This week I became a certified Cloud Practitioner.

Very exciting stuff! This wasn’t strictly necessary, and doesn’t give me any permission to do anything special, but it’s nice to recognise personal development.

I celebrated this success by spending a day and a half messing with databases and planning ways to improve resilience and save money.

I’m really happy with how much I’ve learnt over the past year with AWS, and it’s quite empowering to know the possibilities of what I can build now. But I’m aware that I’ve dived deep into one cloud provider of many, so I’m interested in looking at direct competetitors (Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and other technologies in the space (e.g. Kubernetes).

Summary

• Passed my AWS Cloud Practitioner exam
• Built a proof-of-concept for our documents integration, which is a big step forward alongside other work in the department
• Investigated moving to Amazon Aurora to make our databases scalable
• Moved our email sender to a dedicated IP address since our shared IP has been blocked by some spam lists (nature of cloud infrastructure)
• Investigated a memory leak on our PDF generator, though I ultimately had to give up because there was no clear solution and the leak itself isn’t causing any problems for end users