge you.

Once you write down the list, start adding meat to it.

For example, this is an actual excerpt from one of my mentees in Public Speaking category:

Conducted sessions for college students on zoom for Universities like X Y Z to spread awareness on Cloud, Helped students to be Market ready and mentor them for their innovative projects.

Now, if you are a recruiter or a manager who is building a case for your promotion, what would be your first reaction? do you get any idea on the impact of work here? No.

What about this..

Regularly conducts virtual sessions for college students for major universities like X Y Z, to spread awareness on Cloud. She continues to mentor students on their innovative projects, career guidance and be market ready.

Great so now with some basic language cleanup I made it concise, and a bit more professional.

However, we can do better. At this point, ask yourself a question – SO WHAT?

So, what should I do about this information? Why does it matter? Can I quantify this impact? Can I put it in perspective?

Regularly conducts virtual sessions for college students for major universities like X Y Z, to spread awareness on Cloud. The 15 sessions were attended by 2000+ students with avg CSAT 4.7/5. She continues to mentor students on their innovative projects, career guidance and be market ready.

Isn’t this better? You know what she does regularly, how many sessions, attended by how many students and that is an impressive CSAT (Customer satisfaction score). Provide examples using metrics or data is always more impactful than using fancy words or long paragraphs.

You can further make it more impressive by adding anecdotes or testimonials from attendees, and if this led to a further engagement like the Universities have now signed her up as a regular guest lecturer.

Make a collection

Create a folder on your computer for ‘appreciations’. Anytime someone says something nice about you, take a screenshot and store if for yourself. If you can, ask people to give you testimonials or LinkedIn recommendations. On days when you do not feel good, open this folder and read through. You will get instant motivation boost.

Make it a habit

I suggest doing this activity as soon as activities are done.

You can also create monthly, quarterly half-yearly and yearly snapshot of these activities.

If you are looking for a job change, make this list right now!

It will not only help you look at your accomplishments, this will help you show your interest and impact. You can add them to your resume or portfolio. During an interview, you can use this list to showcase impact and highlight your success stories.

You can build great examples using this for your behavioral-based interview questions in STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, and Result). Specifics are key; avoid generalizations. Give a detailed account of one situation for each question you answer, and use data or metrics to support your example.

Once you start building these writing skills, next time before you say yes for an activity, you will automatically assess if the activity has true measurable impact and helps you achieve your goals.

If you do not have the option of saying no, atleast you will assess how this activity impacts you in the greater scheme of things

Build your support system

Humans are social animals. While you are doing this writing activity by yourself, you need your own support system. Find people in the community, at your workplace, in your friend circle who support you and cheer you up on these accomplishments. Do not be arrogant or bullyish about your work. **Appreciate people who supported you in the journey. **You can summarise and publish this on your social media. Social media can be a great ego booster so why not use it for that? You should celebrate your accomplishments! Be your own cheerleader and the world will follow you!

Contrary to common belief, at workplace your manager should be part of your support system.

If you think your manager should inherently know all the awesome work you do, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Managers are not responsible for keeping track of your achievements. When you assume your manager owns your growth, it inevitably creates frustration for both parties. There's only so much each of you can do without the other.

As mentioned before, our own memories are fickle, how can we expect a human being (aka your manager) with many direct reportees to remember all your good work? Be a good direct reportee and make your manager’s job a little easier. Regularly share your work progress and achievements in a short, concise manner as discussed above. It makes it easier for them to remember and share with other internal parties.

So that’s it. Today we learnt how you can build your own list of achievements, make them concise, data oriented and share them with your support system. I hope some of these tips help you build your career and you continue to climb the ladder of success!

Builders Guide to AWS Summit Online India 2022

Rohini Gaonkar — Mon, 23 May 2022 08:11:44 +0000

For the last many years, I have had privilege to attend, speak and even curate agenda at AWS Summits, open/free tech conferences, that happen globally. This year I have been more closely involved and it gives me immense happiness to showcase what we have in store for you. This is a great conference to meet and network with similar minded enthusiasts about technology we all love.

Event highlights

Just like last 2 years, the AWS Summit Online India 2022 is a 2-day virtual technical conference, on Wednesday 25th May, and Thursday, 26th May; with opening keynotes starting from 9am IST.
And this is amazing as anyone from anywhere across the world can attend sessions and build network. Registration for the event is free, so go ahead and sign up for the event here.

