30 posts tagged with "Technology and Programming"

The Rise of Speculative Wealth Traps​

Before diving into this post, I want to clarify my specific beliefs regarding sports betting and prediction markets. In a vacuum, I have no moral qualms with the principle of gambling. I’ve certainly laid down some sports bets while in Las Vegas. That said, I do not play daily fantasy sports (DFS) or engage in any sort of online betting or prediction markets. Mirroring many of my thoughts regarding social media, I personally feel that unfettered online access to the dopamine hits of gambling is deeply unhealthy for the human psyche. In addition, I believe that the potential for sudden personal wealth via highly speculative risks (much like cryptocurrencies) attracts so many willing participants due to the rapidly vanishing middle class and the increasing scarcity of quality job opportunities. As the already massive global wealth inequality continues to widen, I view these as yet another transfer of capital from the middle and lower classes back to corporations and executives. As a diehard sports fan, I am also profoundly disappointed at how intertwined sports media and betting have become. People today simply cannot watch any sports coverage without being bombarded with online betting ads. In fact, I fear that new sports fans are now unable to distinguish between betting and the sports themselves. Kids and teenagers today only know betting to be woven into the very fabric of sports.

I’m tired. Existentially.

Motivation and Background​

While I’ve used Kubernetes professionally in a few capacities (particularly in customer engagements while working at AWS), I wanted to cement my knowledge and increase my mastery with a systematic approach. I decided to prepare for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam. I’ve taken and passed more than a dozen technology certification exams spanning AWS, Azure, HashiCorp, and more. This exam is unique in several ways. Namely, it’s all hands-on in a lab environment. Azure exams often have a coding, configuration, or CLI command component, but even these are typically multiple-choice questions. The CKAD presents you with a virtual desktop and several Kubernetes clusters, making you tackle 15-20 tasks with a strict two-hour time limit. I put together this repository and post for a few reasons:

About the Book​

Recently, I started reading a fantastic book called The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman. From the description:

About​

This is a tool that I developed and open sourced at AWS. Find the latest in the GitHub repository here. It’s released under MIT-0.

Solution Overview​

As I wrote about previously, AWS users are shifting left on costs using DevOps and automation. While tools like Infracost are powerful for estimating costs for Lambda and other services, they alone do not provide optimization or tuning feedback during the development lifecycle. This is where a tool like AWS Lambda Power Tuning assists:

About the Book​

Recently, I started reading a fantastic book called The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman. From the description:

Solution Overview​

My current role focuses on every facet of AWS cost optimization. Much of this entails helping to remediate existing infrastructure and usage. Many customers ask how they can shift left on cloud costs, like they do with security. Ultimately, cost consciousness needs to be injected into every aspect of the engineering lifecycle: from the initial architecture design to implementation and upkeep.

The Course and Companion​

Rahul Nath recently released a course called AWS Lambda for the .NET Developer on Udemy and Gumroad. I had a ton of fun going through the exercises and highly recommend purchasing a copy. While working through the material, I implemented the solutions with infrastructure as code using AWS CDK in C# and .NET 6. I also containerized most of the Lambda functions and wrote unit tests for both the functions and infrastructure. You can find all my source code on GitHub.

I previously wrote a blog post about getting started with Terraform for CDK and the benefits. At that time, the latest version was 0.3. Last week, version 0.5 was released. In this version, some new experimental features could make adopting CDK for Terraform exponentially easier.