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How Cloud Cuts Your Budget

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businessman seated worrying — AWS…I could’ve cut cost going with Google cloud. Multi-cloud nonsense.
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Here’s a situation, you are working on your small business and you’re thinking about growing your enterprise so you can further scale to make your company become the industry giant you have set your sights on.

However, you begin to notice that cash isn’t flowing like it once was. You begin to question: “Why? How did this happen? I know my company is turning a profit. What in the world is going on here?” You check your business account only to find your money has been going places it doesn’t need to be.

You find you don’t need this stress since you have other pressing things to worry about and trying to get your finances back on track doesn’t rank high on your to-do list. This situation would be better suited if you had access to a certain team of people with a particular set of skills (my second Taken reference sorry).

There’s a name for a group of people that handles the operation of financing, but I just can’t recall it.

someone seated counting money — Counting money that doesn’t belong to me gets old very quick.
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Clouding Around

Do you want to cut costs and track your money in the meantime and all the while grow your business to new heights? How would one do this you might ask?

Well, you have two options which are 1) you could venture to handle everything yourself which in turn would be a complete and utter nightmare, seeing you go from 0 to 100 in 1.5 seconds flat due to the fact you got overwhelmed, or 2) find yourself a team of people who could manage and monitor, assess, and even advise your finances for you.

What group of people would be crazy enough to do such a thing? Financial Operations or FinOps for short. FinOps is a cultural practice that brings cloud technology and business altogether to drive accountability and maximize business value.

FinOps are governed by six principles: collaboration, ownership, centralized cost savings, reporting, value, and taking advantage of variable costs. If you’re looking to scale your business and moving to the cloud or growing your cloud is going to be on the menu, FinOps are going to be one group needed to make sure all resources are accounted for and the budget stays on track.

In a nutshell, you can think of them as accountants for your current or future cloud.

credit card transaction — I sure could use a team of accountant to explain why business card keeps declining.
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Sales in Failure are Final

Oh dear reader of mine, you may be thinking to yourself, “Why would I hire an accountant? I manage my bank account and business account just fine. I budget well, I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Well, as mentioned before, if you lack the skill set to operate in the cloud and begin to connect resources without a care in the world, your dollar sign will quickly get overwhelmed. Everything costs in the cloud down to the computing power which could range from a second to minutes.

So yeah, money management would get out of hand before you even completed computing “Hello World” using a Lambda function. Therefore, having a FinOps team would be very beneficial. What group of people would turn to FinOps for information?

Financial planners, analysts, business managers, and advisors use reports from FinOps for cost allocation and forecasting. This is like having a weatherman in your business, but they’re actually paid to get the forecast right.

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a team of people looking over data — Third quarter isn’t looking good, might be another quarter in the red.
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Fins Cuts the Budget

How much does FinOps have a play in the world of today you might be wondering. Well, that depends on what part of the world you are in, if you’re the employer, you’re more likely to hear about how certain cloud resources are outside of your budget and how you should be focused on cutting costs.

If you’re the employee, then it’s more likely you’re hearing about how cloud resources you could use, and need are outside of the company’s budget and how much the company needs to focus on cutting costs.

FinOps has been around since 2012 and many companies both big and small have adopted the FinOps framework to run their business. This adoption helps edge out the competition by enabling companies using FinOps to be capable to make better data-driven decisions, reducing costs on wasted resources, creating investment opportunities, and increasing transparency.

Just think of them as all good things to have if you get hit with an audit. Again, this group has a particular set of skills that work in your favor, just don’t forget to pay them on time.

older fellow seated at table — So you think you have a future in FinOps?
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Choosing Paths

So, you may have the response “Nah, I can handle my budget and others with no problem. Just tell me, do I need a degree?” There’s some good but pricey news, you don’t need a degree to get into FinOps, just need to be familiar with their core principles.

FinOps is a cultural mindset developed to provide accountability to a business. Your time will be better suited to pursuing certifications with some specialized credentials like a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) or Certified Equity Professional (CEP) however, obtaining these certifications is not going to be easy, and knowing your stuff when it comes to financing is a must.

