Toni's Cloud Journey

Cloud Wordle 1: AWS Glossary

Toni — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 02:35:14 GMT

Because each provider has their own product name, I am compiling these definitions to quickly refer back to them if needed, starting with AWS.

AWS Name	What is it?
Route 53	A DNS Server
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud, hence EC2)	A VPS. It allows for OS, memory, and computing power
S3 (Simple Storage Service, hence S3)	Fast Cloud Storage
Glacier	Slower Cloud Storage due to higher latency, ideal for backups since it has a lower cost than S3
CloudFront	A CDN with a high number of PoP (Points of Presence/Edge)
CloudWatch	Monitoring and analytics for instances
CloudTrail	API and general logging. Useful for audits
CloudFormation	Create templates to enable services via a configuration file in .yaml or .json
ECR (Elastic Container Registry)	Allows the user to upload and store Docker images that can be run through other tools, like ECS
ECS (Elastic Container Service)	An API for starting, stopping, and allocating VMs to the containers, allowing the user to connect them to other products like Load Balancers
ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)	Distributes traffic across EC2 instances
EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)	A service for managing Kubernetes (K8S)
EBS (Elastic Block Storage)	Extremely fast storage that can handle high throughput, ideal for applications that have intensive processing requirements
ElasticSearch	ES, but on Amazon
ElasticCache	Redis, but on Amazon
AutoScale	Uses parameters to scale services up or down depending on demand
Lightsail	PaaS (Platform as a Service) - Used to deploy containerised applications through a static server that’s always running
Lambda	FaaS (Functions as a Service/Serverless Computing) - Upload the code and use events to determine when the code should run
App Runner	Deploy containerised applications to AWS
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)	Manages both public and private subnets
Security Groups	Controls access to individual resources, like EC2, by allowing traffic through
NACL (Network Access Control Lists)	Controls access to the subnets by blocking traffic
Nat Gateway	A managed service that allows resources in a private subnet to access the internet while remaining protected from unsolicited inbound connections
Simple DB	General-purpose, no-SQL database
Dynamo DB	Document database that scales well horizontally, but isn’t great with relational data (no joins)
Document DB	Basically, MongoDB
RDS (Relational Database Service)	Supports SQL databases and can manage backups, patching, and scaling
Aurora	Compatible with SQL and Postgres, 5x faster than MySQL at a lower cost
Neptune	Graph database that achieves better performance on highly-connected datasets, like a social graph or recommendation engine
Redshift	A data warehouse that receives multiple sources of structured data and can be queried with SQL
Lake Formation	A tool to store a large amount of unstructured data, or data lakes, that can be used in addition to Redshift to query a larger variety of data sources
Kinesis	Used to capture real-time streams from your infrastructure that can be used to analyse real-time data on your favourite business intelligence tool
Rekognition	An API that classifies objects and images
IAM	Identity and Access Management, used to control who can access AWS tools
Cognito	An auth service
SNS (Simple Notification Service)	Used to send push notifications
SES (Simple Email Service)	Used to send emails
SQS (Simple Queue Service)	A message queue system
WAF (Web Application Firewall)	Watches traffic and blocks anything according to the rules specified
Bedrock	Deploy and use pre-made AI and LL models
SageMaker	Use to make and train your own models in detail

On Accountability and Reform

Toni — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 11:22:49 GMT

For all the dreams of walking deeper into the belly of the beast and aiming to become a certified cloud practitioner with either AWS or GCP by the end of June 2025, the lack of meaningful scheduling meant it was doomed to fail before it even started. In my defence, NamiComi became so incredibly busy for me and my co-founders that it really took all we had to keep everything running as smoothly as possible.

In any case, my new goal is to get back on track and have some certifications by the end of this year. I was looking at the basics to ensure I have a solid foundation going forward, and as it turns out, being a project manager for infrastructure, frontend, backend, and iOS and Android apps imparts some indirect knowledge.

Between public, private and hybrid cloud, the project I manage is basically a hybrid, using a combination of our own infrastructure alongside some external systems that introduce technology that would be outside our price range to do privately at that scale.

Side note: cloud computing is known for two main benefits—cost and scaleability. Both make sense, it’s now cheaper to rent IaaS than it is to have multiple PoP around the world that had to be bought, maintained and updated. That said, running a typical setup from AWS or GCP for delivery can be much more expensive than running your own setup in a private environment, where you can outsource certain features that require on-tap resources to maintain a healthy service to a public cloud provider.

As I find out about more about cloud computing and services, I think it will be a fun exercise to document how some of that is reflected in setups I’ve seen in the past and other ways they could have been deployed. Subscribe if you’d like to come along!

Dreams Are Messages From the Deep

Toni — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:42:48 GMT

Imagine waking up one day after dreaming that you’ve architected, deployed, and streamlined the infrastructure that your platform uses. Thus, I set out to learn:

Networking
Virtualisation
Operating Systems
Databases

This will allow me to establish the foundations for my projects and test some of my solutions. Once I have experience with their products, I will also consider AWS and GCP certification. Since AWS is very inexpensive at low volumes and seems to be the most flexible, it’s likely to be the first.

I aim to become a certified cloud practitioner with either AWS or GCP by the end of June 2025. I will also collaborate on at least one open-source project and be considered for a junior cloud engineer role, where I can further expand my skills.

The final goal is to deploy and manage a small cloud infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible by the end of March 2026.

Let’s see how well I can adhere to those timelines and accomplish my goals. This is where it gets fun!