The Summit will offer 150+ educational sessions, technical demonstrations, and keynotes featuring the the VP of AI at AWS Dr. Matt Wood with other AWS business leaders and AWS customers like Tally, ICICI Lombard, Apollo tyres and more.

Our AWS Community Hero for DevTools, Bhuvaneshwari Subramani, is presenting in the Day 1 Keynote.

The sessions are divided into 17 tracks with themes like AI/ML, Big Data, Cloud Security, Compute Anywhere along with 5 experiential zones - exam readiness sessions Training & Certification, deep dive demos in Builders Fair and Startup Central. Pick and join any sessions you wish based on the detailed Agenda on the event website.

Attend the Summit to know more about what is happening in the Cloud Computing space and how India is using AWS to build innovative applications. Most of the sessions have AWS customers across India talking about how they have been using AWS in their real-world solutions.

Sessions are labelled from Level 100, i.e. introductory level to level 400 i.e. expert level. So, attend sessions depending on your level of knowledge ranging from L100 - L400.

Community track

I am happy to introduce you to the 'Build on AWS' track where for the first time ever, our community members are presenting in the AWS Summit India, alongside me. We will present advanced deep dive sessions on topics like Containers, Serverless, DevOps, Data Lakes and more.

Architecting for sustainability Level: 300 | Advanced

I will be presenting this session, where I will dive deep into techniques recommended by the AWS Well-Architected Framework Sustainability pillar and provide direction on reducing the energy and carbon impact of AWS architectures. Learn about best practices, which organisations of any size can apply to their workloads and how to review the new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool report with a demo.
Connect with me on LinkedIn

End-to-End CI/CD at scale with infrastructure-as-code on AWS Level: 300 | Advanced

AWS DevTools Hero - Bhuvaneswari Subramani, dives deep into building a production ready, multi-account, at scale CI/CD pipeline using your own Jenkins, with infrastructure-as-code using AWS CloudFormation, and discuss best practices for building DevOps capabilities for your container applications running on AWS.

Just-in-time worker nodes for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service using Karpenter Level: 300 | Advanced

AWS Container Hero - Dijeesh Padinharethil, will demonstrate how Karpenter simplifies Kubernetes infrastructure with the right nodes at the right time. Karpenter is an open-source, flexible, high-performance Kubernetes cluster autoscaler built with AWS

Build serverless apps with SAM Accelerate and SAM Pipelines Level: 300 | Advanced

AWS Community Builder - Jones Zachariah Noel N, demonstrates how to use SAM templates to manage serverless infrastructure as code. He will share best practices for using the AWS SAM CLI and the recently announced AWS SAM Accelerate to develop and debug serverless applications on your local machine. He will also showcase the ease of CI/CD workflows with SAM pipelines to multiple staging environments.

Build performant, scalable and secure GraphQL APIs Level: 300 | Advanced

AWS Community Hero - Dipali K, and AWS UG Delhi leader - Rajat Arora, take you through security best practices for your GraphQL API’s with AWS AppSync, and Amazon Cognito for easy management, improved performance, and observability.

Build sustainable applications on AWS using Rust Level: 200 | Intermediate

AWS Solutions Architect Developer Specialist - Sundararajan Narasiman, will dive into the “super powers” of Rust, hear about the work ahead to give those powers to every engineer, and learn about the ways in which you can contribute. He will cover how to build a lambda function using Rust and deploy to AWS.

Build a data lake with AWS Lake Formation Level: 200 | Intermediate

AWS Community Builder - Sanchit Jain, will explore data lake challenges and how AWS Lake Formation can help you. If you're a developer, DBA, or a data engineer who works with data, this session is for you.

Build a real time pipeline to ingest streaming data Level: 300 | Advanced

AWS Data Hero - Sridevi Murugayen, will look at how you can build streaming data analytics pipelines that speed up time to information from hours to seconds. She will discuss how streaming-data services like Amazon Kinesis are used to capture and analyse data in real time from hundreds of sources, with AWS Lambda, stored in Amazon S3, then process it with Amazon EMR and deliver it to your Amazon Redshift data warehouse.

Goodies up for grab

I would recommend watching few noteworthy sessions live. The live experience will get you an opportunity to connect with peers, tech enthusiasts, ask questions to experts, and last but not the least, win swags.

You are eligible for the certificate of attendance, as long as you complete watching 5 sessions or more during the conference and you stand a chance to win $25 AWS credits too. Also, watch 2 or more express trainings in the Training & Certification Zone and be amongst the first 2000 to get the discount certification voucher!