Another option is you could join the FinOps Foundation and select from their courses to become either a certified practitioner (I know I mentioned this step but skip becoming a practitioner, employers don’t recognize them) or hop right into becoming a certified professional. Just know, this is going to get pricey since this ranges from $599 – $3,750 (I did say I had some pricey good news).

But if you’re trying to learn on a budget, again Zero daddy has you covered. There are other resources, Coursera has one course on FinOps provided by Intel, and there are several courses on Udemy. Just stay away from getting caught up in tutorial hell. Gain a deep understanding of the basics, build upon them, and keep on moving.

After obtaining some of these credentials and online courses, you will be able to demonstrate your knowledge of investment and financial management best practices. Or you could do a combination if you have the time and money, it all boils down to what goals you have in place.

typewriter with paper saying "goals" — Goals without actions are only dreams.
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Think there something that might have been missed about Finops? Script a comment below.

Cloud Talk, Tech

Wish I knew this before jumping into the cloud

Journey Upward

So, you are looking to start a career in the cloud, and you are eager to pick your courses from platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and edX to begin tracking that great journey into the cloud. You are on the hunt to gain a new set of skills and knowledge which you look to lead you to a bigger payday and a greater way of living.

After surveying the internet, talking to your peers, questioning the systems admin at your current job about things that were hot in Information technology, and they told you “Cloud computing was trending in the tech world and edge computing was on the horizon”.

On the internet, you will find countless articles on the cloud championing to be the go-to career choice, especially since the boom of the covid-19 pandemic many companies switched to using the cloud. Making the switch so they can continue to develop, house data, and migrate to being completely digital.

This is one of the most sought-after skills that are high in demand and is only going to increase in demand in the coming years. Well, while that is all good and well there are a few things you may want to consider before slamming your card or your parents down and saying, “sign me up”.

House of Cards

Choosing which CSP you are going to be using is very important. There are a ton of providers out there from A-To-Z such as Cloudflare (a United States provider based in San Francisco, California) to Alibaba Cloud (a Chinese provider, based in Singapore). Not saying you are going to be starting with either one of them but if you continue and make it a career, these are a couple out of the many you may come across.

This is being said because there will be a time when performing multi-cloud (linking different CSPs to each other to utilize benefits such as prices). Aside from them, there are the main three or the big three when it comes to cloud computing. You have Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

AWS is the largest with more availability zones and regions to operate, Azure is right behind AWS but not as large, and Google falls last for size and time. Choosing which one to start with isn’t much of a chore since they all have simple user interfaces (UI) and PowerShell (terminals) to use.

Something quick to note is that once you learned one you pretty much learned them all since most of the setup is the same, just that the names for resources and their placement on the UI are different. However, at this junction, I’m going to be biased since my journey started with AWS. You always remember your first love.

Check out the link below to compare CPS.

https://intellipaat.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud/

Pay to Play

After sorting out which CPS to go with, you then must lay down a credit or debit card to gain access to resources. You are the customer first in the cloud before you become the third-party constructor.

No need to worry about making a large payment because providers offer a trial program after you fill out the payment method and then receive a credit to use. Certain things like processors and storage are free within a defined limit. The use of resources like this does not charge too much, the low is ten cents an hour.

However, it is insanely important to create a budget before building hands-on projects. A good limit (which most instructors will tell you) is $10.00 – $12.00. The purpose of setting a budget is to keep you from screaming Homer Simpson’s famous catchphrase at the end of the month.

I had the unfortunate pleasure of leaving Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) running which triggered an alert to notify me via email that I had exceeded my designated limit. Thankfully my statement was something I could pay but the fact remains. Make sure everything is stopped or deleted before you sign out.

Toughest challenge

Okay at this point, you probably picked out your study material, CPS and access to the cloud were granted. Your budget is set and you’re ready to start building projects to beef up that portfolio. What else could be ahead of you?

Well, if you are anything like me when I made my track into cloud technology and solely focused on cloud. You will be easily overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that are available when starting.

I went in wanting to learn everything cloud and after one or two courses, viewing learning paths, and staring at diagrams I quickly realized that was going to be a tall order since everything from web development to data science could be done in the cloud.

