Staying up to date with the Cloud
Tags: cloud, aws
Published: 2020-02-16 00:28:33

I have a deadline - in late May my AWS Solution Architect Associate certification will expire. Rather than simply renewing it I'd like to "level-up" to the Professional certification.

Now, I actually had this goal last year before AWS extended their certifications from 2 years to 3, but I was really busy this time last year and it fell by the wayside. This year I'm probably just as busy, but at least I have an extra year of experience under my belt.

I'm planning to write a series of posts about the experience of studying for the certification and the exam itself, but I thought I'd start with a more general topic - how to stay up to date with developments in the different Cloud platforms (but particularly AWS).

In my role as the Cloud Solutions Lead for [Leading EDJE](http://www.leadingedje.com) I feel a responsibility to stay up to date with the Cloud Platforms we use at our clients. As I also work full time at a client there's a limit to how much time I can spend experimenting with every new technology, so I mostly have to settle for an awareness of new features unless they directly related to a project I'm currently working on.

Here are some resources I've found useful (in particular for AWS).

## AWS Resources

* [AWS News Blog](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/) - this is the primary blog for AWS that highlights the larger announcements, often with examples of how to use them. This is where [Jeff Barr](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/author/jbarr/) often posts.
* [What's New with AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/new/) - this is the firehose of all announcements across all services and regions, and a lot of the information here is not relevant to me, but it can include information I might otherwise have missed. For example I just saw this:
  * [Amazon ECS-optimized Linux 2 AMIs now come with pre-installed AWS Systems Manager Agent](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/02/amazon-ecs-optimized-linux-2-amis-come-pre-installed-aws-systems-manager-agent/) - I was actually just researching this last weekend when I noticed that I couldn't connect using Session Manager to new ECS instances, and after having read some of the comments on the [roadmap GitHub issue](https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/issues/426), I'm a little surprised to see this announced.
* [A Cloud Guru: AWS This Week](https://acloud.guru/series/aws-this-week/view/latest) - this long running series of short videos (the last one was #307) gives a summary of the important AWS announcements from the last week.
* [AWS YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices) - lots of videos, but perhaps most importantly this is where you can watch the replays of the re:Invent keynotes where this year like every year there were a lot of announcements.
* [AWS Stash](https://awsstash.com/) - Searchable index of AWS videos, blog posts, GitHub repos etc. This is a particularly good way to find particular sessions from re:Invent
  * e.g. [ECS sessions from re:Invent 2019](https://awsstash.com/?event=%5B%22re%3AInvent%22%5D&year=%5B%222019%22%5D&search=%22ecs%22)

## Azure Resources

* [Azure Blog](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/) - highlights announcements and related content.
* [Azure updates](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/) - the firehose for Azure updates

## GCP Resources

* [GCP Blog](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp) - blog that includes announcements but also customer stories, tutorials and other content
* Individual services within GCP have Release Notes that contain details of all changes:
  * [Google Kubernetes Engine Release Notes](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/release-notes)
  * [Compute Engine Release Notes](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/release-notes)
  * ...(I'm not going to list them all)

I hope you find some of these resources useful. Let me know if you have any resources you use (in particular for Azure and GCP).

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