I started working at AWS, as a AWS technical account manager for over 18 months starting back in 2020.  In that time I have helped more than 12 customers be highly successful in adopting AWS services.  All my customers are in the public sector and I have seen tremendous growth.  This has been driven by the challenging environment that COVID-19 has created.  The pandemic has required all types of organisations to be agile, scalable and resilient which in turn translates into processes, systems and technology.

For the past 9 months, I have been working as a senior technical trainer.  I have inspired, engaged and motivated many customers and passed on all my lifelong learnings.  This has not been easy and has taken a tremendous amount of work and dedication.  I wanted to share some fundamental practices that I have applied when I work with customers, that have helped me be successful at AWS, but more importantly have helped delight my customers.

1. ​Manage work using a Kanban - this is the foundation of everything I do.  A kanban is a system of work where the workers pull work when they are ready.  Think of it like a queue.  I can pull off work for me to execute or add customer requests and reprioritise as required. The key here is to have work in process limits. These limits prevent you from overworking, over stressing and burning out.  So if I reach a limit, I need to rethink my priorities and put something back into the backlog.  Everything goes in the Kanban: escalations, customer enablement sessions, immersion days, game days, certifications I plan to acquire, videos, livestreams, strategic planning, support planning, delegated outcomes….everything.
2. Learn how to communicate effectively across all channels - reach out to others via instant messaging, mobile phone, via videoconferencing and avoid email where possible.  Reach out for advice, support and to collaborate.  Remember that reaching out is a sign of great strength.
3. Know when something is not working and pivot immediately - don’t keep making the same mistakes.  If in doubt, try something different and learn to experiment.
4. ​Learn slowly - take your time to learn your craft.  Andy Jassy who is the CEO of Amazon wisely said: “There is no compression algorithm for experience”.  Nothing wrong with finding more efficient ways of learning, but don’t take short cuts.

I hope that helps you all on your agile journeys.  May the force be with you. 🚀

P

G'day beautiful people.  It's almost Christmas.  Sorry I haven't blogged for a while, but I've been super busy, doing incredible work in the cloud with AWS.  But my Tesla Model 3 has inspired me to blog yet again, this time 1 day before Christmas Eve.

So...I have had a problem with my Tesla Model 3 windscreen wipers for about 3 weeks now.  My partner was driving the car, and they just went berserk.  Simple fix...turn them off.  Well...that worked for the last 3 weeks because I haven't been out in the rain.  But today...the heavens opened and I needed them.  So after switching to Auto....they furiously wiped back and forth...even though to start with the rain was only spitting.

I looked a quite a few forums and it is a common problem. Good thread here on the problem: 

teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/wipers-dont-work-properly-in-auto.222547/

What is the fix?  Make sure the centre front-facing windscreen camera is clean and so too must be your forward-facing side cameras.  After cleaning mine...it worked a treat.  Keep reading if you're interested to know why this fix most likely worked.

Me being a curious person and wanting to understand how the wipers work, I dug a little bit deeper.  

Well they use the camera system, and a clever piece of technology called Artifical Intelligence (AI), to detect whether there is rain on the windshield and they look for other visual weather cues.  From my research and knowledge of the Tesla Model 3, and my knowledge of AI netural networks, I have deduced the following:

The camera that is looking out at the windscreen, which is positioned between the driver and passenger on the front windscreen, is most likely detecting the rain, and the front facing left and right cameras are looking for weather cues. 

The 3 cameras are fed data in a lab somewhere in Tesla.  The data consists of real-world vision that shows that the weather is raining.  Lots of different types of data needs to be fed into the cameras, so that the AI, well neural network to be precise, can LEARN how to detect rain.  This is known in data science as TRAINING.  The neural network is really a mathematical representation of an algorithm, that can learn to do new things.  The type of algorithm is called a neural network.  A neural network is a type of algorithm that mimcs how the human brain works. The word neural refers to neurons, which are small biological systems in the brain that help us all learn. 

By replicating a similar technique using mathematics, machines can be taught to learn, just like humans.  If you remember the stories about AI beating Lee Sodol in the game of Go, that's the same technique.

Anyway...once the neural network is trained the output is a model.  The model is then tested by feeding more live data, to ensure that it functions correctly.  It is doesn't function in all scenarios, that new learnings are fed back into the original neural network and new models can be TRAINED again to produce better results.  

This process usually takes weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the problem being solved.  

If you'd like to learn more about neural networks, check out this awesome article:

www.explainthatstuff.com/introduction-to-neural-networks.html

And if you'd like to have a play with neural networks, also known as Deep Learning, you can stuck in here with AWS:

aws.amazon.com/deep-learning/

Merry Christmas

G’day from the land that gave you kangaroos, koalas, redback spiders and Paul Hogan….sorry about that! 

So….what is Kubernetes.  Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration platform that helps manage containers at enterprise scale.  Typically a large enterprise (say more than 1000 employees), tends to put a lot of stress onto the underlying technologies that are delivering business value.  These stresses include:

• Scaling resources and services to meet demand.
• Providing extremely high availability of services to customers.
• Being able to reconfigure the components on the fly, in an instance, in real-time to provide business services with shapechanger capabilities.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) - 
​aws.amazon.com/eks/

I hope you are all staying safe in this unique period of coronvirus lockdown.  To take your mind off all things viral, I'm going to talk about the basics of Amazon Web Services and a service called Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 for short.

The Amazon EC2 service offers a way of running up virtual machines in minutes.  Each virtual machine is billed per minute and you can terminate them at any time.

There are 4 flavours to choose from:

• On-Demand instances - recommended for when you are starting off with experiments where workloads may be a little unpredictable.
• Reserved Instances - recommended for stable workloads, which can be secured over a 1 to 3 year term.  These are the cheapest per second of billing.
• Spot Instances - these are instances that you can bid for, and if you are successful you get to use them for a period of time.  Perfect for time critical workloads.  
• Dedicated - a dedicated physical server, recommended for when you have to licence per server to save costs or for clear, compelling compliance reasons.  These are the most expensive per second of billing.

Check out my video below which talks through these options:

Once you have decided on your instance aligned to your commercial model, you can look at what type of instance you want and where you want to host it.  There are many locations to choose from.  Click on the image below to take you to the interactive map:

Once you have selected your instance category, you'll need to then pick an EC2 specification.  Don't sweat it at this stage....try out a few specs.   Measure their performance and price over a few days and then you can select the one that meets your needs.  Just be sure that when you're monitoring your EC2 instances, you are making the instances work as normal. 

We call this first set of measurements a baseline. And we can use it to measure what "normal" looks like.  Click on the link below to understand best practices around baselinining:

Deviations to this baseline can indicate abnormal activity.  Things like an unexpected peak in demand from our users, or worse still an indication of a malicious attack.  Either by a person, via a bot or via some form of malware.  

I hope you enjoyed my blog post.

Take care and stay safe.

​P

I hope everyone is staying safe and making the most of their time indoors.  Today I am rediscovering the beauty and elegance of Amazon Web Services or AWS for short.  AWS provide a cloud computing platform that allows you to build apps and infrastructure to deliver business outcomes.

Today, my session is going to focus on a very basic service called Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 for short.  It is a simple service that allows you to build your own virtual machines or VMs.  These VMs are the most basic building block in cloud computing.  

Below is a fantastic Zoom video, that steps you through some of the basics of AWS EC2 and provides you with a simple hands-on demo on the AWS platform.  I really hope you enjoy it.