My very first project was a vulnerability scanner for Docker images. I have felt the agility starting from day -1. I have been talking about Java during my interviews. I signed a contract for front-end development. When I joined, I saw this image scanner written in Go. I was excited, as everyone should be about their first real job. And to be fair, I already had a great story out of it, and a little lesson on getting used to being flexible. It also ended up giving me female IT friends, a group of amazing people, with whom we still catch up from time to time.
During this first experience, I have felt appreciated for my backend skills, and even peeked into EC2 on AWS. I have some vague memories about trying to make machines accessible by modifying some IP addresses, but I do not remember much on the exact issue. What I do remember is that I felt intrigued and challenged. I wanted more of it. (I also remember running Kubernetes on Docker and not managing to make minikube work with the VPN – but that’s for another day)
And I did get more of it. In my current position I have been part of the infrastructure team, having multiple internal dev teams as clients. During these years, my exposure to the cloud and cloud providers increased. I have learnt from people with a vast knowledge about virtual machines, load balancers, storage, networking and dealing with developers. The internet also helped.
Lately, we have been focusing more and more on the cloud provided by Google. So it was a natural step to try to challenge myself and go for the Professional Cloud Architect exam when the opportunity arose at the company. I signed up for a virtual class and followed the lessons on Coursera and Qwiklabs.
But then either life or my fear of exams or my fear of big books got in the way. I wanted to finish the Study Guide before actually doing the exam. I got to the second chapter and “took a break”. Did I say that it is a big book? Not Knuth-level, but bigger than my usual 120 page, big-lettered fiction books.
Today I did manage to pick it up and start over again. And I do want to recapitulate here what I have learned from the intro. I also tried using flow-based notes.
The very first thing explained is that this exam is not about a developer’s knowledge on how to get things done in GCP. It is targeted at architects, or people needing architecting. My knowledge of clicking around will not be the right kind of knowledge, and it will not be enough, but it will certainly help.
The exam is measuring the capability of solving business problems while keeping technical requirements in mind. On business parts, it is about understanding the role of the solution. On technical parts, it is about finding the right balance between writing pretty code and pushing out new features. And in order to get these right, we must think not just about the design of the application, but also about the infrastructure around it, how me manage the data, the deployment lifecycle. And how the software will evolve when requirements change. Which means getting out of the programmer mindset (writing code to solve stories), and doing more software engineering.
There was also a list of Objectives at the end of the introductions. This part was a more detailed list of the above-mentioned requirements. It started from designing and planning solutions directly fit for the cloud, went through setting up infrastructure, being compliant, implementation, all the way until keeping the application alive and reliable. All things that need to be kept in mind for cloud applications.
At the end, there was an assessment test. Got 20 out of 25 questions right. I have already done this test some months ago, but still, glad to see the knowledge did not get completely away from me. I have failed mostly on the data analysis questions, but also one time on storage. And there was one question I knew the answer to, but wrote the letter down wrong. This mostly means I have to pay extra attention during the chapters on big data and storage.
I did promise myself to finish one chapter, but I finished the introduction instead. I still count it as a win for today.
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