Marjorie Furay: So again, hello everybody and welcome to master class this Thursday night, March 23rd, 2023.
Marjorie Furay: That was correct.
Marjorie Furay: Umm. So glad to have you. I know that you will enjoy it as I have enjoyed every master class so far. We have some great speakers tonight and.
Marjorie Furay: Including.
Marjorie Furay: As I said, Brandon Greer, Kristopher Crimson Kimsey and Joshua Rogers O. If Brandon, if you are ready, we can go ahead and get started.
Brandon Greer: Alright, cool. Uh, can everybody hear me?
Marjorie Furay: Yes.
Brandon Greer: Alright, let me see if I can present this.
Brandon Greer: Alright. Does everybody see my screen?
Marjorie Furay: I do, yes.
Brandon Greer: OK.
Brandon Greer: Alright, so good evening everyone. My name is Brandon Greer and today my topic is going to be about AI and supercomputers.
Brandon Greer: So what is a AI? What is a supercomputer? You know, you might be asking that so.
Brandon Greer: AI or artificial intelligence, is the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. Now a supercomputer is simply the fastest computer in the world that can process a significant amount of data very quickly. So here we can see by frequent field that's what he quoted what AI is defined as, and Docker. That's what they quoted a supercomputer to be.
Brandon Greer: So what exactly do these things do?
Brandon Greer: Well, with AI it learns how to operate based on what we give it. So if we give it a book to read or ask questions about what's happening in the book or what has happened to some of the main characters, we could expect output that might give us a summary of what happened. Or we could ask direct questions about certain aspects of the book. Right. So a prime example of AI that is buzzing the news right now is ChatGPT. We see users sending the AI things like explain The Big Bang theory or, you know, it will explain and write out.
Brandon Greer: And like, write me a resume, if we wanna ask that and it would generate a resume for us to use and build for where a circumstance that we have as long as we provide at some type of information or some type of input.
Brandon Greer: The main idea here is as long as we give AI something to learn from, it will be able to generate some type of output and perform some type of tasks that we're trying to get to perform.
Brandon Greer: A supercomputer, on the other hand, it operates differently, so we often use supercomputers for intensive data and large computation based research. There's usually a single problem we're trying to solve, and we develop as your computer to try to achieve our goal. Some examples of a supercomputer are things like the deep Crack, which was used at brute force, the DES or data encryption standard. The main goal behind it was to prove that DSS key size was not sufficient.
Brandon Greer: Be secure and after 56 hours of deep crack attempting this brute force attempt, the machine achieved this goal so we can see how powerful computers and supercomputers can be. When we have a certain drive or someone go that we're trying to achieve.
Brandon Greer: So why is it important to know this right? So as we see A's becoming popular and it's a known fact, we switch Chad GBT, becoming a tool and everybody's hands, you know, all the time. I'm gonna see it on things like Facebook or Instagram. Someone creating some new ChatGPT or using ChatGPT to create some type of output that we're not used to seeing or haven't seen yet. So we can use this information to assess how can it also be used in the hands of attackers.
Brandon Greer: And that's just intent. We often see, you know, pop culture and movies like the Terminator, where AI becomes sentient and his goal as a hunt down humans and cause mass destruction. So we had to be really careful about how we manage these programs. So I pose a question, what happens if we were to run AI on a supercomputer and merge these two concepts together, right.
Brandon Greer: We can see that in our IDs or in section uh intrusion detection systems and IPS intrusion prevention systems were firewalls. They incorporate anomaly based algorithms that are boosted by AI in order to help protect our information. So what happens if we instead use it for malicious intent? We already using it for that defensive side. So what if we create an AI that runs off of these super computers whose only goal is to cost chaos through hacking, cracking any other form of cyber attacking or cyber threats?
Brandon Greer: Overall, it could be good or it could be bad.
Brandon Greer: If we made it AI capable of these tools, we had this concept and we tried to make it as good as possible and use only for the good and betterment of the world.
Brandon Greer: There would be virtually no need for any form of software security because this API would be able to protect our devices from any and all attacks. It would have the tools needed to detect things like an IDs prevent like an IPS, and summarize what happened and we could act like it's just a normal day on the web. The fear of cyber criminals would go away because we know our AI is so strong and so fast at handling this potential text that there's no reason to have to worry about investing in products like.
Brandon Greer: McAfee or Malwarebytes? Things like that that already do these malware scanning and antivirus processes.
Brandon Greer: So this sounds great. Great idea. Never had to worry about your information. End up in someone else's hands. Ever have to be attacked or hacked? But what happens instead if it's used for evil? Well, the moment the AI would be able to get inside of the network through any vulnerability, the ability to protect, safeguard, reverse the damage would be virtually impossible. We already know that there are polymorphic viruses out there that create modified versions of the self that avoid detection.
Brandon Greer: Yet they still continue the same path attack. The issue is that it would know what every malware detection software ever invented is and how it prevents malware from getting on to the system and uses information to prevent itself from being detected by these applications.
