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Adopt a Cloud-First Mindset

Why should you adopt a cloud-first mindset? As you start on your cloud migration goals, it’s going to be key to repeatedly come back to the fundamentals as people lose focus or enthusiasm. We’re talking about the phenomenon known as the “trough of sorrow” where a dip in initiative and output occurs, usually when novelty wears off and learning becomes harder.

To be prepared, it’s important to refer back to your fundamental goals. The new mentality at your organization will consist of the following key understandings, which will eventually become part of the healthy baseline culture:

• Being aware of cloud tools and services — this is the what in terms of the cloud: understanding the landscape, the providers, and the language so you can have a conversation with stakeholders, vendors, and consultants.
• Being able to use cloud services effectively, economically, and safely — this is the how, part 1: Safety and economy first. You don’t want to cause any more problems or spend budget unwisely.
• Understanding how to apply cloud tools to solve customer problems — this is the how, part 2: The other side of being able to use cloud tools safely is being able to apply them to real-world problem-solving.
• Being able to use your cloud services together to create new products and solutions — this is the why: This piggybacks on the previous point…whether it’s a service or a product, you’re going to want to take advantage of the opportunity to make something new first in the market.

Getting through these steps is a cycle, an ongoing process. As mentioned at the beginning, one part of the journey that always happens as a large group progresses on a big change is the “trough of sorrow.” 

There are always going to be peaks and valleys in your progress, and the faster you can get back to your goals, the better — so how do you do that? There are a few ways to build back momentum.

Certification campaigns

Our practitioners and instructors at Cloud Academy have had lots of opportunities to interact with enterprises at various parts of their cloud transition. What we’ve seen in other engagements is that internally commenced certification campaigns can provide personal motivation to individual team members. These cert campaigns help team members commit to gaining new domain knowledge.

Further, when leaders can incentivize people to get core certifications for a desired specialty — i.e., AI certifications on Azure in order to develop solutions — this helps the employees’ own professional development while at the same time putting the overall team in a strong position to tackle new product initiatives.

Product teams brought up to speed

Remember that it’s not just IT and engineering that needs to be educated and fluent in cloud. For your team to gain maximum benefit from the full offering of cloud technologies, you’ll need all product-oriented roles to be aware of how cloud-based services such as artificial intelligence tools and services can be applied to solve business issues. As a starting point, evaluate areas where you may be struggling with data. Can a turnkey AI solution help here? If not, what types of changes would need to take place in order to leverage some of the positives of a managed service (and later down the road, a custom-built service)?

Unsure of some of your staff’s levels? Get back to basics

We’re going to continue beating the drum on this, but it’s helpful: you will need to assess your entire team’s skill levels, and continually monitor as time goes on. This sounds like a lot of work, which is why a programmatic approach that can scale with your organization is the ideal way to keep learning momentum moving across the board.

Just make sure that the learnings are outcome-oriented: whether it’s certifications, specific job roles, or specific technical tasks, the learning paths that your employees take should have a clear goal.

The last challenge: working together

Once you take all these steps you’ll get back on track, and all teams will become aware of how to solve business issues. But let’s be honest: there will always be the challenge of getting people to work together.

To put it bluntly, the big challenge is how do we get people in cross-functional teams to work together with all these new services and practices?  

The answer is to run practical exercises. These need to be cross-functional projects that are engaging, quick to start, and quick to yield results.

Engagement + Collaboration = Progress

What would be a practical exercise and why would it help? Find a partner with domain expertise both in cloud and upskilling employees, and you’ll be able to get guidance to create blueprint-like exercises that can be applied to projects.

These blueprints can work across teams, with contributions across IT, Engineering, Product, and collaboration between all managers. Further, the bar for the learning experiences gets higher every year, with learners wanting the ability to have very little friction when learning (think about coding labs starting in 30 seconds vs. 3 hours of installing and troubleshooting software). It also makes more and more sense to learn together with coworkers, as opposed to the current single-player experience. This shows that the area of collaboration is set to be huge and will drive a better user experience and faster, more communal learning.

Conclusion

This type of engagement at the individual and communal level, with real-time tracking and modification of progress and goals, is going to be key to helping any team stay focused as they go through their cloud transformation. Understand that no matter the size of the organization, there will need to be attention paid to learners and managers as their attention naturally wavers. Having a concrete plan before addressing this makes it infinitely easier to address natural speed bumps and challenges as they occur in the learning and cloud migration process.

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like a preview of what our blog series will cover in a more in-depth fashion, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success. Use it as a helpful reminder to stay on track.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 4 of 5): Adopt a Cloud-First Mindset appeared first on Cloud Academy.

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Assessing your ready state

Last time, we talked about detailed planning that forms the foundation of your cloud migration effort. Now it’s time to really understand what your team can do, and how you can help them get to a place where they’re empowered to enact a big organizational shift.

Making a big change like this is a huge undertaking when you work in a large organization. There’s little guidance out there for executive teams on just how much learning effort is required to turn the ship around. What’s needed is to have your Learning & Development team present a clear direction on the training goals — the result will go far to ensure that things go smoothly.  

Why is the buy-in from L&D important? Some of the biggest mistakes happen in the early stages of cloud adoption when enthusiasm for new tasks and appetite for experimentation is high, but knowledge of best practices is low or non-existent. In order to get into a cloud console and start doing things, your staff doesn’t necessarily need to pass a cloud certification exam before they can spin up instances. It’s easy for people to make expensive mistakes in the early stages of adoption if they don’t know or understand the proper operating procedures. L&D needs to be the first line of defense in the first stages. 

