What Does Mercury Retrograde Have to Do With the AWS Summit?

In New York this Thursday I’ll be attending my third AWS Summit in that city. I’m not sure about you but for me, when an annual professional event approaches, I often reflect on how much I’ve matured professionally or in a particular role since the last event, and the one before that, etc. In 2017, I had just recently moved back to New Jersey from Israel, and at the same time had begun transitioning from being responsible for the company’s editorial team to cultivating new business and strategic partnerships in the U.S.

For those of you who have been in the same industry forever — especially if you are a tech professional — it may be difficult to recall what it’s like to walk into a large event where everyone seems to know each other or at least speak the same jargon, and you don’t.
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Why AWS re:Inforce? Because It’s Time!

Covering the world of cloud for more than a decade now, I’ve learned a simple thing: innovation should not and will not be focused too closely on security from the get-go. However, security cannot and should not be ignored as the cloud market matures and this is what we see here with the introduction of the 1st cloud security conference, AWS re:Inforce, taking place in Boston, June 25-26.

Back in the days when the market was still resistant to the public cloud, the discussion often centered around security of the environment and compliance. Public cloud opponents claimed that large enterprise and government organizations would not use the public cloud due to the risk of running sensitive workloads on a public facility. Now that the public cloud is a common go-to even for organizations with sensitive workloads, and AWS is the new IBM, this is no longer the case.
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10 Things I Learned Shipping an Ancient Data Center to AWS (Part 1)

By John Fahl, IOD Expert
When we got to the consulting gig, they told us they wanted to do DevOps. They said they wanted to be like <insert “awesome streaming video provider” here>. What they had was several data centers filled with several servers using OSs older than 10 years (some even 20+ years old).
They also relied on some real relics like NIS (yup…this is still a thing …), had deep vendor lock-in, massive old, stagnant clusters, manually built applications (most having been created a decade earlier), and armies of contractors overseeing it all.
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Just a Few AWS Tricks I Learned on the Way

By John Fahl, IOD Expert
Once you work with AWS long enough, you realize it changes all the time.
Some things that were difficult last year are now easy.
Who remembers ELB IPs moving on you? Normally, when you use a CNAME (like you’re supposed to) it doesn’t matter, but I’ve moved a few apps that used hardcoded IPs in old applications. Now, you can just abandon the legacy ELB and use their NLB for that issue. NLB and ALB were big improvements over traditional ELB.
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