Brandon Greer: So who could ultimately stop these devices? If someone has created such a powerful AI, who, who can we lend on? Who could we, you know, go and talk to to try to prevent this from happening or stop it?
Brandon Greer: Well, there are many dark or anti dark AI initiatives set in motion already. So here in a quote by minevitch it states places like United Nations World Economic Forum, the UN I CRI Center for AI Robotics, the G2 and OECD in the White House. In addition to companies like Microsoft, have helped mobilize the masses in a grassroots movement against dark artificial intelligence through a set of AI principles which have been instrumental in defining a workplace code of conduct.
Brandon Greer: Surrounding responsible AI.
Brandon Greer: Chief among Microsoft AI principles include fairness, reliability, safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability.
Brandon Greer: This just means that all these are organizations are all putting forth effort to combat against this idea and how to properly respond to potential threat. There are many different methods being used. Combat against dark AI, like enforcing ethical codes and standards to the AI to prevent issues that we have already discussed.
Brandon Greer: So how could we everyday citizen step in to stop these right well, quote from Selmer brings you our from our global protect the future. How to stop AI from overpowering humanity gives a frightening statement AI that merely approaches human level intelligence and is both anonymous and kinetically powerful. Would be enough to end humanity right Terminator? Already very scary thought, but at the end of the day the only real way to stop these malicious.
Brandon Greer: A in dark AI would be pulling the plug if we completely stop the AI in its tracks turning up the systems and devices and prevent it from ever getting to this point of sentient domination, then we could potentially stop this AI token takeover.
Brandon Greer: Banning the use creation implementation of AI is the other way to stop it. If we ban it and actively prevent people from creating and using AI, then we could potentially stop the AI.
Brandon Greer: Right now, the main source for invention is to create rules ethics, a framework for the AI to follow, and the regulatory sense. But this is not a be all solution. Stopping AI from going out troll again would be having malicious attacker or someone who doesn't establish these frameworks or rules and ethics. Then how is it going to stop the AI? They have no rules, they have no care. You know, it's what we feed into the AI is what we get out.
Brandon Greer: Of the AI.
Brandon Greer: So overall in summary, right when you're using AI with a supercomputer and teaching it how to use hacking toolkits and ideologies in order to hack the world.
Brandon Greer: Is a reality that I hope to never experience.
Brandon Greer: But the possibility of that happening is real. The use of AI in supercomputer collaboration is already being used. AI supercomputers are starting to go hand in hand with one another already.
Brandon Greer: Sorry about that.
Brandon Greer: We the people have the power to stop AI and to control how it is used and implemented in our everyday applications. Things like Facebook or Google are still under federal laws that mandate how these companies use their technology and prevent them from taking advantage of their users. Now real question is, are we there yet technically?
Brandon Greer: Well, maybe there's no true answer to this, because as far as we see, sometimes, yeah, we do use things like IDs and IPS that have some type of AI automated system to prevent and protect us. And then we have polymorphic viruses that we give code to that automatically do and follow that path of attack. Right. So as we grow with AI, so does AI grow with us learning how to use AI and how they function and how to control AI?
Brandon Greer: As all available at click away on a web it it only takes having that information go into the wrong hands for things that go from bad to worse.
Brandon Greer: So these are some of the references that I use. I mentioned them some in the PowerPoint but that is it. Hope you guys enjoyed.
Marjorie Furay: Excellent job. Thank you for that information. I like I said, I always get some great information out of you guys. So now you help me with AI so much.
Marjorie Furay: And yes, ChatGPT is one of our issues with the school with PG.
Marjorie Furay: But we're back and forth on that, right? So this was great. This was very helpful. I hope everybody else enjoyed as much as I did.
Marjorie Furay: That was good.
Marjorie Furay: Ah.
Marjorie Furay: Thank you so much. OK, next.
Marjorie Furay: Kris Kimsey he's gonna cover AWS cloud practitioner certification, which I'm still supposed to get completed.
Marjorie Furay: So maybe give me some tips.
Kris Kimsey: Can everybody hear me?
Marjorie Furay: Yes.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Yes, loud and clear.
Kris Kimsey: Ah, there we go.
Kris Kimsey: All right. Hi. How is everybody?
Marjorie Furay: Good. Thank you.
Kris Kimsey: How do I? How do I follow that? That was an awesome presentation that was really good.
Kris Kimsey: I I gotta say I have used ChatGPT a bit not not for school, not for school. But yeah I have used it to help Polish up my resume and and whatnot just to kind of wordsmith some things. And it is scary. It's pretty scary how just.
Kris Kimsey: Intelligent it is, yeah.
Kris Kimsey: But I'm gonna cover the AWS cloud practitioner certification today, not as a not as not as in depth as our previous presentation, but it's really just what I want to cover is not so much.
Kris Kimsey: Uh, the the weeds of the cloud practitioner sort of stuff. I just kinda wanna go over.
Kris Kimsey: More about is this a certification you should pursue is this? Could this benefit you right?