So our first goal needs to be understanding where your team stands with regard to technical skills, followed by a plan to get them to a ready state to accomplish the technical goals that you laid out in the planning phase.

Readiness is both a state and a process

You’ll start by accurately pinpointing your team’s baseline skills. Once they are on track, you’ll then want to upskill them again to make sure they stay up to date with constantly changing cloud technology.

This brings us to a main point. As you assess your team, grow their skills, and make sure they’re on track, you’ll realize that this is actually a process of continuous development. Just like agile software teams that work in sprints and constantly deploy code updates to certain parts of an app in order to stay current and update products, the readiness stage of your cloud migration is the same. It will be a culture change for your organization, one with positive impacts because your teams will be ready, and will be motivated by individual and group growth and success.

Here are some highlights of what a readiness program should entail:

Pre-assessment

To get started, you’ll need to determine your team’s current skills and capabilities. This means creating a breakdown for each individual member that can be updated as they progress through their learnings.

Skill Assessment

You don’t want to be in the dark about your team’s abilities, so you’ll need a full view in order to build on each member’s development. This helps you predictably upskill talent so you know exactly when they’re ready to tackle that new project. Useful metrics will include strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity.

When you think about it, the ROI of your tech stack is only as strong as your team members operating on it. You’ll need to use the insights from multiple skill assessments to paint a picture of broader skill coverage, ideally from the individual, team, and organization level.

Dashboards

Yes, dashboards are all the rage and will continue to be so, for good reason. A well-designed dashboard helps you cleanly separate signals from the noise.

Ideally your dashboard to monitor organization readiness will contain the following items:

• ability to assign assessments
• current skill levels
• an organization of teams that effectively mirrors your internal organization

These seem like simple things, but they often get overlooked. It’s key to focus on these tenets because while the many programs roll out in tandem, it will be easy to get overwhelmed with too much information.

Cloud-first: four key goals to keep in mind

It bears repeating that there will be a lot going on in your organization. This readiness and learning stage of a cloud migration is going to set you up for success as you adopt a cloud-first mindset. 

The new mentality at your organization will consist of the following key understandings, which will eventually become part of the healthy baseline culture.

1. Being aware of cloud tools and services
2. Being able to use cloud services effectively, economically, and safely
3. Understanding how to apply cloud tools to solve customer problems
4. Being able to use your cloud services together to create new products and solutions

Conclusion

This is exciting stuff — changes, new technology, opportunity for growth. In part 4 of our series, we’ll delve into maintaining that cloud-first mentality, especially when the going gets tough and real-life challenges invariably pop up to get in your way.

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like a preview of what our blog series will cover in a more in-depth fashion, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success. Use it as a helpful reminder to stay on track.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 3 of 5): Assess Readiness appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog to be notified when new content goes live!

Start planning your cloud migration

You’ve defined your cloud strategy. You understand why you want to take a journey to the cloud. Now that the high-level strategy is done, let’s focus on the nitty-gritty and the details. It’s time to make a plan for making the big change. Don’t get discouraged, as it’s going to be a lot of work. That’s why we’ve created this series to help you.

Budget for the journey

You’re going to have to sit down and have a realistic conversation with your technical leads and executives about how much a cloud migration is going to cost. Let’s be clear, a migration from legacy systems is not like flipping a switch, nor is it a one-time affair. Rather, like most change that lasts, it’s a process with milestones. 

As you go through the continuum of change, you’ll eventually leave some or all of your legacy systems behind (depending on your views on hybrid cloud). But as that is happening, you’ll need to maintain old systems, scale new systems, and make sure you have the right employee talent to keep things progressing forward. 

A few key facets to consider:

• Current budget and fiscal year considerations
• Ideal timeframe for transition
• Product roadmap, short- and long-term

Check your infrastructure

Before you dive in and take the whole organization with you, let’s take a look at what’s being developed in the various groups in your business. Some of these might be more translatable to the cloud, such as lightweight mobile apps. But remember, there are so many cool technologies and buzzwords out there (Kubernetes, agile, data lakes, real-time everything) — you have to think hard about whether there’s really a business case to jumping in. 

For example, maybe you run a monolithic app that’s been your bread and butter for years. Maybe it’s worth it to host the app in the cloud, but not change to microservices. Instead, since you’ve taken a good look at your product roadmap you might spin off a new product that can then benefit from some quick cloud-based solutions, such as turnkey managed services like AI libraries or data analysis.

Initial organizational alignment

The last thing you want is for people to leave meetings about your migration and have nothing happen. Fast forward six months and progress has been scattershot, not much morale, and zero inertia. But let’s not focus on the negative…what are actionable steps to take to guarantee forward movement?

In part one we talked about organizational buy-in. A good way to maintain internal accountability is to create a multi-disciplinary “Tiger Team” — a group of individuals who can meet to maintain focus and ensure that separate groups don’t become too siloed.

Modify this to your own needs and don’t bog people down with fluff, but do hold them accountable, whether it’s by unintrusive meetings or reports to leadership. Remember, this effort has to be supported from above, as a positive culture starting from the top can be contagious. 

Assess your team

How are you going to get your team from point A to point B? Will they be ready to not just take steps toward a migration, but toward creating products in a new way?

Your product, engineering, and IT teams are experienced in designing, creating, testing, and deploying monolithic applications. They probably have some experience in cloud technology already, and it’s more than certain that they have a deep curiosity to learn more: that’s part of the creator’s mindset and that’s why they’re in this field.

