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Big-Techs Bittersweet Symphony

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Have you ever woken up, walked into the kitchen, put your hand into your toaster, flip it on, and while it was heating up thought to yourself,” This is a good idea, I mean my hand is starting to burn but I’m okay with this”? No, me neither but yet somehow, we complete this same action every day at work.

While “we the happy few” go to work and enjoy it there is a mass amount of people who do not but in either case, the result is the same, we take part in a cycle. Get up, get dressed, grab your bags, head to work, work your standard eighty hours, get your paycheck, pay your bills, complain throughout the process, and repeat.

We complete this cycle for various reasons but whatever those reasons may be, this cycle hides away a question from the forethought of our minds that we should be asking ourselves and searching for an answer. “What would I do if my employer had to let me go?”

In case you were wondering, the reaction to pulling your hand out from the toaster is the thought that you should be aspiring to do something more than your current position. This symbolism hits all too hard.

woman in bed holding smartphone in shock. — We know it’s your day off, but could you still come in and hand over your badge?
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Heartbreaks and Layoffs

I don’t know how many of you reading this have ever experienced a layoff before, personally, I have not. I mean, I experienced being laid off in a relationship (it was her choice, not mine) but I could imagine the feeling of your heart dropping into your gut, and experience trembling throughout your very existence would be the result.

For those who don’t entirely have a good idea of what a layoff is; in short, the employer may come into a situation where they have to terminate your employment, the reasons can vary from trying to cut costs, lack of work, or funds because of reorganization, or even mergers and acquisitions.

Breaking this down in relationship terms, this is the classic “It’s not you, it’s me” situation. This differs from being fired because, well… being fired is something that happened on your end. So, again, in relationship terms, this is the classic “I’m breaking up with you because we’re just not meant to be” situation.

Breaking hearts aside, if you have been living under a rock, the company Google, is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc that focuses on various business areas such as advertising, search, platform, and operating systems, and the list goes on, had to perform a massive layoff and people were informed via email, that they were being let go despite their longstanding with Google.

Again, haven’t been laid off before but I could imagine your world becoming microscopic after reading the email. This is heartbreaking because there are many people who spent their better years trying to acquire a spot in Google only to be treated like a mishandled Door Dash order and be left out curbside.

a team of people at a table going over data. — We should start making plans in case this company starts downsizing.
Door Dash here I come.
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Letting Go by Numbers

You may be curious to know how many people and why is Google laying off. As of right now Google either has or seeking to let go of about 12,000 employees. And interns looking to land a job with Google have been put on freeze with a chance of having to pivot their plans because landing a job at Google isn’t looking promising anymore.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai informed employees this decision resulted from the realization of unrealized growth expectations. This translates to, if you have ever thrown a house party, I invited too many people and a good chunk of you have to go. So sorry folks but don’t forget to tip your bartender and close your tab on the way out.

This makes Google the latest tech giant to “trim the fat” after the rapid expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic had worn off. Pichai did take full responsibility for the decision however, this doesn’t soften the blow but at least he did address his muck up.

Yours truly even applied at Google and like most of the companies I’ve applied to, they scoffed at my achievements because I didn’t come from a university or have the certifications, they were screening for but after applying for their apprenticeship program and never hearing anything more about it, this all makes sense now.

young man sat worried. — I have spent years in school, I never gave much thought into pursing other skills.
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Being The Jack of Spades

This brings things back into perspective from the introduction I made earlier. Not the toaster part but that has a play in it too. What would you do if you had to part ways with your employer and either have a small chance of coming back or none?

After spending years on the conveyer belt traveling from school to college and from college to fall into a position in a company that you hope to carry you into your golden years, you find the world is changing and companies of yesterday have less of a care for their current longstanding and hope-filled potential employees due to having to rapidly change.

A thing about jobs is that they are meant to be a short-term service while having a career, on the other hand, is better but not the best since you must specialize in something. The problem with this is you have to be careful with whatever specialization you choose because it could either contribute to oversaturating the market or end up being such a small niche in the wrong area that people have no use for it.

A solution to preparing for this situation if you are ever so unlucky to come face-to-face with it is to treat your skills like a stock portfolio and be diverse as possible. Be the Jack of All Trades and master of none because in this case, it’s better than being a master of one.

I’m sure there are a few people in Google who were able to shrug off being laid off because either they have a decent amount saved in their savings plan or they have other skills they can rely on. But for a large amount of them, this is removing the blinders and a rude awakening. If you noticed, in school you’re never taught how to adapt to change.

highway near trees under cloudy sky. — Either experience the storm of change or be the storm of change.
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Would like to give sincere thanks to current followers and subscribers, your support and actions mean a lot and has a play in the creation of each script.

Have you ever been laid off before?

Script a comment below about it.

Cloud Talk, Tech

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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Made it this far and found this to be entertaining? Then a big thanks to you and please show your support by cracking a like, scripting a comment, or plug-in to follow.

Would like to give sincere thanks to current followers and subscribers, your support and actions mean a lot and has a play in the creation of each script.

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