Kris Kimsey: Some of you that are probably working on your masters finishing up your Masters, this might not be for you, but it is something to consider. There might be reasons why you might want to consider it. I'm finishing up my associates, so this is a good one for me because it it helps me in the long run.
Kris Kimsey: Right. So let's go to our next slide. Let's just an overview overview. Excuse me, I'm gonna talk about how I ended up getting into this cert and maybe some of you guys can relate to that. Gonna cover some training, kind of what what to expect with the training modules.
Kris Kimsey: Some of the benefits of of pursuing this cert and then uh, just an exam overview. Some of the the the details on how to take the cert.
Kris Kimsey: Alright so.
Kris Kimsey: How did I get here? Let me see if I can blow this up a little bit.
Kris Kimsey: I have been working in IT for about four years. I worked in intelligence for probably over a decade before that.
Kris Kimsey: I've since going into IT. I've just taken a real strong interest in anything cloud related, so I wanted to work.
Kris Kimsey: Doing something cloud.
Kris Kimsey: Being in in that world.
Kris Kimsey: I just haven't been able to kind of get a job in it. So we started the internship here and I was talking with Christy and she's asking, what are you into? What are you wanna pursue? What sort of?
Kris Kimsey: You know, what do you wanna be when you grow up?
Kris Kimsey: And.
Kris Kimsey: I said I'm really interested in cloud stuff and she said alright. I got some stuff. I'll assigned the AWS cloud practitioner materials for you and so Microsoft Azure stuff and get you going on that.
Kris Kimsey: So in that same week I had just put my new sexy resume out to the world and I got a few bites on it. But here's one of the bytes that I got that was.
Kris Kimsey: I.
Kris Kimsey: Pretty pretty off putting honestly, and I'm just gonna. I can't really see it on my screen, so oops.
Kris Kimsey: Let me see if I can see this a little bit better.
Kris Kimsey: No, I can't. Basically, it's it's. Uh, you guys can probably read it better than me, but I gotta.
Kris Kimsey: I got an e-mail saying hey, you applied for this. Umm, do you have a W 6 experience and before I even had a chance to reply?
Kris Kimsey: The CEO jumped in and was like, hey, you know, we need someone with AWS knowledge. I don't know if you guys can see it, but it it's a bit caddy, so.
Kris Kimsey: As a bit off, put by that, but I went I I did reply to them. I said, you know, I've got.
Kris Kimsey: I've done heaps of hours on on.
Kris Kimsey: They, Claude Guru and Linux Academy and.
Kris Kimsey: So on and so forth and they they never responded, which is fine by me.
Kris Kimsey: But it it did say that alright, I if I don't have any experience working with AWS, should at least try and pursue the certs and have something to say that right?
Kris Kimsey: So it was a good it was a good kick in the **** to pursue the AWS cloud Practitioner Cert.
Kris Kimsey: Alright, so Next up we have kind of what's covered in this. So these two, you know left and right, those are both tasks that you can pursue in the internship here.
Kris Kimsey: And they they cover. It's a bit of an umbrella of everything. AWS, right? It's it's much like the.
Kris Kimsey: If anybody's done the CompTIA A+ certification, you know that the A+ certification kind of covers all things IT right. And it kind of lets you figure out what you like and what you don't like, what areas you wanna go into. So as you can see here is covers, networking. It covers storage, it covers security, monitoring, pricing, all the things, right.
Kris Kimsey: So.
Kris Kimsey: And it it actually does cover a lot more than I expected. So after I got the certification, I posted it on LinkedIn and posted it on Facebook and one of my friends jumped in and went. Ohh cool. Now you understand how AWS pricing works and I'm going.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah, nice joke. But it's it's a lot more than that. It's the covers, a lot of stuff.
Kris Kimsey: So the nice thing with this too is I got the little bullet down on the bottom there.
Kris Kimsey: Umm.
Kris Kimsey: A lot of this training will roll into the more advanced training, so I started working on the security training after I finished this certification and I was about 30% complete with it. So everything kind of builds on each other.
Kris Kimsey: Right. So.
Kris Kimsey: Next up, I'm just going to give you a few practice questions here.
Kris Kimsey: And that way you can kind of see what the test looks like. I know we're not going into any of the material, but it'll give you an idea of.
Kris Kimsey: How straightforward the test is? Or I don't want to say straightforward case. They do have a few gotchas in there.
Kris Kimsey: But.
Kris Kimsey: It it.
Kris Kimsey: Umm, we'll give you an idea of what the test kind of will look like. These are practice.
Kris Kimsey: These are practics test examples, so I didn't take anything from the actual exam right.
Kris Kimsey: So here's your first one. It's it's, uh, multiple choice question. They like to do this thing where there's two answers that are just gonna be completely not close, and then there's gonna be 2 that are.
Kris Kimsey: Both of them might work, but they're really wanting.
Kris Kimsey: One that makes the most sense, so they'll say what is the most cost effective answer? Or what is the most efficient answer. So you need to kind of be aware of that.
Kris Kimsey: So this one here. Uh, I'll, I'll let you guys uh.