Now you need to establish a baseline for where their skills are, how that aligns with your strategy and planning, and how to raise their skills to meet your strategy.

Develop a skills readiness plan

If you want to create an effective plan for your employees’ technical growth, you need a good way to assess their skills and develop them at scale. We’ll review this more in part three of this series, but here’s an overview of how it’s done.

Start by accurately pinpointing baseline skills

• Test competence across multiple cloud platforms and technologies and track skill improvement
• Test practical, hands-on tech skills
• Streamline the assessment process with automated reminders
• Understand where your team stands and how fast they’re growing

Quickly increase technical capabilities

• Drive skill growth with hands-on cloud training programs built to master AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DevOps
• Build and assign training plans with 10,000+ hours of up-to-date cloud training
• Keep your team accountable with built-in reminders and weekly reports
• Track progress and completion on a real-time dashboard

Confidently know when your team is ready

• Measure practical expertise through skill reports based on hands-on assessments.
• Challenge your team with lab scenarios using actual AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud accounts
• Establish a data-driven approach to learning and skills management
• Understand your team’s strengths and identify skill gaps

Cloud adoption plan

Migrating to the cloud isn’t just about technology. The mindset and the repeated, tactful reminders to stay on course help to make all the difference.

You’ll find that one of the main challenges with transformation projects is keeping a clear sense of direction. Often with a transformation project, there isn’t a dedicated project resource to run it. That means it’s easy for people on the ground to lose focus a bit and end up working in silos or vacuums. Confusion can set in and the wheels can quickly fall off — everyone loses interest and inertia. 

What can make a significant difference is when learning and development have a clear program structure to drive the behavioral outcomes that leadership wants to see. This can be the backbone to build your cloud adoption plan on.

On top of this framework, you can start to build the basics of how to use cloud services both securely and efficiently. Then you will layer the most important factor on top: your people. Your people will use the framework to both increase their skills and collaborate with new (and sometimes scary) tools and technologies.

Conclusion

Now you have a plan for how to get your arms around this whole digital transformation. Next, we’ll dig deeper into your people and how to assess readiness for your team. You’ll learn about what to look for and how to know you’re all set for your cloud migration and for whatever technical projects you choose in the future.

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like a preview of what our blog series will cover in a more in-depth fashion, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success. Use it as a helpful reminder to stay on track.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 2 of 5): Start Planning appeared first on Cloud Academy.

If you’ve already locked in your strategy, have a look at what you should do next.

• Cloud Migration Series (Step 2 of 5): Start Planning
• Cloud Migration Series (Step 3 of 5): Assess Readiness
• Cloud Migration Series (Step 4 of 5): Adopt a Cloud-First Mindset
• Cloud Migration Series (Step 5 of 5): Manage & Iterate

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Getting Started

Cloud migration is the process of migrating IT components (data, applications, systems) from on-premises to the cloud, or from one cloud platform to another. Modern enterprises have embraced cloud computing for its superior speed and agility, cost savings, and always up-to-date, automated software releases. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Statista, about 50% of all corporate data is now stored in the cloud.  

The evolution of technology, i.e., big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT), has played a major role in enterprises making the shift to the cloud. At the same time, external factors like the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced companies to operate and onboard new employees in remote environments, have facilitated the further acceleration of cloud adoption. Gartner predicts worldwide public cloud spending to grow by 18.4% this year.

For those just getting started, you may be further along than you think. There’s a good chance that you already use the cloud in day-to-day operations without even realizing it. We’d bet that your email provider, file storage, and CRM are cloud-hosted applications — to name a few. But the cloud offers a lot more than that. Think about the possibilities of auto-scaling to meet any customer demand across the globe, or leveraging containers and microservices to modularize your applications, keeping your products running with high availability. These are just some of the benefits you’ll be able to take advantage of once you’re well on your journey.

Like any business transformation, getting started with cloud migration is often the most difficult and daunting challenge. There’s a lot to consider, which is why defining your strategy is a critical, yet often overlooked or underdeveloped, first step. Let’s dive in.

Identify Cloud Migration Goals

Most people are familiar with the generic benefits of cloud computing, but envisioning (and executing upon) them for your own organization is an entirely different story. Every business’s IT infrastructure, processes, and regulations are unique. And cloud value is perceived differently depending on industry and operating model.   

Before any steps are taken toward migrating to the cloud, tech teams must first understand how such a move fits into the business’s overall strategy. Are there existing problems that could be fixed through cloud adoption? Would moving certain processes to the cloud save costs? How can the cloud further enable innovation?

Defining concrete goals based on KPIs that are relevant to business objectives will lay the foundation for all future initiatives. After all, if you can’t measure success, what’s the point of investing in the first place? Here are some topline ideas to mull over when thinking about your goals:

• Reinforcing business continuity plans
• Reducing costs and avoiding vendor lock-in
• Improving execution on your product roadmap
• Delivering better customer support or user experience
• Increasing revenues as a result of improved customer retention

Gaining Organizational Buy-in

It was intentional when we said “business transformation” instead of “IT transformation” earlier. In many cases, leadership leaves these kinds of decisions to technology teams. But when it comes to a cloud migration effort, an all-hands-on-deck approach is required — and that starts at the top.

Let’s think for a moment about the benefits associated with moving to the cloud. From improving flexibility to saving costs and streamlining the customer experience, it’s logical to connect your business goals with your digital transformation activities. Leverage the expertise of enterprise architects to analyze applications, identify potential quick wins, and develop a best-case proposal for migrating on a larger scale. 

