I was a Compute and Networking guy for a while, so it is good to add breadth into my technical knowledge.
Big Data on AWS training
KVM Virtualization 101
This is a translation of my article in Russian which was written in September 2019.
Virtualization is so deep and broad subject, that it is not possible to cover all details of hypervisor (and not needed, actually). I will concentrate on “minimal valuable pack” of knowledge that is required to understand any KVM virtualized solution, not necessarily Telco.
Content
- Overview and brief history of virtualization technology
- Types of virtualized resources – compute, storage, network
- Virtual switching
- Virtualization tools – libvirt, virsh and etc.
- Conclusion
Overview and brief history of virtualization technology
The story of virtualization began in 1999 when young company VMWare has released product VMWare Workstation. This was a first commercial product that provided virtualization for desktop/client applications. Virtualization of the server part started a little bit later in the form of ESX Server product that evolved in ESXi (i stands for integrated). This product is being used widely in IT and Telco private clouds as hypervisor for server-side applications.
Continue readingBook review: Speed Reading: Learn to Read a 200+ Page Book in 1 Hour by Kim Knight
Excellent book with a lot of practice drills to improve spead of reading. Most of the advices are easy and straightforward to understand, but it will require commiment and time investment to master speed reading skill.
I’m gonna practice following skills:
- Setting a purpose before starting to read
- Preview reading materials
- Space reading
- Remove subvocalization
- Reduce fixation and regression
- Practice peripheral vision
- Look for key sentences and meanings in text
- Do recall and review after every 30 minutes of reading
- Eye exercises at the end of the day
Overall rating – 5 out of 5.
Certification: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
I got my second AWS certification – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate!
Score: 874 out of 1000
Total preparation time: 5 weeks, from 30 minutes to 1 hour per day.
Materials used:
- Ultimate AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate 2020 by Stephane Marek
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Practice Exams by Jon Bonso
- Various AWS whitepapers
Overall, exam questions are quite difficult and I don’t think it is possible to pass it without solid preparation.
Next target is AWS Certified Developer Associate.
Book review: The Kindly Ones: A Novel by Jonathan Littell
Very long and very controversial novel. So controversial that I will refrain from commenting it.
It is worth to mention that novel was awarded two of the most prestigious French literary awards, the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française and the Prix Goncourt in 2006.
My personal score 4.5 out 5.
Cloud Native as a disruptive innovation for Telco market
Disclaimer
This article is a summary of my personal views and opinions. It does not pretend to be 100% correct as far I’m a human and have my own biases and tend to make mistakes.
Introduction
The pace of innovation is high and continue to increase. There are very limited amount of industries that were not impacted by Cloud Computing technologies stack. And Telco industry is not one of them. I was witnessing for last 5-7 years how several waves of innovation gone through telecommunications vendors and service providers changing not only products and solutions but organizational structures, processes and ways of working.
The most recent innovation that came to Telco market was Cloud Native technologies. The purpose of this article is to summarize how Cloud Native innovation is different from other multiple changes and improvements happened in industry and explain why it is “disruptive”.
What is “disruptive innovation”?
Continue readingBook review: Influence without Authority by David L. Bradford; Allan R. Cohen
Every person in any organization has a need to influence people – peers, boss, other department. This is just a part of human nature. We prefer to participate in reciprocity process rather than to follow marching orders. Even with direct reports it is much easier to achieve better performance with influence than authority.
This book provides guidance into how to create influence using pretty straightforward process. In the context of the book, influence is an ability to establish trustful relationships and make “win-win” exchanges to achieve the one’s goals.
One of the key ideas of the book – everybody is your potential ally. This idea is very simple, but in practice we tend to mark individuals or groups of people as “bad persons”, if they don’t cooperate or help us right after the first request. Thus, we remove them from list of potential allies and killing the possibility for influence.
The book explains how to avoid this bias, how to understand other side values and goals (currencies in the book’s language) and how to build mutually benefitial reciprocity process in professional environment. The process how to do that explained early in the book and the rest of it concenrates on various situations where and how this process applies – with your boss, cross-functional team or other departmernt.
The key weakness of the book from my point of view – too much speculation and hypothetical thinking in some of examples.
Overall rating – 4 out of 5.