Kris Kimsey: You guys can answer this in chat or if you want to use audio or however or or just take a guess. So why is AWS more economical than traditional data Centers for applications with varying compute workloads? So just taking a guess.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah, perfect. It put put your guests in the chat if you want so.
Kris Kimsey: This is 1 where it's got kind of a gotcha. It's asking what's more economical.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Hmm.
Kris Kimsey: Myself.
Kris Kimsey: Let's see.
Kris Kimsey: Was the a Amazon EC2 costs are billed on a monthly basis?
Kris Kimsey: Just kind of feels related. Be users retain full administrative access to their.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: Didn't mind.
Kris Kimsey: Uh Amazon EC2 instances.
Kris Kimsey: Next one.
Kris Kimsey: Amazon EC2 instance of you guys already got it alright so.
Kris Kimsey: You can see.
Abimbola Ogunfuye: You need.
Kris Kimsey: Some of them are pretty straightforward, so yeah, see easier answer. The ability to launch instances on demand when needed allows users to launch and terminate instances in response to a varying workload. This is more economical.
Kris Kimsey: This is a more economical practice than purchasing enough on premises servers to handle the peak load.
Kris Kimsey: No, it's nice.
Kris Kimsey: So for those of you guys that have worked with data centers, I I work with. You know, I've worked in some pretty big data centers where I'm located.
Kris Kimsey: And I'm watching them clear out.
Kris Kimsey: I'm watching them empty out and I'm. I'm seeing that they are becoming big empty space as everything goes from barrel metal to virtualize, so this is this is something that's a bit of a bit of awakening for me going oh, everybody's moving to the cloud, everybody's moving to AWS or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
Kris Kimsey: So it's a good thing to have in the back of your head because you know when you get that manager that's going let's, let's implement this giant system and we're going to build a data center. You can go hang on a second. I've got a better solution for you.
Kris Kimsey: Here's the next question. Which of the following is an AWS responsibility under the AWS shared responsibilities model so.
Kris Kimsey: I'm gonna talk on this one of the big things. They start you off with is AWS is responsible for security of the cloud keyword of.
Kris Kimsey: And you are responsible for security in the cloud keyword in.
Kris Kimsey: Right. So.
Kris Kimsey: Let's see what are our answers? Uh, configuring third party applications, maintaining physical hardware, securing application access and data, data, data, data. I live in Australia, so they say data here.
Kris Kimsey: Managing guest operating systems. So take a guess at that.
Kris Kimsey: So this one can be for me. I was tempted to say managing guest operating systems when I was starting out because you think they're they're covering.
Kris Kimsey: Right.
Kris Kimsey: That that's something they might cover, but they don't actually care what operating system you're running underneath. Linux, Windows and so on and so forth.
Kris Kimsey: Uh or Linux distributions, I mean.
Kris Kimsey: So let's see here what's our next one?
Kris Kimsey: Yep, maintaining the physical hardware.
Kris Kimsey: Right. So maintaining physical hardware is an AWS responsibility under the AWS shared responsibility model. All the rest of it I'm gonna go back to that. All the rest of that you manage. So third party applications, that's something you cover. Amazon AWS has over 200 services, but they also encourage you to reach out and use third party applications because there's some things that they're just not going to do for you.
Kris Kimsey: So they encourage you to use third party applications, securing applications access and data that goes on you and your security team, right?
Kris Kimsey: But they do have their own sort of side to security stuff.
Kris Kimsey: So they do talk a lot about encryption data and transit and data at rest and encrypting everything all along the way and encouraging you to encrypt it into it as well. So it gets double encrypted, right? You can never be too safe with this stuff.
Kris Kimsey: All right, next question and I I only have 3 questions here. So just to give you an idea of what the the test looks like.
Kris Kimsey: How would a System Administrator add an additional layer of login security to a user's AWS management console? So this one got a little bit of a gotcha in it.
Kris Kimsey: So first answer.
Kris Kimsey: Use Amazon cloud directory.
Kris Kimsey: Audit AWS identity and access management roles.
Kris Kimsey: Enable multifactor authentication and enable AWS Cloud Trail.
Kris Kimsey: So I'm going to talk a little bit on on each of these. You guys go ahead and and take a guess.
Kris Kimsey: Another thing you'll notice on the.
Kris Kimsey: On the exam is.
Kris Kimsey: In the material, they're going to cover.
Kris Kimsey: The main services and if you see a service that they talk about on the exam that you didn't really cover, it's probably not gonna be the answer. If you're like, I don't really know anything about that one. It's probably not the answer. So use Amazon Cloud directory.
Kris Kimsey: Right. That's not really a service that they talk about that much in the practitioner material, so avoid it. Alright. The next one audit AWS identity and access management roles.
Kris Kimsey: Right. That does sound good. It does sound like an additional layer of security.
Kris Kimsey: But look at the keyword. They're audit. That's your gotcha. We're not talking about auditing.
Kris Kimsey: Right.
