Introduction
I’m starting AWS at Scale as a place/topic to share strategies, skills and tips on how to build your AWS career, what to focus on to stay relevant, how to make an impact, and where to focus your time & energy in a large corporate enterprise.
I’m Lee 👋 and I’ve spent almost my entire career working as an architect designing at scale, in some of the world’s largest corporations.
I'm currently at Informa PLC where we operate at the heart of the knowledge & information economy, we connect humans through intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events.
I work closely with our Senior Leadership Team, Senior Stakeholders, InfoSec teams, Networks, DevOps, Developers, FinOps, Observability, Enterprise & Solutions Architects to provide leadership that ensures that what's built on our Cloud platforms aligns with compliance, governance, principles, standards, policies and general guidelines whilst maintaining the velocity of change and innovation that Informa demands.
I'm proud to be part of an excellent team that supports the people behind London Tech Week, Fan Expo, MegaCon, Monaco Yacht Show, Black Hat, Game Developers Conference, The AI Summit, MedTech and hundreds of other huge global events that you’ve probably attended at some point in your career. We’re 11,000+ people strong, FTSE 100 listed and north of £3b in annual revenue 💪.
We’re all in on AWS Cloud, we have no data centres, for an enterprise that’s north of £3b in annual revenue, that’s some achievement! 🌟
A bit about me
Here’s my professional bio if you want to learn more about what I do within my role at Informa as an senior architect - my primary focus being AWS and cloud (at scale).
What i’ll be posting.
This will be the first post of many on AWS at Scale, all of which aim to cover AWS at scale concepts in a bite sized format with stunning easy to understand visuals.
Concepts I’m looking to cover:
✅ What is AWS at Scale? (the post you’re reading)
✅ Making the right career choices.
✅ Mechanisms for change.
✅ Building and engaging with your stakeholders.
✅ Defining and aligning your standard.
✅ Aligning standards with enterprise level principles.
✅ Primary cloud vs other clouds (how to manage strategy and adoption without over stretched your resources).
✅ Defining and building a communication strategy.
✅ A Cloud platform provider / consumer model.
→ Reusable Infrastructure as Code modules.
→ Reusable CI/CD pipelines.
→ Reusable design patterns and reference architectures.
✅ Core foundations, landing zone & control plane.
→ An SDLC mindset
→ At core landing zone level
→ → Dev LZConsumer LZs
→ At AWS account level
→ → Dev, Test & Prod
→ → Standalone
→ → Sandbox
→ Segregation
→ → At account level (dev, stage production)
→ → Throughout the core network
→ → → East west inspection VPCs
→ → → Centralised egress inspection VPCs
→ → Removing VPC peering
✅ Privileged access models (PAM) for:
→ Request & approval for time bound AWS console/cli based access.
→ Identifying roles for:
→ → Break fix
→ → View Only
→ → Read Only
→ → Session Manager
→ → Secrets Manager
→ Building a multi stage approval MFA based process for root IAM account access.
→ Removing local IAM accounts
✅ Reference VPC architecture for automated vending, standardisation and reusability.
→ Industrialised for provider management at scale.
→ Fit for the future of microservices and serverless
✅ Tiering (and ultimately designing for it).
→ Uptime, RTO & RPO objectives.
✅ A mandatory tagging taxonomy from sources of truth.
→ Flowing mandatory tags down to resources
→ Providing recommended resource level tagging
→ Tagging storage resources with the appropriate data classification
✅ FinOps
→ Discovering and setting estimated AWS account level budgets during the engagement process.
→ Automated AWS account spend dashboards and identifying trends.
→ Visualising and approving budget changes when commits are made to the infrastructure as code pipeline / repo.
→ Automated enrolment of AWS accounts into an AWS Private Marketplace.
→ Implementing an AWS Private Marketplace request and approval process.
→ Ensuring all non prod compute runs on spot.
→ Ensuring all non prod storage is tiered as required.
✅ Identifying early adopters.
✅ Build the advocates.
✅ Creating an architectural engagement process.
→ Data gathering for.
→ → Requirements.
→ → → Non function.
→ → → Functional.
→ → → Vending
→ Outputs
→ → Early stakeholders comms.
→ → Schematics.
→ → Enablement guides.
→ Why it’s important to be
→ → Opinionated.
→ → Decisive.
→ → Confident.
→ How to reduce the amount of snowflakes by building cattle and not pets.
→ → Provisioning over configuration
→ → EC2 by exception.
→ → Implement cattle, not pets.
✅ Changing behaviour and ways of working.
→ Stop perceiving AWS as a data centre.
→ Building an ‘everything as code’ approach.
→ Driving changes through the CI/CD pipeline (and not the console).
✅ Tips on getting hired as an AWS professional within a large corporate enterprise.
→ Interview techniques.
→ Dos and Don’ts.
→ What the hiring manager is looking for.
→ Tools and preparation.
I’ll also be publishing byte sized content that will help you understand important AWS / cloud concepts. Some of these you can find here:
👉 AWS at Scale #3: AWS Platform Concepts at Scale:
👉 AWS at Scale #8: Pick a primary Cloud platform and absolutely nail it
👉 AWS at Scale #7: Why its important not to build everything in a single AWS account
If any of this future content interests you then you’re going to want to hit that subscribe button or follow me here on Dev where I'll also be posting content.
What does AWS at scale mean?
Or more specifically, what does AWS at Scale mean to me?
For me ‘AWS at Scale’ means consistent governance, compliance, FinOps practices and common developer and DevOps experiences are delivered through automation and vending. It means the ability to provide this as a service to your project/workload/builder teams through an architectural engagement and ITSM process that provides cover for all the thing your community of builders maybe haven’t considered as it’s not part of their overall domain of responsibility.
Your consumers may not see the bigger picture at play. They just need to focus on building.
AWS at Scale is also about bootstrapping your community of builders. At the point of which AWS accounts, VPCs (if required) along with automated governance and compliance are vended, you’re also vending a CI/CD pipeline and Infrastructure as Code modules out of the box,
This gets developers and DevOps teams building within minutes, and provides a consistent DevOps experience from product to product.
Wrapping it Up
As if you don’t know already, AWS is an awesome community to be involved in, it’s also a primary skillset that is high in demand, it opens doors to all sorts of opportunities, interesting challenges and lifestyle benefits.
In a large corporate enterprise you’ll get to travel, enjoy really nerdy conferences (especially AWS re:Invent) meet like minded people from all over the globe, help others, share knowledge and continuously grow.
There’s a never ending supply of new things to learn to feed your curious nerdy mind. You’ll never stop learning. You’ll earn a good salary (and in some cases a very good salary) and the skills you’ll learn are beyond portable, every business is consuming AWS either directly, or indirectly, like EVERYONE.
Repeat after me…
It’s ubiquitous, like photons 💡 and yes it can be a steep learning curve, but the juice 🍊 is worth the squeeze 🥤, and anyway - you’ll learn from someone that isn’t just reading and learning from documentation and labs, I’ve spent my entire career working at scale in some of the world’s largest corporations.
If you’re already on your AWS journey, it’s time to level up.
Many thanks for reading and i’ll be posting again soon, Lee ✌️
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