AWS Summit India event Website - https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/india/https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/india/

How to stop overspending - AWS Cost Optimisation tips

Rohini Gaonkar — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 08:04:27 +0000

Sharing with you typical cost savings tips I have shared with customers as a Solutions Architect. These are some of the obvious (but often ignored) items that customers can do to save cost as they build and grow on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

1. Backup frequency and retention in services like Amazon RDS
2. EBS Snapshots & Volumes
- 2.1. Stopped Instances
- 2.2. Amazon EBS 'DeleteOnTermination' attribute
- 2.3. Recent Announcements from AWS re:Invent 2021
3. Storing Logs in CloudWatch, without ever purging
4. Data Transfer
- 4.1. NAT Gateway to S3 bucket
- 4.2. Chatty applications
5. Unused Metrics & Alarms
Summary

Let's talk about some of the commonly ignored ones :

1. Backup frequency and retention in services like Amazon RDS

Sometimes customers want to be extra cautious while taking database backups. This is great compared to being completely ignorant and not taking backups.

True story: couple of my customers were taking manual snapshots of RDS instances every 4 hrs, storing them for 15 days, and each backup being more than 500 GB. Plus there was 1 automated snapshot everyday retained for 7 days. Additional backup storage for your provisioned database storage is billed at $0.095 per GiB-month.
If you just do a rough calculation on above items, you can estimate that they must be paying 100s, if not 1000s, of dollars on unnecessary backups that were useless in case of a disaster, if any. No one would be using a 13th days old 2nd backup to restore database, the data already was too old for the system to be up and running.

Hence, the frequency and retention of backups must be selected depending on the RTO/RPO discussed with your business stakeholders.

Read more information on the Disaster Recovery (DR) objectives in the AWS documentation

2. EBS Snapshots & Volumes

2.1. Stopped Instances

It is a common saying for EC2 - when you stop the instances, you stop paying. Yes, this is correct, but only for the compute and data transfer costs. If you have an EBS volume attached to the EC2 instance, you will continue to pay for storage.

If you don't need the EC2 instances again, its good to backup data in cheaper storage like Amazon S3 bucket or simply create an Amazon Machine Image. Snapshot storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in Amazon S3. Because Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the snapshot size will be considerably less than your volume size.

Moreover the costs are slightly lower. For example, in US-EAST-1 :

EBS Volume (gp2) - $0.08 per GB-month
EBS Snapshot     - $0.05 per GB-month of data stored

2.2. Amazon EBS 'DeleteOnTermination' attribute

By default, Amazon EBS root device volumes are automatically deleted when the instance terminates. However, by default, any additional EBS volumes that you attach at launch, or any EBS volumes that you attach to an existing instance persist even after the instance terminates.

A lot of times customers are unaware of this and end up with 'Available' volumes in their account which are left over by terminated instances, ultimately adding to your EBS cost. This gets more troublesome when you have AutoScaling instances scaling in and out all the time.

This behavior is controlled by the volume's DeleteOnTermination attribute, which you can modify. You can change the value of the DeleteOnTermination attribute for a volume when you launch the instance or while the instance is running.

To verify the value of the DeleteOnTermination attribute for an EBS volume that is in use, look at the instance's block device mapping. To query instances with this attribute as false, run following command:

aws ec2 describe-instances \
--filters "Name=block-device-mapping.delete-on-termination,Values=false"

For more information and if you want to modify this, see View the EBS volumes in an instance block device mapping.

2.3. Recent Announcements from AWS re:Invent 2021

You can now use 2 new features from AWS :

EBS Snapshot Archive, a low-cost storage tier to archive full, point-in-time copies of EBS Snapshots that you must retain for 90 days or more for regulatory and compliance reasons, or for future project releases.
EBS Snapshot Recycle Bin - lets you set up rules to retain deleted snapshots so that you can recover them after an accidental deletion.

3. Storing Logs in CloudWatch, without ever purging

Amazon CloudWatch Logs is awesome. You can use it with services like X-ray and CloudWatch ServiceLens for better observability of your application.

However, it is important to note that default retention setting is ‘never expire’. This means all that log data from months ago which you may not require now is still stored and costing you money.

Purge or export your CloudWatch Logs to Amazon S3 to save on cost for long term.