Kris Kimsey: All of us are probably familiar with AIM, right? So my first guest, just glossing over, I would have gone.
Kris Kimsey: I would have gone. Yeah. And I, I I am sorry.
Kris Kimsey: But the keyword there is auditing, so they they trick you there. Next one enable multifactor authentication. That's something we deal with everywhere.
Kris Kimsey: Right it it does my head and honestly because I can't have my phone at work. So anytime I need to log into something I have to run out to my car, get the little off my phone and run back and hopefully I made it in time right so.
Kris Kimsey: I I love, I love MFA, but I also just it drives me nuts, alright. And then the last one enable AWS Cloud Trail. So AWS Cloud Trail is the sort of their sexy name for your log files. Any sort of action taken within your EC2 instance or your.
Kris Kimsey: Any of your services cloud trail logs that it's just your log files so it's not really adding an additional layer of security for the login.
Kris Kimsey: Uh, it's just saying what you did.
Kris Kimsey: So this one is talking more user specific, so your answer is going to be enable multi factor authentication.
Kris Kimsey: So multifactor authentication MFA is a simple best practice that adds an extra layer of protection on top of a username and password with MFA enabled. When a user signs into an AWS management console, they will be prompted for their.
Kris Kimsey: Their username and password.
Kris Kimsey: The first factor what they know.
Kris Kimsey: As well as the as well as.
Kris Kimsey: For an authentication code from their MFA device, the second factor what they have.
Kris Kimsey: And this could be your phone. This could be, I think they do. Security tokens. I know for some stuff I have like an RSA security token.
Kris Kimsey: Uh, and then? Alright. Taken together, these multiple factors provide increased security for AWS account settings and resources.
Kris Kimsey: Alright, I think that was the last question here.
Kris Kimsey: OK. And then I'm just gonna go into a few benefits of the certification.
Kris Kimsey: Like I talked about earlier, it could be a foot in the door with some cloud jobs. I I won't say that.
Kris Kimsey: You know, applying for jobs. You're gonna go. Oh, man, this person's got.
Kris Kimsey: The AWS Cloud practitioner certification, but it does give them a better idea that you are interested in cloud technology and you're you are.
Kris Kimsey: You know you are trying to get in the door. It might get you an entry level position, but it's it's a stepping stone to higher level certifications.
Kris Kimsey: So.
Kris Kimsey: I'll say with this looking here, you've got sort of the different ways you should go. I jumped from the AWS Cloud Practitioner CERT to working on the Security Cert.
Kris Kimsey: And I went, whoa. I understand the material, but the practice questions are just so over my head. If anybody in here has done security plus.
Kris Kimsey: It's very similar to that where it's a lot of hypotheticals, a lot of UM situation, not hypothetical situation based.
Kris Kimsey: Uh questions and I just was not ready for that. So I said, you know, I'm gonna hold off on doing this certification.
Kris Kimsey: And I'm going to kind of dig into some of the other stuff and then I've I've learned too, that you're supposed to do the solutions, architect associate before kind of digging into any of those specialty certs. So I started working on that and it's actually really helped me understand the security stuff a lot better.
Kris Kimsey: And I've also started working on the networking one, so I'm doing those kind of in parallel.
Kris Kimsey: And so I think just opening those up after the cloud practitioner stuff, I was about 30% done on those. So it wasn't like I was starting from scratch, which was really nice.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah, that was another thing I was gonna mention. The AWS cloud practitioner.
Kris Kimsey: Material. I'd say in this internship.
Kris Kimsey: I think it took me about two weeks to get through 2 1/2 weeks to get through and I think by the end of the second week I've registered for the exam and I took the test and had it. I passed the exam.
Kris Kimsey: Like I think I had it all wrapped up in three or four weeks, so it's pretty quick one to get.
Kris Kimsey: And this is this is kind of why I'm saying like.
Kris Kimsey: This is this is a good one to pursue because it it is a.
Kris Kimsey: It's it's a pretty easy one to grab up and it it gives you any an idea of?
Kris Kimsey: Are things cloud?
Kris Kimsey: Alright, so here's another benefit, and this is more produced specific. So with this certification, once you get the cert, you can turn it in to the school and it will actually take these three classes off your degree plan.
Kris Kimsey: So for me, that's 30 weeks that I don't need to do stuff, so I I wouldn't mind pursuing the cloud.
Kris Kimsey: What is it? The cloud solutions and?
Kris Kimsey: What's the bachelor's? Uh.
Kris Kimsey: You know the one I'm talking about. It's it's the cloud one. So this knocks out a few classes off of that. For those of you working on your masters, this might not help you, but the there is that 500 level class in there, this one.
Kris Kimsey: Will only go towards the concentration on AWS stuff, so probably not gonna help our masters level students. But for those of you like me who are working on Associates bachelor level stuff, there's two classes that you got taken care of.
Kris Kimsey: Right.
Kris Kimsey: Umm.
Kris Kimsey: We're going to say anything else on that.
Kris Kimsey: OK.