By performing an analysis of the application portfolio and communicating anticipated benefits to the business, technology leaders can structure a measured approach to cloud adoption that is more likely to get backing from executives. From there, you can communicate next steps and value to affected parts of the organization. Strategy = defined!

Part 2 of this blog series will discuss what you must do during the planning phase.

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like a preview of what our blog series will cover in a more in-depth fashion, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success. Use it as a helpful reminder to stay on track.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 1 of 5): Define Your Strategy appeared first on Cloud Academy.

So, with 2020 approaching and IT looking to make important decisions on utilizing budgets, we take a look at seven key trends that look to shape the future of cloud computing solutions. These could have a profound effect — not only on organizations’ computer systems and websites but also on running their whole operation. 

In this article, we’ll cover:

1. Increased storage capacity
2. Impact on SEO
3. The Internet of Everything
4. Increased security
5. The rise of serverless technology
6. Microservices
7. Hybrid or multi-cloud strategies

Whether you’re new to cloud computing or you’re a certified expert, Cloud Academy’s Training Library loaded with expert-led courses to master cloud computing or any new technical skill — check it out and score your 7-day trial at the end of the article.

1. Increased storage capacity

One of the major aspects of the future of cloud computing is the need for increased storage capacity — and how providers will offer this capacity to businesses and private users. This is due to the fact that many businesses are choosing the cloud as their only IT solution, meaning all of their data is stored on the cloud. 

And given the amounts of data that is needed to be stored — due to everything from compliance with data regulations, to the increasing needs to cybersecurity software — the amount of storage is set to become colossal. In fact, Cisco estimates that by 2021, data center storage capacity will have grown nearly four-fold from 2016. 

Companies are increasingly making the switch from on-premises servers to cloud computing solutions. And just at the same time, data storage needs are rising exponentially. 

2. Impact on SEO

Cloud computing is having an increasing impact on the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Given the importance of SEO to virtually every business (read: virtually every business full stop) with a website, this trend can only grow in 2020 and beyond. Cloud web hosting offers numerous advantages, and more businesses are beginning to realize this. 

One of the most crucial elements of modern SEO is page loading speed. There are many things that webmasters can do to improve loading speed, but ultimately it comes down to your web hosting. Websites need powerful hosting services, and this is something that cloud solutions providers will increasingly need to offer.

Website security is another area that is increasingly having an impact on a variety of areas in SEO. Cloud providers, then, will need to be offering hosting services that offer comprehensive protection for users.

3. The Internet of Everything (IoE)

We are increasingly familiar with the term Internet of Things, or IoT, but the continuous evolution of real-time data and analytics has led to the coining of a new buzzword that you need to take note of: The Internet of Everything (IoE). Functionally, this is the idea that almost all electronic devices and services will have access to the internet and will use it to learn and improve. 

Cloud computing will, of course, have a major role to play in the development of IoE, as it relies enormously on machine-to-machine communication. IoE devices will inevitably use cloud solutions in order to be able to communicate data and processes. 

As more business devices will need access to connected data, it will be important to have an all-encompassing cloud solution that can provide full access to a full range of devices — not just computers and tablets. 

4. Increased security

Cybersecurity is becoming a crucial part of all forms of internet use – you only need to look at the many examples of hackers hitting the headlines, such as the WannaCry Ransomware attack and many others, to see that. But for cloud services providers, there is a growing need to offer advanced security in order to keep businesses secure.

At this point, there is still some level of confusion over the responsibilities for both the provider of the cloud services and the end-user, as to who deals with security issues. From the provider’s perspective, it will be important to continue to clarify which areas of cybersecurity they are responsible for and which areas must be managed by the user.

Indeed, it will be up to providers of solutions to offer the strongest possible cybersecurity measures in order to keep clients as safe as possible. This includes not only preventative measures but also proactive threat detection. 

5. The rise of serverless technology

Of course, there are many advantages to using cloud technology such as the spinning of extra resources and the flexible pay-for-use consumption model. However, it is still true that provisioning servers is highly time-consuming. In this type of model, the measuring unit is known as an “instance,” but with serverless technology, the measuring unit is even smaller than that and is known as “functions.”

A function is a piece of code that runs automatically, and it is quite easy to get started with them, as there are many language options, and little in the way of configuration management necessary. Additionally, the managing and scaling of resources are entirely managed by serverless providers.

Serverless technology looks set to go from a relatively specialist and niche option to something that is mainstream. Naturally, the onus is on serverless providers to ensure they stay relevant, but the adoption of these technologies is undoubtedly accelerating. 

6. Microservices

There has been a shift in cloud architecture. While in the past, we have seen closed applications with only human user interfaces, but now we are seeing the growth of more open services. Additionally, this has opened the door for application programming interfaces (APIs) of other software applications to interact with your applications – they can then make use of combined capabilities for whole new solutions. 

The use of APIs and microservices-based architecture have undoubtedly inspired innovation. And the advantages of using cloud-based APIs have changed how core applications are designed and built in the first place. 

7. Hybrid or multi-cloud strategies

We should also expect to see a growing number of organizations adopting multi-cloud and hybrid strategies, as these become increasingly mainstream. These strategies have often come about due to frustration from companies that committed to an individual cloud provider based on promises that went unfulfilled – they then found themselves locked into contracts. 

By 2021, 98% of companies plan to use multiple hybrid clouds – this shows that if your current strategies utilize a single cloud solution, it may be time to look into alternative options. 

As services become increasingly specialized, with differing requires to get the most out of specific applications or functions, businesses will require multi-cloud solutions in order to run efficiently and effectively. 

