☁️ AWS -- Head in the Clouds ☁️

Cloud Bound

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to best serve my present employer and keep learning about exciting technology. The most exciting avenue open to me right now is learning more about AWS. The avenue I’ve chosen to pursue is studying for my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Certificate.

So far the course I signed up for at (Digital Cloud)[https://digitalcloud.training/courses/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-hands-on-labs/] has been awesome. It offers oncise presentation of information, but also includes plenty of hands-on instruction. This week I’ve been learning about using auto-scaling instance groups to spin up AWS instances in response to server conditions and using load balancers to balance traffic between them. The possibilities are very exciting, and with the help of the training material I probably won’t accidentally end up with an unexpected bill!

Building on Spec

I’m once again debating building a website for an organization that didn’t ask for one. For a few months I’ve been going to (F3)[https://f3asheville.wordpress.com]. The site for our local chapter is fine, but there is obvious room for improvement. It appears to be hosted on a free Wordpress site using a very Bootstrappy template. I think there’s room to convey the most important information more clearly, and I think a facelift could help others be excited to try it out.

The upside to the project is that I’m excited about it and would enjoy building it. The downside is that without stakeholder buy-in, you are setting yourself up for tears. Do we want to actually purchase a URL? Who pays? Do we really need a backend? Hosted where? How do we train people to use it? Maybe instead of a backend, it could use Twitter and Insta APIs to build content instead. How do you weigh the pros and cons of these choices without buy-in? The list could go on and on.

I’m still on the fence thinking about it.