Kris Kimsey: Overview on on this. So it's a foundational level. It's 90 minutes. I felt like 90 minutes was adequate.
Kris Kimsey: Ohh materials for certification. Yes. Sorry I didn't put that in here all.
Kris Kimsey: Umm, I'll mention that just a moment.
Kris Kimsey: So I did feel the certification was.
Kris Kimsey: It was enough time. It gave me enough time to answer all the questions and then go back through and review stuff. I would have probably liked 10 or 20 more minutes just to kind of really look at things. But 90 minutes is good.
Kris Kimsey: $100 US, I think I paid for it in Australian dollars and it's like.
Kris Kimsey: Still like 140 or 160, that's still pretty cheap for cert, and that'll pay for itself. You know, you'll get that money back with like, like a lot of certs.
Kris Kimsey: And then 65 questions, I don't remember if mine was 65 questions. I think it might have been less, but some of those questions were multiple answer questions. So you'll get some that have two or three.
Kris Kimsey: Sort of. You know, pick two, pick three. The issue with those is if you get one wrong and that you get the whole question wrong, so you'll actually get dropped like 3 points. So just be mindful of those.
Kris Kimsey: But there's not a my experience. I didn't have a lot of those. So and then the delivery method is.
Kris Kimsey: Through Pearson view or through online proctoring actually at my work, I do have a Pearson Vue test center and I've used it plenty of times, but I actually much prefer like post COVID 2020 Madness actually prefer doing these exams at home where I can sit in my comfortable bed and you know just.
Kris Kimsey: Be less stressed.
Kris Kimsey: Right. So they do give you the options of doing that.
Kris Kimsey: And just a quick review and I'll get to the questions here in just a second. So Yep, that that covers all of it. So we covered how I kind of got into this and and maybe why you might want to pursue it. We cover the training, we cover the benefits and the exam overview.
Kris Kimsey: So any questions? So I I gotta I had to put this. I had to put this meme in here because I was looking for Perdue Perdue images.
Kris Kimsey: And this popped up and I thought it was hilarious, so I had to add this picture for you guys.
Kris Kimsey: Umm you asked about?
Kris Kimsey: Let's see.
Kris Kimsey: Yes, what the training materials. So if you're doing the internship, you can be assigned the training materials and there's a link in there that will take you straight to AWS.
Kris Kimsey: All the training materials or a lot of the training materials are free on the AWS.
Kris Kimsey: It's like they're training center. It's it's pretty easy to Google. It's like the first thing that comes up when you Google like AWS training.
Kris Kimsey: Uh, there is stuff that you can do that is like.
Kris Kimsey: Umm it is paid.
Kris Kimsey: A few things that are paid for, but honestly I've gotten through.
Kris Kimsey: A bulk of the material, or like all the material without paying for it so.
Kris Kimsey: Uh, and and there's a lot. There's a lot of free content that AWS just gives out. So I think they really encourage people to learn their stuff.
Kris Kimsey: And they also have a one year free trial where you can go in and and test stuff and break stuff and.
Kris Kimsey: Uh.
Kris Kimsey: I I have a fear of.
Kris Kimsey: Uh.
Kris Kimsey: With the AWS stuff of accidentally.
Kris Kimsey: Leaving a you know an EC2 instance running or something and getting a massive bill so.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah. Free knowledge. Yeah. So they they do give you a free year to just figure it out.
Kris Kimsey: So it's it's something to look into.
Kris Kimsey: Any other questions?
Kris Kimsey: Right, I think.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah.
Joshua Rogers: No questions, just a big time. Appreciate no questions. The big time, appreciation from someone that not in the department where a lot of certifications matter, but someone that's looking to grab A at least the developers. I'm looking at the developers and the practitioners certifications just to have because at least one of the two of the one or two of the companies I'm looking at are looking for like that high level overview and they don't need to ask the question if I have the certification.
Joshua Rogers: Set you apart.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah, and that's that's the thing too is this is a good certification.
Kris Kimsey: What's that?
Joshua Rogers: It's. It sets you apart.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah, it does. And this is this is the thing too with the certification, it's a good one for managers to even take that way you can speak.
Kris Kimsey: Move your team to to the cloud. This is a good one for managers to do cause it gives you a general idea of what you're in for.
Kris Kimsey: Ohh, watch your hours when using the free tier. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see that. There's a catch to it.
Kris Kimsey: All right, that that concludes my my master class.
Marjorie Furay: Great job, Kris.
Kris Kimsey: I don't actually know how to stop.
Kris Kimsey: Thanks.
Marjorie Furay: That was that was great stuff, definitely.
Kris Kimsey: Cool. Thank you.
Marjorie Furay: And else to see it, it helps to see what you guys have learned, you know.
Kris Kimsey: Yeah. I'm. I'm. I don't actually know how to end my PowerPoint.
Kris Kimsey: This is.
Marjorie Furay: Are you can go up to the share and click that and it'll just. I'll sharing. So when you and I think you hit escape on your keyboard you can get out of the PowerPoint.
