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In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Bart Castle, an AWS and cloud computing trainer and media personality. Bart works with IT training company CBT Nuggets and also does cloud-migration consulting projects. 

Bart shares the patterns he seems based on training demand and also advises how to decide which certification to go for next. He discusses the importance of solving business problems that will help achieve the business’ goals while retooling and transforming systems.

“At this point in my career, every technical conversation that I have is always paired up with a business value conversation,” he notes.

But how should a data team shift focus to better solve business problems? He suggests looking for patterns. Uncovering patterns can help determine actionable steps to maximize efficiency and enable new business opportunities.

Bart also discusses cloud computing trends, CloudFormation stacking, hybrid deployments, and containers.

Featured Guest

Name: Bart Castle

What he does: Bart is a cloud computing and AWS expert and technical trainer, as well as a consultant. 

Key quote: “In the end, we’re still looking for those tools that will bridge gaps. This is why, for me, being an integrations professional and getting what integration means is skill number one across all different arenas. Everywhere you look, it’s an integration problem.” 

Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

Key Takeaways

When thinking about all the different training options, Bart suggests pursuing the certification that would help you land a specific job or role. If you’re not sure what your next job might be, look at SysOps administration first since it is closest to traditional network help desk operations support roles.

Based on his training background, Bart sees a rising interest in network automation. Many teams are working with various vendors to address networking and connectivity and to make the transition from command line administration to Python automation. 

“A lot of what I’m seeing here is the switch from real deep specialty to real broad generalization, and that can be an overwhelming bite to take when you look at how much information there is to consume,” says Bart. 

Learning how the tools work is the easy part, but you have to dig deeper to make it work for your specific business use case. Bart recommends looking for white papers, as well as case studies and blog posts. Communities (like TCP!) can also point you in the right direction.  

Bart says, “Once you get those examples of how a piece of input data with the right transformation with this pairing of reporting can solve this problem — now, you’re putting tools in your belt that are going beyond just using the tools, and how to actually solve business problems with them.”

Here’s what was mentioned in the episode

CBT Nuggets: provides in-demand training, primarily in IT, project management, and office productivity topics.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): a cloud object storage service. 

“What is DevOps?“: an AWS blog explaining the DevOps

Peter is back after a few weeks away from the show. Azure launches new Event Grid features, Palo Alto Networks picks up Twistlock and Puresec and Google has a really bad day. Plus the amazing lightning round with Peter.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics:

25th Episode Blog Post

Azure has simplified event-driven architectures with new updates to Event Grid

Palo Alto Networks enters into definitive agreement to purchase Twistlock and Puresec

Oracle Lays off hundreds from its Seattle office as its cloud strategy remains grounded

Azure Adaptive network hardening in Azure Security Center is now GA

Amazon EBS adds ability to take point-in-time, crash-consistent snapshots across multiple EBS volumes

Announcing Tag-Based Access Control for AWS Cloudformation

New Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) – Now Generally Available

Google Cloud has Major Outage on 6/2

Google Cloud Outage resolved, but it reveals holes in cloud computing atmosphere

An update on Sunday’s service disruption

Lightning Round (Jonathan 6, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

AWS is Announcing Windows Server version 1903 AMI’s for Amazon EC2

Amazon Chime now supports United States Toll-Free Numbers

Jacques Chester author of Knative In Action and Principal engineer at Pivotal joins us to educate us on Knative.  Knative is an open-source tool to run functions as a service on top of Kubernetes and is gaining popularity in Kubernetes deployments.  Learn all about Knative, Kubernetes maturity, Googles involvement in Knative, and more.

If you are are interested in checking out Knative in Action, I have a coupon code for you to save today on any Manning press publication including Knative in Action!

https://www.manning.com/books/knative-in-action?query=Knative%20in%20Action 

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