You can configure how long to store log data in a log group. Any data older than the current retention setting is deleted automatically. You can change the log retention for each log group at any time.

4. Data Transfer

4.1. NAT Gateway to S3 bucket

You can use a network address translation (NAT) gateway to enable instances in a private subnet to connect to the internet or other AWS services, but prevent the internet from initiating a connection with those instances. This is a great security feature that is highly recommended to customers.

If you create a NAT gateway in your VPC, you are charged for each “NAT Gateway-hour" that your NAT gateway is provisioned and available. And the data processing charges apply for each Gigabyte processed through the NAT gateway regardless of the traffic’s source or destination.

Many miss out the important note mentioned on its pricing page :

'To avoid the NAT Gateway Data Processing charge in this example, you could setup a Gateway Type VPC endpoint and route the traffic to/from S3 through the VPC endpoint instead of going through the NAT Gateway. There is no data processing or hourly charges for using Gateway Type VPC endpoints.'

So, if you have used a NAT Gateway for all your traffic, including to and fro from Amazon S3 bucket you end up paying a lot of data transfer cost.

Instead use a Gateway Endpoint to route the traffic to/from S3. And the NAT Gateway will route rest of the traffic.

For this, simply attach a Gateway endpoint to your VPC and update the Route Table for private subnets. The route table will take care of forwarding the requests automatically. Following is architectural representation of same:

Please note, S3 access through gateway endpoints is supported only for resources in a specific VPC to which the endpoint is associated. S3 gateway endpoints do not currently support access from resources in a different Region, different VPC, or from an on-premises (non-AWS) environment. However, if you’re willing to manage a complex custom architecture, you can use proxies. In all those scenarios, where access is from resources external to VPC, S3 interface endpoints access S3 in a secure way. Check out the blog Choosing Your VPC Endpoint Strategy for Amazon S3

4.2. Chatty applications

Some customers have chatty applications that talk to each other a lot which pile up the Data Transfer cost for inter-region.

True story: One of my customers' managed this by making silos of their architecture per AZ. So, LBs will talk to instances in only one AZ. They managed routing of customer segments and failover between AvailabilityZone with Route53. Ofcourse this is not always possible and not easy to manage.

There are many different ways of handling this depending on your use-case so I recommend reaching out to your AWS Solutions Architect(SA) to help dive deep into this. They can help you if your spend is significantly high, thank me later. If you don't know who it is and if you wish to be connected to our Sales/Solutions Architect teams, submit a request here

5. Unused Metrics & Alarms

By default, your EC2 instance is enabled for basic monitoring with 5-min interval. You can optionally enable detailed monitoring, then the Amazon EC2 console displays monitoring graphs with a 1-minute period for the instance. This is great as you get additional information.

However, it is important to note that detailed monitoring is charged. The number of metrics sent by an EC2 instance as part of EC2 Detailed Monitoring is dependent on the instance type. Most commonly used instance types have atleast 7 metrics. So the pricing would be Monthly CloudWatch Metrics Charges @$0.30 per custom metric = 7 * $0.30 = $2.1 per instance. This can pile up quickly.

So, ensure you are enabling detailed monitoring for instances that you require additional information and those instances are not simply left in stopped mode.

Similarly, create alarms only when they are required and used frequently.

Summary

In this blog, we learnt simple yet effective ways of optimising cost in your AWS account and stop the wastage.

Ofcourse this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add any more tips you have to benefit everyone. Hope some of these help you make the right decisions for your workload. Looking forward to your feedback.

Do let me know if you found this helpful, and would like to see more cost saving tips/reminders.

The Ultimate Guide to AWS Community : SAARC

Rohini Gaonkar — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 06:43:33 +0000

As Solutions Architect and as a Developer Advocate at AWS, I have been working with the AWS community for years now, either it is to deliver tech sessions or to help setup logistics for a meet-ups.

The community is a great space for learning, sharing and ofcourse networking.

A lot of times I get questions on how one can get involved with the AWS Community, especially in my region - India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Hence, this blog to summarise some of the amazing efforts of our community and the various AWS programs we have. Many of these programs are global while some are regional, you could still access regional content from anywhere.

AWS User Groups

Global program
AWS has 400+ AWS-focused User Groups(UGs) around the world. These are communities that meet regularly to share ideas, answer questions, learn about AWS services and best practices, and even a great pool for hiring talented professionals.