Kris Kimsey: Uh, stop sharing. There we go. This is my first time.
Marjorie Furay: No problem.
Kris Kimsey: Doing doing this so pretty cool.
Marjorie Furay: Right, yeah.
Kris Kimsey: Right.
Marjorie Furay: OK.
Joshua Rogers: That's me.
Marjorie Furay: Last but not least, we've got Joshua Rogers deep dive into data lakes in deep dive into data lakes.
Joshua Rogers: Yeah.
Marjorie Furay: What's the data like? I guess you're gonna explain that.
Marjorie Furay: Awesome.
Joshua Rogers: Yeah, we're, we'll, we'll talk. We'll talk about it a little bit for sure. It's just a an unfathomable concept almost to me at least it was previously. So I will share my screen if I can figure out where it is that looks right. Everyone can see that. OK, presumably.
Joshua Rogers: Very good.
Marjorie Furay: I can, yes.
Joshua Rogers: Fantastic. Thank you so much. So I will umm.
Joshua Rogers: Go ahead and jump right in. Then, as it were, we're we're gonna have a lot of water puns today. So not a lot, but enough. Enough for me. So we'll jump right in. If I can click the arrow key on the right application. So the first thing we need to talk about is big data as.
Joshua Rogers: And data lakes are are a part of big data and so we can't talk about data leaks, about talking about big data 1st and big data is all about vast amounts of information that just continues to grow and grow. It refers to the volume of information. This speed or velocity at which it was created or gathered and additionally the different varieties of data points that are included these.
Joshua Rogers: These V's that have been cleverly slipped in are referred to as the three V's of big data.
Joshua Rogers: And so as we're talking about collecting data, gathering data, we have to talk about where we're going to put it all.
Joshua Rogers: And there are several formats you can put them in and each have their own purpose based on the amount of data that you're working with and what you want to do with it. So first we have our databases, which are all pretty familiar with. These are great for small transactional data and can handle a lot of users. SQL's gonna be our best friend here and it can do some great reporting.
Joshua Rogers: Beyond that, we have our data warehouses now. These are meant for more analytics than queries. You can still run them in SQL. Still works pretty well with it, but it's not meant for a lot of users. This is meant for more specialized people to have access to and to and to really run these analytical reports for your organization.
Joshua Rogers: So the analytics that they can perform are not really like normal querying and are much more powerful and which is useful if you're trying to keep your transactional data separate from your analytical data. This leads us to data lakes. These are large bodies of data and are meant to receive data of all types, so relational, non relational mobile applications, websites, social media, corporate applications, just to name a few.
Joshua Rogers: And the divers for this metaphorical body of water include, like data scientists and data engineers, business and business analysts who like to although they generally like to stick to their curated data, I'll cover that a little bit more in a bit.
Joshua Rogers: Next slide, please slide slide mover.
Joshua Rogers: OK, So what is a data leak?
Joshua Rogers: So what exactly is the data like? Basically this is a repository that is a centralized and can accept any amount of data of any kind, structured or unstructured.
Joshua Rogers: And you can even run that variety. Many varieties of analytics on that data in the form of machine learning, data movement and visualizations. One particular Aberdeen survey even made note that companies that utilized data lakes were at 9% more productive in their revenue growth. This is because data lakes give these companies a great place to start, and that is a vast amount of collected data from their customers, their own business and everything else that might affect them.
Joshua Rogers: But more than having the data, it's tantamount to be able to analyze the data and figure out what to do with it so that you and your company can see that 9% plus growth. You can't just have it, you have to, like, figure out what to do with it and figure out why it matters to you. So.
Joshua Rogers: No. Data warehouses are wonderful and they take that they take that nice relational data and it's suitable to SQL queries and they give us even higher specialized function analyzing data. I mentioned that earlier, but data Lakes have this ability and they have the ability to receive data that is not necessarily neatly packaged in a relational database. It can take data from all kinds of social media, Internet of Things, devices, applications and business applications as well. So like more internal ones.
Joshua Rogers: So for instance, I have this friend, he's a data engineer for one of for a major entertainment company. He told me how they put out a preview to this movie and it was not particularly well received.
Joshua Rogers: Then his team. Then he was put on a team that was able to mine a lot of data into their data lake and they found with that feedback and data they found where that disconnect was and they were able to change some things and make some updates. And so when they released a future trailer, it was much, well, much more well received in the movie, ended up doing pretty well. So I thought that was a really cool example of.
Joshua Rogers: How data lakes and data engineers and data scientists use this vast amount of data that is just out there.
Joshua Rogers: Umm to turn things around. So I like to share that example.
Joshua Rogers: So how would you swim in a data lake? Well, while I myself am a big fan of swimming in general, the swimming that I need to talk about here is how do we tread this large amount of data, analyze and visualize it? How can we make this work for my company? Well, this is where data scientists and engineers and data engineers and business analysts really shine. Data scientists are masters at being able to gather and clean up the data that is in the lake, determine what to do with it using analytics, and present it in a way that is useful for business.
