Cloud Computing Discovery – Week 57

As part of my halftime lifelong continuous learning journey, I have recently become a full-time student again.

My learning journey started in 2017 after I left my last banking job. I started to sign up for Skillsfuture courses which were heavily subsidized by the government for citizens, especially mid-career people like me. Over the next 3 years, I took a whole variety of courses that interest me. They include wines, aquaponics, reading financial statements, overseas learning trips to Hangzhou to learn about e-Retailing from Alibaba and to Seoul for Blockchain. My most ambitious one was getting a Specialist Diploma in Business Analytics. It was a 12 months course with a Polytechnic, attending night classes 5 times a month. There was even a nice graduation ceremony at the end where we wore our gowns to go up to the stage to receive our certification.

Overall, I guess I might have received more than $20k+ of government subsidies to date. As long as you are a citizen who is above 40 years old, these courses were subsidized to the tune of 90%. Best of all, there was no limit to it too.

Then Covid19 arrived in 2020 and my learning journey came to a standstill. While I could still do mainly MOOC online courses, most were not comprehensive. With the mounting job losses due to the virus, a new Skillsfuture initiative called SGUnited was created. It was a government joint venture with prominent companies to develop a 6 to 9 months training program for out of work citizens who wish to pivot to a new and promising industry. It was heavily subsidized and even provided a student allowance for the participants.

I discovered this IBM SGUnited program in late 2020. It had 2 tracks: Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity. It costs $20K which was subsidized up to 19.5k and we could use our Skillsfuture funding to pay for the balance of $500. On top of it all, students will receive $1.5k/month as an allowance. https://webibmcourse.mybluemix.net/SGUnitedProgramme

I did not register for it immediately as I had some upcoming commitments then, hence I introduced it to 2 friends who signed up. Then at the beginning of 2021, things changed for me and I decided to apply for it. The course was for 6 months and it was conducted online over live Zoom classes except for periodic exams. It has 5 modules to complete and we do have group projects to complete. IBM certificates will also be earned along the way which we could attach to our LinkedIn profiles too. My course finally started on 22 Feb.

Over the last 2 weeks, I was into my 3rd AI module and the topic was Cloud Computing. While it is quite a technical subject, it provided me with a brief overview of how things work on the cloud which I found very fascinating.

Over the last 15+ years, as mobiles become so critical to our daily lives, I have heard about the movement of many things to the cloud and the term IoT (Internet of Things). Even software, games and apps are all supported via the cloud nowadays. It is inevitable that there will be privacy concerns as all our data is stored wirelessly in data centres around the world. Video streaming like Netflix and live Zoom calls are already a given.

What I did not know about cloud was how it all worked in the background. With 4G and 1GB broadband speeds, there was a lot of cloud computing power that is going on to make many things work. How are they scalable and is security a big concern? How can they work 24/7 and deploy patches without interrupting the UX (User Experience)?

My questions were answered over the past 2 weeks as I learned how things are being done nowadays in cloud technology. New terms about how data is stored in the cloud via containers and Kubernetes infrastructure, SQL versus NoSQL, types of clouds (public, private and hybrid) and services offered (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS). The breaking up of an application into smaller bite-size components call microservices.

How all the apps communicate with each over via API (Application Programming Interfaces) to make the microservices work seamlessly and highly scalable on demand. The addition of security features to the API further enhance the robustness of the integrity of the cloud architecture. These include encryption process (tokens and keys) which provides many levels of secured handoffs which makes it harder if not impossible for hackers to infiltrate and hijack the user experience.

I now understand why we have the 2FA (2-factor authentication) process for logging into bank websites and how they are more secure. We first use an ID and password to get in at the first level, then in the background, the app hands off to the next level to request for an email or to use Google Authenticator to generate another signoff code to log in. The various APIs with encryption capabilities communicate with each other in the background. If your phone has a face recognition sign-on, that would also be another security layer added to the sign-in process.

Most of these technology enhancements were only made just over the last few years. With the confluence of technological advancements, the scalability and speed of adaptation of the cloud are amazing now. Coupled with AI development and big data, anything is possible. The development of a cloud project is also enhanced via a DevOps process with zero downtime deployment, improving the end to end process to days instead of months.

I remember the good old days where the IT team had to burn countless weekends to deploy a new version of a system, then pray and hope it works on Monday morning. Each stand-alone PC then also needed to be shut down and rebooted to upgrade its software using disks.

With the setting up of everything in the cloud now and the ability to slice apps into micro bits while having strong security features, the cost goes down dramatically while efficiency shoots through the roof. Down time is also a thing of the past now as developers can simultaneously run and test manageable portions of the app in real time and deploy them seamlessly into production to maintain high UX.

It has been indeed a fruitful 2 weeks of learning experience for me as I dive deep into this topic of cloud computing. I discovered new things about a subject which I had no prior knowledge about and feel so much more enlightened now 🙂

Cloud Computing – Network Encyclopedia


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