As a Developer Advocate, along with my colleagues, I work with the AWS User Groups across India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. I officially started interacting with these UGs since May 2020. While I have met many members in the pre-pandemic world, most of our interactions have been virtually since you-know-when. Inspite of the WFH mode, many of our communities still connect regularly and help each other grow.

You can find all the UGs here in SAARC at AWS User Groups in Asia Pacific. They come together for sessions they live stream, or setup their own groups so people can communicate or even have their own certifications bootcamp.

Find a local group that is close to you. Last year we launched 6 new UGs across India, so do visit above link. Also, subscribe to the AWS UserGroup India YouTube channel as most UGs also stream to this channel regularly.

🤷 What can you do?

Attend sessions, workshops, bootcamps, etc
Passionate about a topic? Reach out to the UG Leaders of any user group you want and find a speaking slot. Share your knowledge with others.
Connect with others for jobs, certifications, etc.
Stand a chance to win goodies, credits or vouchers.

AWS Community Days

Global program
Every year the user group leaders come together to create tech conferences called as Community Day. They feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. These were in city 1-2 day events for enthusiasts to come, network and learn together. Since the pandemic, the conference has been virtual and sessions are available online for everyones benefit.

In 2021, the user group leaders of India, Bangladesh,Nepal, and Sri Lanka came together to create AWS Community Day South Asia Virtual Edition 2021. You can watch all the sessions from this event on the website.

This community day we also experimented with AWS JAM where you put your skills to the test by solving challenges that emulate real AWS use-cases. This was very well appreciated by the community as it took a different approach to learning.

AWS Heroes

Global program
The AWS Heroes program recognises a group of AWS experts(who are not AWS employees) for their enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing. They write blog posts, present at conferences, host regular meet-ups, contribute to open source, and more. At its core they all are community champs, who are self-driven and self motivated to help the community. They share knowledge to enable others via any medium and help the community grow.

🤷 A lot of times we are asked, what should I do to become a hero? This is an honorary recognition by AWS. There is no said checklist of do these 10 things or apply here and you are a hero. Heroes are given this title to appreciate all the amazing work they have been doing. They are not doing work for the title but to genuinely help the community. So if you have been doing awesome work, continue doing so. Actively work with the community and you will not be missed. Last year we added 3 new Heroes in SAARC to recognise their work, bringing our total to 15 Heroes in the region.

There are different categories of heroes too. Do check out the AWS Heroes worldwide list for more information and don't miss out the Content library

LinkedIn post by AWS Hero Dijeesh Padinharethil with Adam Selipsky CEO of AWS.

AWS Community Builders

Global program
The AWS Community Builders program offers technical resources, mentorship, and networking opportunities to AWS technical enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders from the community who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community. Last year we had 100s of Community Builders selected.

Want to learn from existing Community Builders? Check out their content on dev.to.

Want to become a Community Builder? We just closed our recent application. However, feel free to add yourself in the waitlist now.

Read these articles from Community Builders:

How to become an AWS Community Builder

Stephen Sennett for AWS Community Builders ・ Aug 17 '21

#aws #career #cloud

10 Benefits to joining AWS Community Builders

Ganesh Swaminathan for AWS Community Builders ・ Jan 10 '22

#aws #career #cloud #community

AWS re:Skill

Regional program
We also have our own learning platform called as AWS re:Skill that is developed for the community to help developers learn and upskill/reskill themselves on the AWS platform.

🤷 What can you do?

We do weekly and monthly challenges. You can learn from sessions, take part in the quizzes and earn rewards.
If you are writing blogs and want wider reach, add the links to your re:skill profile.
If you are interested to present a session, feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn DM.

AWS Developer Stories

Regional program
In 2021, we wanted to share unique stories of our community celebrating their passion of building tech and how the AWS community has helped them level up in their journey. Our Developer Marketing Manager, Ridhima Kapoor, has done beautiful work with these stories that have been appreciated globally. Do watch and read about our community 4 stories, hoping this inspires you to be part of a vibrant community and help with your goals.

Sandeep Kanabar -> Video , Blog
Dipali Kulshrestha -> Video , Blog
Bhuvaneswari Subramani -> Video , Blog
Jeevan Dongre -> Video , Blog

AWS Women in Tech Community Edition

Regional program
We also had yearly one day event for Women in Tech. The sessions were a good mix of tech and non-tech topics. We had huge response for this from the community. You can watch all the on-demand videos on YouTube playlist.