Joshua Rogers: It's kind of feels a little bit like a consulting role and that they take the data and present it and make recommendations based on their findings.
Joshua Rogers: Digit data engineers manage the data itself, which can be ever changing, so they're that first line of first line of touching the data that is being brought in.
Joshua Rogers: And manage it and they also validate it, organize it and transfer it to the scientists and analysts to so that they can more effectively do their jobs. And they're also in charge of securing the data and the security policies that are being followed for those that are accessing it. And then the business analysts, they're all about finding out what are those questions that are coming up from the top of the organizations? What are the questions that matter to the business that we are using this data to solve or to make better?
Joshua Rogers: So that we can make this data mean something. This role helps focus the results and the queries that we look for.
Joshua Rogers: So to do all of this, these roles use programming skills such as Python And R and Java frameworks such as Dask and Hadoop and Nosql databases as well.
Joshua Rogers: Excuse me.
Joshua Rogers: Beyond this, they need to have strong presentation and storytelling skills.
Joshua Rogers: Visualization skills and statistical and mathematical skills. We use those frameworks and programming skills to mine and clean the data, sure, but these other skills, some of which are soft skills, are important in conveying this data and making it matter for the business at hand. It is the soft skills and presentation skills that take the hard work of all the other roles and show what is really going on and what really matters here. And so I will move on to my next slide where we talk about those soft skills and presenting.
Joshua Rogers: The data like so unfortunately I don't have a real fund water analogy for this particular one, but I find them very important anyway.
Joshua Rogers: Mining and cleaning the data means nothing if we can't make it serve us and guide our organizations decision making. That's the whole point. We do this by using mathematics and statistics, but also it's really important how you present it. Your presentation, your presentation skills do start with some visualizations, but they should be impactful and only illustrate the words that you are saying. This means that taking time to come up with a script for what? For the message you were trying to get across and keeping it concise as to not to add too much information or confusion.
Joshua Rogers: This will also build your confidence knowing exactly what you're going to say and when you're going to say it and why it matters will innately help sell the idea that you are setting forth. If you weren't confident and your data, why should they be? Additionally, there are some soft skills at play which include, but are not limited to like knowing the people that you are presenting to, reading the room in terms of mood, and being aware of how you look not just how you're dressed, but how you are being perceived by those watching you. Are you smiling or do you just think you're smiling, right.
Joshua Rogers: Umm, it's also about punctuality and really respecting the time of the people that you are presenting to, which can even mean getting there a little bit early to check your audio visual setup for presentation. Sometimes these kinds of things can be more conversational too, so especially in the smaller setting is important to have strong emotional intelligence and enterprise.
Joshua Rogers: Intelligence and interpersonal skills.
Joshua Rogers: The final point I will make here is storytelling, which I mentioned earlier. I believe the change.
Joshua Rogers: The story that you're telling is that of the company.
Joshua Rogers: This data that you're presenting and how it can change the outcome of the future and make things better or even just be a warning sign for the path that we are currently on.
Joshua Rogers: Regardless of all these, skills are equally as important as the technical skills.
Joshua Rogers: That's all I have.
Joshua Rogers: I do appreciate your time and just what questions do we have?
Joshua Rogers: As we have reached the end of my presentation.
Joshua Rogers: But I I thought I just think data lakes are really interesting big data in general. I find very interesting and just like.
Joshua Rogers: I was in a forum the other day with some people and someone was talking about moving like.
Joshua Rogers: Many like.
Joshua Rogers: Dozens of petabytes worth of data and moving it and treating it and just that that is unfathomable to me. So I thought it was cool and I thought that I would bring a little bit of that to this meeting today. Thank you for your time.
Joshua Rogers: Thank you.
Marjorie Furay: Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that was a great job, really. It was. I think there's a lot of people don't realize how much data is actually taking.
Marjorie Furay: And used. You know what I mean? It's it's so.
Marjorie Furay: Easy for them to get data from us we that we don't even notice.
Joshua Rogers: It's real scary.
Marjorie Furay: A big data is one of the biggest yet it is really scary, but it is used for a lot of good too. I mean, you know, we use data for our own marketing and different things like that so.
Marjorie Furay: You know, it does help businesses and and whatnot, but it'd be good and bad.
Marjorie Furay: But that was a great presentation. Absolutely. Does anybody have any questions for any of our speakers this evening?
Marjorie Furay: Gone through and you might have come up with something.
Marjorie Furay: OK.
Marjorie Furay: Well, I thank you for joining us.
Joshua Rogers: No, no.
Marjorie Furay: I'll be enjoyed everybody's presentations this evening.
Marjorie Furay: And have a wonderful.
Marjorie Furay: Uh date. What's today Thursday. So have a wonderful day tomorrow. Be safe and have a great weekend.
Marjorie Furay: And.
Marjorie Furay: Have a great rest of the evening. Goodnight everybody.
Joshua Rogers: Take your time. Thank you so much. Take care. Have a good night, everyone.
Kris Kimsey: Next, goodnight.
Sharleen Squires: Goodnight everyone.