Final thoughts…

The cloud is set to become indispensable to businesses – and the needs of cloud computing solutions grow increasingly complex. We can expect to see providers offer a broader range of solutions to customers, which could mean a need to consult with specialists in order to establish which could be right for your business.

In 2020, these trends will be impacting businesses across the world, and it is important for organizations to keep up-to-date with their requirements so that they can adjust their cloud architecture as necessary. 

The post Cloud Computing Solutions: 7 Trends for the Future appeared first on Cloud Academy.

In this article, we’ll discuss: 

• AWS IoT Things Graph
• AWS IoT Events
• AWS IoT SiteWise

To dive deeper into the features and benefits of the Amazon IoT service, check out Cloud Academy’s Introduction to the Amazon Internet of Things (IoT) Service.  Or you can check out any of Cloud Academy’s AWS Courses taught by accredited AWS expert instructors with deep technical expertise.

AWS IoT Things Graph

As it stands today, the IoT industry does not currently have a widely used and accepted standard by vendors on how IoT devices should connect to each other. This makes it hard for developers to understand how this can be achieved across multiple manufacturers when developing IoT applications. As a result, the AWS IoT Things Graph was launched. This service helps to simplify the process of visually understanding the connectivity between IoT devices and web services.  

The service allows you to develop IoT applications using a visual drag-and-drop interface that connects devices and services together making it easier to build and understand workflows across the solution. One example provided by AWS explains that “you can create a workflow that is triggered by a motion sensor that will automatically take a picture and send a text message.  IoT Things Graph coordinates the interaction between devices and services, including any necessary protocol translation or unit conversion.”

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/iot-things-graph/

IoT Things Graph uses reusable, pre-built models each of which consists of a set of actions,  events, and states, which can also be considered at inputs, outputs, and attributes respectively. The pre-built models contain popular devices such as locks, switches, and programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and expose the underlying state of devices and services. 

The pre-built models save you from writing custom glue logic to make devices and services interact with one another given the lack of any widely adopted standards. You connect devices and services together to define multi-step automation applications. IoT Things Graph applications are deployed on IoT Greengrass-compatible devices. The number of pre-built models will grow over time and you are always able to define your own models using the in-built model editor with a GraphQL-based schema modeling language when you need to.

AWS IoT Events

The function of IoT Events falls into the realms of monitoring and identifying and responding to events from data gathered by your IoT devices. Prior to this service, to implement a system that responded to specific events, you had to build your own applications that gathered data and analyzed that information with set logic to spot specific data patterns signifying an event. This would then trigger another system or application to respond to the event itself.  

With AWS IoT Events, that is no longer a requirement, this fully managed service takes the hard work out of creating your own system to spot and react to events.  IoT Events can easily detect and respond to events at scale, from hundreds or even thousands of your IoT resources, such as sensors and applications. These events are identified from multiple sources of telemetry data and could indicate anything from a measure of poor quality, equipment slowdowns, to mechanical failures in an industrial setting. 

By configuring IoT Events to ingest data from your different IoT sources, you can then create set parameters and simplified logic based on that data using if-then-else statements.  The result of this logic can then trigger an alert when a specific event occurs, for example, send a notification via the Simply Notification Service (SNS), or even trigger a lambda function.  Through integration with other IoT services provided by AWS such as AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Analytics, it’s possible to remediate early signs of potential issues based on event data. Early detection of incidents can help you as an organization save money as well as provide a greater level of customer satisfaction, not to mention boost efficiency, processes, throughput, and speed within your product.

So a quick overview of how this works: It starts with your IoT infrastructure, sensors, and applications which feed telemetry data into AWS IoT Events, allowing the service to monitor the incoming data looking for patterns of data, or events based on logic defined.  When an event is identified, AWS IoT Events will trigger a response to that event that will carry out a specific action, such as an SNS notification of a Lambda function.

AWS IoT SiteWise

AWS IoT SiteWise removes the challenges associated with gathering and monitoring Industrial IoT (IIoT) data. Conventionally, industrial sensor data is locked into proprietary systems on-premises and requires expert knowledge to retrieve and format in a searchable format. IoT SiteWise is software that runs on a gateway in your facility and automatically collects, organizes, and sends it to the AWS Cloud where it can be stored and analyzed. The gateway interfaces with servers storing IIoT data that could be coming from assembly lines or manufacturing robots, for example. The gateway can be an AWS Snowball Edge gateway or one of several popular third-party industrial gateways that are likely to be found in your facility. IoT SiteWise lets you focus on optimizing your operations rather than worrying about data collection and managing applications.

The post AWS Internet of Things (IoT): The 3 Services You Need to Know appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Refocusing Design on the Real Needs of the Business

Trying to deliver on the specific business expectations while meeting extremely demanding technical requirements is an increasingly common challenge. Over-zealous engineering, even in its finest form, can lose sight of real business needs.

Regardless of the technical complexities of a system or its size, if the end result does not provide value back to the business, it can result in unproductive business processes, lost hours, lost money, and implementation failure.

To avoid failures in system design, it’s imperative to consider both the functional and non-functional needs of the business equally. In doing this, you will design a system that helps the organization achieve the most value with the least possible waste.

Look to Domino’s Pizza for an everyday example of design thinking. The executives of that company stepped back and considered their business. Customers were rating their pizza poorly even though all of the technology and ingredients were there. Famously, they realized their process was backward: you don’t start with a pizza and sell it; you start with what people like and make it. This led them to a drastic change in their business, which ultimately resulted in their stock increasing and ratings improving.