AWS and other communities

I always tell this to cloud newbies - think of AWS as an added flower in your bouquet of skills. AWS has the breadth across many different technologies that you may have already have experience in. Apply that knowledge to AWS and learn how to do that with AWS for a quick-start. And for this reason we also participate and engage with communities that are not necessarily only AWS. For instance, we have been engaging with communities of Women in Big Data, GitHub, Postman and more. If you are part of a community and would love AWS to come collaborate with you, reach out to me via LinkedIn DM or reach out to any UG Leader or Hero.

AWS and Open Source

We have been involved in lot of Open Source discussions. We participate and host events for Open Source. In India we had 2 major events last year - our AWS Jaipur User group hosted OS Tech, and we had a whole day AWS track at Open Source India and more. We will continued investing more into Open Source discussion. So stay tuned.

Summary

Hope this gives you some insight into the active participation AWS communities in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

How can you stay updated on all of these?
Simple, follow me (and AWS heroes on LinkedIn), join user group communities and be an active member.

Can we do more?
Ofcourse! If you have great ideas of what we can do to enable builders of tomorrow, tell us in the comments section or DM me on LinkedIn.

Let's enable developers to be highly skilled and set them on a path to be the best versions of themselves.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Youtube

Life at AWS : 8th Anniversary

Rohini Gaonkar — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 03:43:35 +0000

Update 7th January 2023 : Its been 9years now since I joined AWS and I moved to AWS Canada as a Developer Advocate in Oct 2022. First image is updated for same.

8 years ago, 7th January 2014, I joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) and this blog is a peek into the dream-come-true life I have had so far. These are some of the learnings, experiences and thoughts on life at AWS. If you are new to AWS or aspire to join us, read along!

Over the years, I have been a Cloud Support Engineer(CSE), a Solutions Architect(SA) and a Developer Advocate(DA) across South Africa, Singapore and India. I have moved with AWS to different geographies, and made friends globally. I got to work with hundreds of customers in different regions, and many more colleagues who have become really good friends. Meeting them in different countries has been pure joy!

While many organizations frown upon people leaving teams/projects, here at AWS we are encouraged to explore different roles. I could apply my tech skills as a Support Engineer while expanding my breadth and dive deeper into services. I used those learnings to help customers as a Solutions Architect(SA). As an SA I followed my passion of public speaking and worked with AWS community over the weekends, which led to eventually moving into Developer Advocacy.

A little history :

Before I joined AWS I was part of an R&D team that did Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) on different cloud platforms we had back in 2010. Most of those public/private clouds do not exist today.

It was love at first sight, with AWS technology

I worked with AWS tech before launch of AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS AutoScaling for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It led to an idea and a working PoC which resulted into my first published IEEE paper. Interested? Read here.

In the years that followed, I had hands-on migrations experience of moving on-premise web applications to AWS - a highly coveted skill at that time.

The organization was acquired and its vision changed, but my love for AWS and my vision stayed strong. So, I applied to AWS, went through virtual interviews and did the unthinkable - moved to different continent - Cape Town, South Africa. In the middle of culture shock and home sickness, my tech skills soared higher every passing day.

Source : My feature in the AWS Employee Spotlight series.

Learnings :

While everyone talks about Leadership Principles, which we Amazonians imbibe in every aspect of our work, I wanted to shed some light on other aspects of working at AWS.

Something I tell new joiners, or people who even change roles/location internally - initially, it feels like a lot of information is sent your way and its only natural to feel overwhelmed. Drinking from the firehose. When you feel like it, remember what Dory said - just keep swimming. Trust me, it does get better.

Hence, don't rush through your ramp up time. There is a reason ramp up time is provided, use it well to learn the internal ways, do your certifications and most importantly shadow your colleagues in different roles. Everyone is busy, but if you need help - ASK! Find a buddy, or a mentor, it will help calm your nerves.

Most of us experience imposter syndrome It may feel overwhelming to be around so many smart individuals. AWS has a high hiring bar, if you made it through it, you are worth it.

If you want to be successful at AWS you have to take ownership of projects beyond your daily responsibilities. It is a great way to connect with the global AWS teams, customers and helps you build relationships. Over the years, I am proud having worked with some amazing teams here at AWS - from being part of the This is my Architecture, to managing 21 sessions across 3 theatres for Lightning talks in a physical AWS Summit India, to owning a T&C Twitch series, getting my customers speaking slots at re:Invent, building workshops, and many more.