Cloud is an ever-growing technology, that is gaining more and more services at a rapid pace. With more services comes more things to know and be aware of. Staying up to date is going to be challenging because what’s working for you today might not be in use tomorrow.

A good way to stay on top of this is to frequently check white page documents (if you choose AWS), blogs, and forums to see if anything is no longer being used.

If you have made it this far and still are not sure where to pick up course materials to start, below I will leave a few recommendations.

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-new/

https://www.coursera.org/learn/aws-cloud-practitioner-essentials

If you have found this post to be interesting and you would like to read a quick take on how companies are falling into money pits in the cloud, be sure to check out the link to my post below.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/suffering-aoc-allure-cloud-everette-powell%3FtrackingId=Zq%252BT2QxFTauSnRhlHqhwYw%253D%253D/?trackingId=Zq%2BT2QxFTauSnRhlHqhwYw%3D%3D

Security, Tech

Dev’s Gain a Job Loss…

For many, this feeling doesn’t come from holding regular jobs.
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Love Gained, Job loss

Do you have a job that you love? A job that you can’t go one day thinking about. A job so perfect that you can’t see how you would live the rest of your life without it. If you’re like most people, then your answer is moreover going to be a deafening “no”.

Not surprisingly, most people grew up and found the old saying, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” to be a load of …cow dung. At least the grass looks nice.

Given not being satisfied with your current job or not having one depending on the situation you’re in, you are more likely to have been advised to seek work from job posting boards/sites like LinkedIn, indeed, and Monster. Seeing the amount of job postings on these job sites could have you scratching your head and checking your skillset.

This isn’t bad, you are trying to find your “dream job” after all, and you may land on one to apply. However, can we tell you that not every job posting is a real one? Don’t know what we mean?

Today, we’ll look into this trend of fake jobs—a little about why this method would be used, and how you can protect yourself from falling victim.

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Always take a closer look when it comes to being online.
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So, you’re on Indeed, and you’re looking around for a job that matches your skillset. You know the skills you went to college for, spent four to eight years of your time, only to meet the request of you having five years of experience for an entry-level job.

Math isn’t mathing, yea, we know, a quick shoutout to Human Resources. They found a way to job-block. Okay, moving along, you found your dream job, you want to be a developer and there’s an opening.

Great, you apply, get a date for an online interview. The day finally comes, the interviewer asks you to install something onto your computer so the interview can take place. To your surprise, however, you just fell victim to a new campaign called “Dev Popper”.

Yes, you have been hoodwinked. Threat actors are using job postings to trick people, mainly software developers, into installing a RAT (Remote Access Trojan). A trojan on its own is bad enough, but the remote access allows the threat actor to navigate around your machine.

How is this a problem? Well, think of it this way, you opened the door of your home to a robber along with giving them the key. They can do what they want.

Sometimes we give you too much information, but that’s okay. We’re nerds, it’s what we do.
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A quick fun fact, while this activity is illegal, there have been some questions if the use of RATs is legal. They are to a degree depending on the purpose. If someone from the IT help desk was trying to solve a problem on your computer, they would ask you to download something to give them access, and you would watch them as they were fixing the problem.

This use case is perfectly legal, now if they were to find a folder saying, “Bank Account” and copy information from there, then that steers to being illegal because this is being done with malicious intent.

Also, another issue with RATs is, that once they’re on your machine, a backdoor can be created for the threat actor to retrieve any data they didn’t take the first go around. So, word to the wise, pay attention to your downloads and keep your backdoor closed.

So, you may be wondering, “How would I be able to tell I have a RAT?” Some tell-tales are seeing unfamiliar programs, processing running, or if you find items have been deleted without your intervention. RATs tend to be installed with other programs or “PUPs” (Possible Unwanted Programs) and can eat up your CPU usage.

Other ways to tell something that may be on your machine are; that it’s taking longer than usual for a program to run, and the obvious one; your mouse is moving without your intervention. Unless your residence is possessed, the other logical answer is that you have a ghost in your machine. That ghost is a threat actor.

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