How to Achieve a Design That’s Driven by Both Functional and Non-Functional Needs

New system designers should always be driven by the end goal.

There are many critical points of design — and a highly structured design processes can help guide any new design from concept to implementation. Meticulous attention to detail can ensure that the critical points of the design are captured from the onset.

Once a thorough comprehension of the structured process for system design is established, both new and experienced designers will feel better equipped and have a proven method to capture the critical points which are required by the organization.

The act of uncovering these needs at the very start of the process can make a significant difference to the end result. It ultimately determines the overall success of the system and its ability to meet with the current and future business demands. From the onset, it is important that you are:

• Asking the right questions
  • “Who is the real end user?”
  • “What is a typical usage pattern?”
• Following the correct system design process for modern-day applications
  • Process – What key capabilities do we need
  • Solution – What type of technology is needed
  • Technology – which specific technology should we use
• Listening to the responses
  • Don’t inject your own bias onto answers
• Confirming the details
• Keeping open communications
  • Be sure that you consider everyone’s answer and don’t suppress a key area of feedback.
• Understanding their business

Sample Case Study

In the IoT Data Management Solution Design Course, we review a case study and produce an accompanying system design.

One of the key takeaways comes from understanding why the business cares about this project, along with what it needs to achieve to deliver true value. This is typically performed by realizing the impact the project will have, without necessarily being technical in nature.   

This course will cover the following core concepts:

• Process Design Walkthrough
• Understanding the Requirements
• Business Value
• Implementation

This course offers a more holistic approach to design thinking and proves that great engineering and system designs go far beyond just technology. It’s important to take the time to consider what the business cares about, including fully gathering the requirements from clients based on the information you need, rather than the information they have.

It will also uncover key skills to help you with technical discovery, systems architecture, technology selection, and implementation.

• How to Learn
• How to Research
• How to Design

All these elements need to be undertaken effectively to achieve a successful project outcome.

By failing to consider just one of these three components, the longevity of any success will be limited. Knowing how to learn, conduct research, and design a system based on the outcomes of research is essential to design thinking for the 21st century.

You will learn the importance of dynamics, flexibility, and suitability as they relate to the needs of your users.

Course Outcome:

Becoming a great system designer takes practice. It takes time and an appreciation for the bigger picture and long-term needs of the users. You need to create more than something that simply ticks a box, and you want to design a system you can be proud to put your name to.

You will learn what it takes to elevate your system design capabilities far beyond those of engineers who are simply creating acceptable solutions that may not withstand the test of time. Additionally, you will learn how to adopt a design structure and a set of procedures that help you to be superior to your counterparts. More importantly, this course will help you and your clients surpass expectations on all levels.

To learn more about Calculated Systems, visit: https://www.calculatedsystems.com/

The post Design Thinking for the 21st Century – An Essential Skill appeared first on Cloud Academy.

We started 2018 with two content objectives: To show customer teams how to use Cloud Services to solve business problems, and to help customer team members be successful in their respective roles.

We plan role-based learning paths around three content foundation stones: selecting and combining cloud services to create effective business solutions; applying AI and ML services to solve business problems; and driving Best Practices in cloud security, cloud architecture, and development. “Cloud Services” is a vast topic – having focus is a key discipline in the Cloud Academy Content Team.

In Q1 we focused on Machine Learning. We launched the Introduction to Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform Learning Path, the Introduction to Azure Machine Learning Path and the Introduction to Machine Learning on AWS Learning Paths.  

These comprehensive learning paths combine courses, Hands-on Labs and Skill Assessments to get you started building solutions with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.

Next –  we showed you how to apply ML and AI services to solve business problems. We showed you how to Use Azure AI Services to Build Customer Solutions and How to Apply Machine Learning and AI Services on AWS.  

In February, AWS released the Cloud Practitioner Certification and an update to the AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification exam. I love both of these certs for different reasons. The AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification remains our most popular certification, so it was a highlight for me to see our new Solutions Architect-Associate Certification Preparation for AWS – Feb 2018 Learning Path published in line with the new AWS exam.

Our AWS Content Lead Stuart Scott and his team then released new versions of the Certified Developer-Associate Certification Preparation for AWS – June 2018  and SysOps Administrator-Associate Certification Preparation for AWS – 2018 learning paths in the same manner.

We cover all nine of the AWS certifications with regularly updated content that is designed to help you master the skills required to succeed with the certification exam.

I admit to holding a high bar for certification content due in part to my two years working as a Partner Manager at AWS. In that role, helping partners and customers gain AWS certifications was a top priority. I strongly believe the Cloud Academy content and platform that we have today are the most mature and comprehensive solutions for mastering AWS and passing the AWS certifications.

The AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification is designed for non-technical teams – potentially making AWS more accessible to a wider audience, a direction I really welcome.  The AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification provides a good baseline for business teams looking to learn the fundamentals of cloud services, and I was excited to see our Cloud Practitioner Certification Preparation for AWS go live in line with the release of the AWS Certification Exam.

The AWS Certified Practitioner helps non-technical teams – but we wanted to do more to help your organizations acquire the skills needed to succeed with cloud projects. So we released two business-focused learning paths based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework to help you accelerate enterprise cloud migration.

The first Learning Path – Cloud Adoption Framework – Cloud Skills for Executive Teams provides a simple way for executive teams to gain the knowledge and perspective required to support and drive Cloud Adoption projects in their organization.

The second learning path – Cloud Adoption Framework – Cloud Skills for Business Teams introduces business teams to DevOps principles, AGILE practices and how they can get started evaluating and integrating cloud services in business projects.