One of the most important lessons of my life - Burnout is real. Some interviewees ask a question - is life at AWS too hectic? Well IT depends on what stresses you (and sometimes which team you are in). Here, we are not stressed by office politics, you are not worried of racing with your colleague to get that promotion. Here, everyone has more than enough work to showcase their skills. When you are so excited about the work you do, you may end up not realizing you are burning out. And it's important to pace it. There is a saying internally - it's a Marathon, not a sprint.

So, it's important to know your own limits, take breaks, talk to your managers if something is troubling you. There are multiple programs available to employees, and I have used them last year when our lives changed overnight. It has helped me tremendously!

Everyone works on schedules that make sense to them. You set your own boundaries. Saying NO is encouraged by leaders. You would find leaders saying - just because you saw an email from me that is out of business hours, doesn't mean you have to respond immediately.

All this would not have been possible without some amazing managers & leaders. A good manager is a blessing. They have always pushed me to speak up, to be a leader, motivated me when I doubted myself or just being a friend I can freely talk to. I have never hesitated to reach out to skip level or regional managers. It is never considered as an escalation, but a pure sharing of ideas and building relationships. Coming from a very hierarchical past this was the warmest welcome. Being an autonomous individual contributor has boosted my motivation and creativity.

Source : My feature in the Women of AWS feature on Amazon Jobs website

Summary :

Life at AWS has had its ups and downs, a dream-come-true rollercoaster ride. It is AWSome because of all the amazing people I have met as colleagues, customers or community.

Hope this gives you an honest take of life at AWS! Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn, always happy to chat!

Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Youtube

Interested to grow with AWS? Check out following resources :

AWS Jobs - We are hiring! Apply for jobs based on roles & locations of your choice.
Tips for interviewing at AWS - a good collection of process, and tips for every step in interviewing at Amazon/AWS
Certifications - Explore our role-based certifications
Re:skill - Community driven learning
Join our AWS Community - find an AWS User Group near you and join us.

Summary of my recently published and upcoming talks

Rohini Gaonkar — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 07:53:10 +0000

I have created dev.to account long ago and have planned few posts. To start with thought of enlisting some of my recently published and upcoming talks. Hoping to start my dev.to journey soon. Until then enjoy some of my content!

Just a quick summary :

I just completed my very first Twitch series Let's Ship it with AWS. We built a web application from basics - creating an AWS Account, to using the AWS primitives like VPC, EC2, RDS, etc. We also talked about Cost, Scalability, Data Strategies, High-Availability, Fault-Tolerance, Disaster Recovery, and more in 6 EPISODES only. If you are new to AWS cloud, this maybe a good quick crash course to get you upto speed. All you need is here - Landing Page Let’s Ship It — with AWS
It was so much fun working with Ridhima Kapoor and Suman Debnath to bring a fun, awesomeness packed AWS Women in Tech Community Edition. We had 15 women leaders talking tech + non-tech. This live event was such an amazing experience for everyone! I moderated panel with amazing esteemed women leaders at AWS on How to think like a leader and had a tech session on Application integration patterns for microservices [Level 200]. Do checkout the videos on AWS User Group India's YouTube Channel Playlist
I delivered a 2hr Workshop for the 8th NASSCOM Annual Technology Conference on Build Well-Architected Multi-Tier App on AWS. You can watch the conference recordings via their platform https://natc2021.exposim.io/ [Day 2, Parallel Workshop 1] I also showcased the AWS Well-Architected Labs in this session.

Upcoming:

Open Source India (Oct 7 & 8 ) - Based on feedback from our previous engagements, we have a special AWS track this year that focusses on OpenSource at AWS. Do join us! Register here.
AWS Innovate Online Conference - Modern Applications Edition (Oct 27 & 28 ). Register here.
- Day 1 - Core concepts & Fundamentals, Session levels: 100-300. My session - Increase availability with AWS observability solutions (Level 200)
- Day 2 -Advanced tech & Hands-on, Session levels: 300-400. My session - Reliability, consistency, and confidence through immutability (Level 300)

Also, do check out the most awaited event, AWS Community Day South Asia 2021 (22nd & 23rd Oct 2021). With the combined power of AWS User Groups in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka & Bangladesh, we are back with a bang to host the event, unveiling success stories, use cases & much more from industry leaders. Register here.

Of course, there's more in the pipeline 😄 and will announce as it happens. Until then enjoy and go build!! Happy learning.