Learning AWS The Easiest & Quickest Way: The Framework
Updated: Sep 13, 2020
A sensitive issue with most AWS engagements, that's my observation, is knowledge transfer between consulting teams and clients' staff; it takes clients sometimes up to three months to be comfortable operating their AWS platform.
AWS with its one hundred seventy five (175) services is certainly nice to implement but, fact of the matter is it's difficult to learn.
"One hundred seventy five (175) services, that's a lot!", "How do they work?" and "How can I learn them in a way that makes me qualified in a record time?" is what I hear all the time.
The reason for the long learning curve is, technology instructors don’t take into account learners' concerns, expectations, mindset and psychology.
Leading experts, researchers, teachers and speakers, confirm it, "effective learning goes hand in hand with effective learning strategies, methodologies and techniques."
The AWS Learning & Teaching Framework (L&TF) is the methodology I developed to speed AWS learning in a way that makes clients' staff qualified enough to operate AWS platforms.
Let's see how it works!
The Three Pillar Model of The AWS L&T Framework
As the exhibit illustrates, the AWS L&T framework builds on three pillars to help learners become easily and quickly:
The drivers to rapidly acquire AWS expertise include Learning Simplificators, The Easy AWS PaaS Model, and The Easy AWS IaaS Model.
Let's delve into them!
The AWS Learning Simplificators that Make It Easy
They're a combination of factors likely to make the AWS learning experience easy, fast, and effective. They include:
The 80/20 law of learning
Abstraction of complexity
and Learning by Practice
Creative leaders who are changing our world from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos through Oprah Winfrey to Steven Spielberg build on the 80/20 law of learning. In the context of this article, the 80/20 law refers to the observation that only 20% of AWS services are used in the 80% usual AWS projects. They include service categories revolving around networking, computing, storage, security, reliability, and data science.
Abstraction of complexity uses varied techniques blueprint, infographics, analogy, and information breakdown to facilitate the understanding of AWS services in areas as challenging as security, data science, and networking.
Learning by practice is the verified belief that students must interact with their environment and tools in order to effectively and quickly adapt and learn.
Now let's take a look at how the understanding of AWS Platform as a Service (PaaS) is made easy.
The Easy AWS PaaS Model
As illustrated, it sees the AWS PaaS layer as an extension of the client’s application deployment and runtime environment built on an Easy AWS IaaS model:
The Easy AWS PaaS Model supports two constructs designed to facilitate and speed the learning of AWS application deployment solutions, they include:
Simple deployment
and CICD pipelines
Simple Deployment, based on the learning 80/20 law, prevents students from being scattered over AWS' one hundred seventy five (175) services, it focuses them on the most popular application simple deployment tools: Elastic Beanstalk and CodeDeploy.
CICD Pipeline on the other hand, based on the learning 80/20 law, focuses students on AWS most popular DevOps tool: CodePipeline. It uses Abstraction of Complexity and Information Breakdown to make easy and speed the learning of DevOps concepts and tools.
Now let's see how the Easy AWS IaaS model simplifies the learning of the AWS challenging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer!
The Easy AWS IaaS Model
The Easy IaaS model sees AWS' IaaS layer as an extension of the client’s on-premise infrastructure, it narrows the IaaS cloud to a combination of only six building blocks, each corresponding to a specific area of concern of IT organizations:
These building blocks are constructs designed to facilitate the understanding AWS services mobilized in most cloud migration engagements:
Extended Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Extended Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Extended Data Storage
Extended Security
Extended Reliability
and Extended Site-to-Site VPN
Let's discuss them one by one!
The Extended VPC Symbolizing The Virtual Datacenter
It represents the hosting environment, ensures network connectivity and aggregates AWS services and features as key as:
Internet Gateway (IGW)
Route 53
Public and private subnets
and Site-to-Site VPN connection
The AWS L&T framework combines a variety of learning mechanisms include the 80/20 law, complexity abstraction, information breakdown to make easy the understanding of the above services, tools, and features.
The Extended EC2 Representing The Compute Infrastructure
Extended EC2 represents the virtual servers needed to host and execute applications.
They provide computing capacity and focus on AWS Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and the related features including:
EC2 instance
Key pair
Instance type
Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
It builds on the extended reliability, storage, and security building blocks to provide efficient and effective computing capacity.
The 80/20 law, complexity abstraction, and information breakdown teaching techniques are leveraged to simplify and accelerate the learning.
The Extended Data Storage Representing the Storage Infrastructure
The purpose of the extended data storage building blocks, as its name suggests, is to provide data storage as well as data science capabilities.
It aggregates services and features like:
Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume
Simple Cloud Storage Services (S3)
Redshift to provide safe storage capacity.
The 80/20 law, complexity abstraction, and information breakdown teaching techniques are leveraged to simplify and accelerate the learning.
The Extended Security Acting as The Security Capability
The purpose of the extended security building block is to guarantee security across the extended VPC. It aggregates services and features including:
Identity Access Management (IAM)
Security Group
Network Address Translation (NAT)
Network Access Control List (NACL)
Route Table (RT)
and VPC endpoint
Like with the extended data storage building blocks, the 80/20 law, complexity abstraction, and information breakdown teaching techniques are leveraged to simplify and accelerate the learning.
The Extended Reliability Symbolizing The Fault Tolerance Capability
The extended reliability building block purpose is to ensure high availability and reliability. It builds on the following AWS services, features, and tools:
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Auto Scaling Group (ASG)
and Route 53 health check
The learning of these services, features, and tools is simplified, clarified, and speeded using teaching techniques as varied as the 80/20 law, complexity abstraction, information breakdown.
Where to Go from Here
There's no doubt that any AWS training based on the principles and teaching techniques defined in this article will make you qualified AWS consultant in record time.
Stay tuned, the following courses will be available by end of December 2020 on Udemy and Flevy.com:
Become an AWS Expert The Easiest and Quickest Way
The Six AWS Architecture Design Patterns: The Framework
The ABCs of Managing AWS Migration Engagements
To Your Success!