The skills gained by individuals in completing either of these Cloud Adoption Framework based learning paths are aggregated under the CAF perspectives in your organization’s Knowledge Graph. This means you have a dashboard view of how you are progressing as an organization by acquiring the cloud skills required to progress forward on the cloud maturity curve. Most important I think – the Cloud Academy Training Plans then enable you to allocate training to teams and individuals so you can drive acquiring the skills needed to move the organization forward in the Cloud Transformation Maturity Model.

The Cloud Academy Cloud Adoption Skill Assessment can be applied to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or any of the other Cloud Adoption Frameworks.  

For technical teams, we launched three role-based migration learning paths to help you solve real-world challenges and be successful with your migration projects. Two Architecture Focused Best Practice Scenarios Getting Started With Migrating to AWS, and Migrating From an End-of-Life Data Center to AWS  We also built a developer focused on learning paths showing you how to refactor a Monolithic .NET Application to Use Microservices.

Helping you and your team master DevOps tools and best practices is a key focus for us in helping you learn how to combine cloud services together to solve business problems. In 2018 Jeremy Cook’s DevOps team released two comprehensive DevOps Playbooks to help your organization move to a DevOps culture and start applying DevOps principles and practices.   

The DevOps Playbook – Moving to a DevOps Culture Learning Path provides a guided path for any organization to begin the journey to a DevOps culture and to begin realizing the benefits of DevOps thinking and practices. Content in this learning path is built in collaboration with our partner The DevOps Institute. The DevOps Foundations content provides teams with a common, objective understanding of DevOps principles and practices; this learning path also prepares team members to sit the DevOps Foundations Certification exam.  

The second DevOps Playbook – CI/CD Tools and Services – provides practical instruction on how to implement and benefit from DevOps deployment tools and services. This learning path provides an excellent baseline for any organization looking to maintain a common process and best practices in deployment toolchains.

We worked closely with our partners HashiCorp, Terraform, Docker, Ansible, Aviatrix, and SpotInst to grow the depth and breadth of DevOps tools and services. We showed you how to Solve Infrastructure challenges with Terraform, Introduced you to secure environments with HashiCorp Identity and helped you master Kubernetes and prepare for CKA certification with The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam Preparation Learning Path.

GDPR compliance was a hard requirement in 2018, so we doubled down on ensuring that you knew about GDPR and how cloud services could help you meet the GDPR compliance requirements with the GDPR: Using AWS Compliance Enabling Services learning path. To help you be successful in solving real-world challenges, we ran a series of webinars on achieving GDPR compliance with industry leader Sumo Logic.

Working with partners Catalit and Calculated Systems enabled us to increase the depth of  Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning content for you in 2018. We show you how to Build a Solution Using Artificial Intelligence and IoT, and Calalit’s Zero to Deep Learning Bootcamp – Introduction to Data Science and Machine Learning is a comprehensive guide to mastering Deep Learning principles and practices.

We have a breadth of new partner content already in development in 2019 which I think will really help you solve problems and be successful in your roles.

Microsoft kept us busy on the certification front in 2018 with the release of the AZ-100 and AZ-101 exams at Microsoft Ignite  – followed by the AZ-203, AZ-300, and AZ-301 exams – to phase out the Azure 70-533, 70-532, and 70-535 exams. Our Azure lead Guy Hummel and his team published the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure and Deployment: AZ-100 Exam Preparation Learning Path and have built the majority of the AZ-101, AZ-203, AZ-300, and AZ-301 learning path content, aiming to go live in early 2019.

One of our constant goals is to keep innovating on how we make content more engaging and effective. We released shorter bite-sized content combined with a live lab, and in November our Labs team led by Logan Rakai released an assessment function for our Hands-on Labs.

This innovation automatically assesses whether a step or steps in a hands-on lab have been completed successfully by the student. This function is great as it proves your ability to perform a particular skill.

Our top ten AWS and Azure labs now have an assessment component built in and we are continually rolling out more assessed labs in 2019.  

In 2018 we delivered a record 121 courses, 35 labs, and 28 learning paths! We are already well underway with building content for 2019. We’ll be showing you how you can apply the new services released at AWS re:Invent and Microsoft Ignite to create solutions and solve business problems.  We’ll be helping you apply design patterns and showing you how to select the right cloud services when building enterprise solutions. We’ll also be helping you save time and effort when deploying and managing code at scale.

Here’s a sneak preview of content already in development for 2019: Python Developer – Master Class, Java Developer – Master Class, Combining DevOps tools at scale – Bamboo Bitbucket JIRA Sonarqube Splunk Zephyr, Create a Jenkins CICD Pipeline to Build a Docker Image with Splunk, Passing the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) certification, Using Alexa to Perform Voice Activated CI/CD Build and Deployments,  Implementing Multi-Factor Authentication on Azure, Configuring Serverless Computing on Azure, Designing for Azure Identity Management, Developing Long-Running Tasks on Azure, Creating an App on Azure Service Fabric, Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert – MS-100 and MS-101 Exam Preparation.

Please let us know what content you would like to see in 2019!

The post 2018 Was a Big Year for Content at Cloud Academy appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Like many newly minted terms, the definition of IoT can vary depending upon who’s speaking. This blog post will cover two, related topics:

• What does IoT mean in everyday, practical terms (i.e., what are the real-world applications) and
• What role does cloud technology generally – and Microsoft Azure specifically – play in making IoT scalable and possible for a wider variety of organizations than ever before?

