If you are looking for something interesting to fill your earbuds in 2020, here's a list of 50 podcasts worth a listen.

Mostly focused on Cloud Platforms, DevOps and Security there is sure to be something in there that resonates with you.

A Cloud Architecture Diagram paints a thousand words.

We’ve all heard the cliche “A picture paints a thousand words”, but there is real value in using images to explain complex technical information.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have launched a re-designed set of diagram icons, the first version release was for AWS re:invent 2018, with the official public release on the 2nd of February 2019. Hava now supports diagrams using the new icon set, so you can discover, diagram, diagnose, and document your environments straight from the source of truth with a familiar style. 

AWS security groups act as a virtual firewall for your EC2 instances to control inbound and outbound traffic.

"Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC could be assigned to a different set of security groups." -  AWS Documentation

There is no doubt that as we continue to move further into cloud architecture and infrastructure our environments are evolving daily. This rapid pace of change is failing to keep up with the expectation that your team knows "how it works" and "what it looks like". Keeping network diagrams up to date is often the last thing on most engineers mind, until the time you need them which in some cases is too late.

Manual creation and updating of diagrams are tedious and time-consuming and not that effective with continuous change. These days we have the ability to automate the process of generating and drawing a diagram, getting the information straight from the source of truth.

Sydney’s wild weather brought down an availability zone in AWS’s AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region on Sunday night.

Websites went down, customer service calls went up, twitter went nuts, engineers scrambled to find work arounds and management started asking “Why?”. 

If your website crashed, you know by now that it’s probably because your application wasn’t designed for region failure.

One outage should not be reason for you to start thinking that the cloud isn’t right for you, or that you should move service providers. But it should make you revisit your architecture. 

Failure in cloud services is inevitable regardless of your provider. Outages happen so you must design for failure. Your actual infrastructure availability is irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has an outage regardless of its size.