First book - VMware NSX Cookbook

I haven't been blogging lately because I was writing a book on VMware NSX. It all started in early February 2017 when someone from Packt Acquisition Editor reached out to me and informed me that they were looking for someone who can author a cookbook on NSX. I wasn't sure as I haven't authored a book and English is not my first language so I don't think I would be the best person at that time.

After reading up on Packt cookbook format; apparently, a cookbook is focused more on 'How to do it' and 'How it works'. Reading few cookbook examples, I can see that most of the cookbooks are not heavy on the theory. I would just need a small intro section and then the focus would shift to 'How to do it'. I've been designing and deploying NSX for the past few years so I think I should be able to take this opportunity to contribute more to the community through authoring a book.

But still I wasn't too sure if I should take this opportunity, so I reached out to Iwan Rahabok to gather further insights about authoring a book as he has authored multiple books with Packt. He mentioned that writing a book is damn painful and luckily he wrote few tips for the first-time author here: http://virtual-red-dot.info/tips-first-time-book-author/. I still think that I could do with more help, to ensure I write a good quality cookbook and Packt is open to the idea of co-authors. I asked around in the VMware NSX communities and thanks to Dale Coghlan, he introduced me to one of his colleague in the VMware NSBU - Tony Sangha who is keen to author a book on NSX and my first impression was that we would be a great team!

After teaming up with Tony, the next step is for us to create an outline for all chapters, what would be covered in each of the chapters, how many recipes, how many pages and when we can deliver each of the chapters which are not easy as we don't know how many pages it would be after writing and this is our first time authoring a book! Once all the final outline had been agreed with the publisher, we then needed to sign the contract and start the chapter writing - we started to write our first chapters in April 2017.

After many sleepless nights, we were finally able to jointly release the book and become published authors in late March 2018. Thanks to everyone involved, huge thanks to Dmitri Kalintsev for the technical review and Sjors Robroek for the foreword. The book is now available on Packt and Amazon as per the following li

• https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/vmware-nsx-cookbook
• https://www.amazon.com/VMware-NSX-Cookbook-Virtualization-fingertips/dp/1782174257

If you are interested to review the book, I might be able to get an eBook copy from the publisher. Feel free to reach me on twitter/email for more information or for any feedback you have!

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (February 2018) Exam Experience

I passed the AWS-SAA February 2018 version on the 30th April 2018. It is my first AWS and PSI exam I have sit. My score was 882/100 and I had around ~60-70 mins left after completing all the 65 questions, so I still had plenty of time to review all of the questions. If you do the math, it took me a minute per question to answer them and I've still got another minute per question for reviews.

Below are the sections and % of scored item:

• Section 1.0: Design Resilient Architectures 34%
• Section 2.0: Define Performant Architectures 24%
• Section 3.0: Specify Secure Applications and Architectures 26%
• Section 4.0: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 10%
• Section 5.0: Define Operationally-Excellent Architectures 6%

Ryan's ACG course (https://acloud.guru/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/) and Elias' Pluralsight course (https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate) are awesome! The courses helped me from knowing nothing to passing the exam. I have also attended the AWS Certification Exam Readiness Workshop: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (https://pages.awscloud.com/ASEAN-Get-Certified.html) which is really helpful for me to understand and prepare for the exam.

Lastly, all of the exam experiences sharing on the ACG discussion forum is extremely helpful for me to prepare 1 week before the exam https://acloud.guru/forums/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate. I have also compiled all the exam experiences on the new exam from ACG here: https://github.com/bayupw/aws-saa2018-exam/blob/master/exam-experiences.md for easier reading. Hopefully, this would be useful for the community.

So, here are the topics on my exam:

• Redshift, make sure you understand the use cases, limitations, security, availability, durability, backup and restore. Ryan has covered Redshift for the exam pretty well, the FAQ (https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/faqs/) is also a great additional material. Make sure you understand this as I think I've got 5 or 6 questions around Redshift
• API Gateway, I couldn't remember exactly the details but make sure you understand the use cases and how it works in high-level as I think I have multiple scenario questions that have API gateway as one of the options in the answer.
• ECS, understand what is the use cases, what's the benefit of ECS compare to other AWS solutions and when to use ECS
• ELB, I've got multiple questions that have ELB as an option even specific i.e. one option use Application Load Balancer and other option use Classic Load Balancer, so make sure you understand what are the differences between the two and when to use it
• CloudWatch and CloudTrail, understand the capabilities, things you can do with the solution and when to use
• Kinesis, understand the use cases and when to use it
• AWS Cognito was one of the options
• EBS, you may need to remember the throughput/IOPS/volume size as I've got questions on the use cases, which one is the best option to choose for a particular scenario with a specific throughput/IOPS/volume requirements. Read the FAQ (https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/faqs/) I think almost all of the topics in the FAQ i.e. performance, snapshots, encryption except billing & metering are in my exam
• EFS, I think I've got 1-2 questions around EFS use cases and when to use
• S3, heaps of questions around S3 and mostly are also covered in the FAQ i.e. storage classes, availability, security, durability, data protection, transfer acceleration, lifecycle management, CRR
• SQS vs SNS, use cases and when to use
• VPC, as Ryan mentioned you need to understand VPC inside out, how to setup, what's the default setup, security options in VPC i.e. Security Group vs NACL. On your lab practice, I think it is worthwhile everytime you set up an AWS solution let say EC2, S3, Lambda or anything, think about how do you apply security of access from and to that AWS solution, do you use Security Group or NACL or IAM, think of a real-world scenario with multi AWS solutions even with external non-AWS solution such as on-prem device. Understand all components that made up VPC including but not limited to NAT Gateway/Instance, IGW, VPC endpoint
• I think there was a Lambda question but I'm not too sure
• Databases, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticache. Understand the differences, when to use, available options as this will help you to understand what are the options to improve an existing setup when there is a bottleneck in the performance. Understand the availability, multi-AZ/region setup, reliability, backup and restore, how to scale. Don't forget to read the FAQs
• Can't remember what other topics are but I think I've got multiple questions about a scenario on multi AWS solutions i.e. an existing setup using Route53, ELB, EC2, RDS and we need to understand what is wrong with the setup or how to improve the setup

Hopefully, my exam experience will be useful for anyone preparing for the exam!