Let’s start with a definition.

The IEEE provides a very detailed definition here (“Towards a Definition of the Internet of Things”) which I encourage you to review if you want a particularly deep dive.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ll quote Wikipedia:

“The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of devices, vehicles, and home appliances that contain electronics, software, actuators, and connectivity which allows these things to connect, interact and exchange data.

IoT involves extending Internet connectivity beyond standard devices, such as desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets, to any range of traditionally dumb or non-internet-enabled physical devices and everyday objects. Embedded with technology, these devices can communicate and interact over the Internet, and they can be remotely monitored and controlled.”

The key takeaway is that your PC is not an IoT device but an Internet-connected tracking unit that sends location and status data to a hub (for example) definitely is.

Here’s a real-life example.

Recently, I sent my watch back to the manufacturer for a battery replacement.  As the watch neared the repair facility, I received routine location updates until it safely reached its destination. After a week or so, the process was reversed, I received location notifications as the watch made its way back to my home and an alert from my Internet-connected video doorbell that the delivery person was at the door.

In this scenario, there were several IoT devices in use:

• The real-time tracking device contained in the shipping unit for the trip to the vendor
• The real-time tracking device contained in the UPS truck that returned my watch
• The Internet-connected video doorbell that enabled me to answer the door and speak with the delivery driver while upstairs, nowhere near the front door

There are two technologies that were essential to making this seemingly magical process possible:

• The Internet (for network connectivity)
• A platform that can accept data sent from Internet-connected devices and provide analytics, status, device health checks, location and other types of information.

Let’s visualize this:

At the ‘cloud platform’ layer, Microsoft Azure can provide everything required to build an IoT solution without the need to invest in costly and fault-prone infrastructure that’s difficult to scale. If you’re just getting started with Microsoft Azure, it might first make sense to check out this Learning Path: Getting Started with Azure.

The Azure Approach to IoT

Azure offers two primary solutions for building IoT platforms:

• Azure IoT Central – a fully managed, SaaS platform that enables the creation of IoT solutions with built-in management and operational tools (IoT Central automatically integrates with Azure IoT Hub and Time Series Insights)
• Azure IoT Hub – a managed connectivity service that gives you the ability to create a network of your IoT devices (IoT Hub integrates with Azure Event Grid, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Stream Analytics)

Let’s take a look at an example architecture using some of these tools:

In the diagram shown above, an IoT solution built using Azure IoT Central includes IoT Hub as the interface point for the connected ‘things.’ Stream Analytics acts as the real-time analysis ingestion engine and data source for services such as databases, dashboards, and reports.

It’s important to note that this is only one of many possible configurations.  Azure’s IoT toolkit offers a great deal of flexibility, giving you the ability to create PaaS and SaaS IoT solutions that are either turnkey using IoT Central or highly customized, built using IoT Hub. You can explore sample reference architectures by reading the Microsoft Azure IoT Reference Architecture Guide. Another good resource is Getting Started with IoT with AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Azure IoT Central vs. IoT Hub: When to Use What

I think of IoT Central SaaS as a fully furnished, move-in ready house that includes everything you need from the start (accelerating adoption) while IoT Hub PaaS provides the glue for a solution you build using your preferred tools.

Microsoft describes IoT Central this way:

“…fully managed SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor and manage your IoT assets at scale. Azure IoT Central simplifies the initial setup of your IoT solution and reduces the management burden, operational costs, and overhead of a typical IoT project.”

[…]

Full version at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-central/

Organizations that are completely new to IoT (or whose requirements fall into standard categories) can quickly create a fully featured solution using Azure IoT Central.

In this Microsoft Developer video, IoT Central’s ease of use is illustrated:

EMBED VIDEO:

If your needs are more specific or if you are porting an existing IoT solution to Azure, IoT Hub may fit your needs.  Here’s how Microsoft describes it:

“IoT Hub is a managed service, hosted in the cloud, that acts as a central message hub for bi-directional communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. You can use Azure IoT Hub to build IoT solutions with reliable and secure communications between millions of IoT devices and a cloud-hosted solution backend. You can connect virtually any device to IoT Hub.”

Full version at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/about-iot-hub

Organizations that have experience building IoT applications or whose needs aren’t met by IoT Central’s catalog of pre-created options can use IoT Hub as the communication point for the ‘things’ their app interfaces with.  In other words, you build your app and use IoT Hub to connect the devices your app controls (one option for building your solution is the Azure IoT SDK). There’s greater flexibility and there’s also a greater need to manage some elements of the solution.

In this Azure Friday video, IoT Hub’s features and capabilities are illustrated:

Azure IoT Solution Accelerators

Microsoft provides a very helpful collection of scenario walkthroughs designed to show the capabilities of Azure IoT solutions and get you acquainted with IoT technology generally:

These include:

• Cloud-based remote monitoring
• Cloud-based predictive maintenance
• Cloud-based connected factory
• Cloud-based device simulation

In addition to those quickstarts, Microsoft also provides a series of tutorials that walk you through IoT solution scenarios in which you monitor, detect issues with, configure and manage, analyze errors and fix issues with devices.

Azure IoT is a powerful platform which enables organizations of all sizes to deploy, manage and scale IoT solutions. Using Azure, you can take full advantage of cloud-native techniques to build a robust IoT application.  To learn more, you can explore Microsoft’s Azure IoT fundamentals page and Cloud Academy’s Internet of Things with Azure learning path.

Good luck with your IoT journey!

The post Azure Internet of Things (Azure IoT) – An Introduction appeared first on Cloud Academy.