My First AWS Jam 2021
AWS Jam 2021 - Secured First Place
What's this all about:
I can confidently say that my knowledge of the AWS cloud is pretty
well: xD I am familiar with basic AWS services and can explain their
benefits the same way I can describe those seen in the sky. As a first
step towards cloud mastery, I decided to participate in a jam session!
Thus it’s about spending four hours of my life in the cloud.
I had never heard of the AWS Jam before. Our AWS Educate Student
Ambassador Program Incharge Cortni Grange informed us about
“AWS Jam” is going to be on 28 July 2021.
It appealed to my adventurous nature, so I promptly signed up. Since
I had been reading about AWS services for the past 1.5 years, it would be
foolish not to start using them in real-world scenarios.
I had worked with AWS during my internship.
My memory of the AWS services was still fresh because
I was preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam,
So that was a plus :xD
Are you wondering what AWS Jam is all about?
You don't have to worry, let's get it done together.
"Put your skills to the test by solving challenges that emulate real AWS use-cases across a variety of subject matters."
AWS Jams events are designed to help individuals and enterprises learn
new skills and test their knowledge of the cloud. You technically need to
have some knowledge about AWS basic services at least to do something
over there. Without it, you'll get screwed seeing other teams getting better
scores: xD. There are easy, medium, and hard challenges that you can
potentially split up across more and less advanced members, or you
could choose to work on each one as a team.
Jam is an event where a bunch of teams competes to solve the most
challenges. When you are split up into teams, you may not be with
someone you know. 😅!
Each team also gets a mentor to guide you through the jam if you are
stuck somewhere. Thanks to Praneeth Reddy Tekula for being our
facilitator during the jam.
Here’s a link to know more about AWS Jam, just have a look if you
are more curious.😋
How I spent my 4 hours of jam/How & What I did?
Well after a few minutes of my log-in to my Jam account I was assigned
to a team. Luckily I was teamed with an awesome guy named Cole
duffy. We were strangers to each other (although we did have a little
nice conversation during the challenge and made up a good team).
We can see the challenges that are available on the screen. In addition,
you don't have to pay for any of the AWS resources you use during the
Jam- just sign up and you'll be placed in some test environments to
complete the challenges.
Here's how the challenges window looks like:
How we earn points:
Each challenge had some points, such as 80, 150, or 200, depending
on the complexity. Typically, the easy challenges involve only basic
AWS service, whereas the hard challenges involve several e.g. VPC,
CloudWatch, EC2, Lambda, etc. If you are unsure of a challenge,
a button lets you sacrifice points so you can get a hint. For example,
we used a clue on a challenge that would have given us 150 points.
The clue cost us 15 points, so we were only awarded 135 points for
solving that challenge. That also cost joining the first position 😞 So, be careful.😋
We just started tackling challenges one by one. In the beginning,
we were 9th, but we quickly jumped from 8th to 1st place after
making good progress. It was dramatic. We came to the end of the jam
after 4 hours of tackling these challenges and managed to secure first
place.
Challenges that we encountered:
Creating resources as 1-2-3.
We were supposed to create an S3 bucket Create Virtual Machine from
EC2 AMIs, Creating and triggering Lambda function.
Securing your AWS Cloud resources and Configuring alarms.
we used AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail, SNS, and lambda to accomplish
this task.
Use Amazon Rekognition to track out images from a list of hundreds
of images in S3.
We were supposed to create an S3 bucket, enable it for the Static
website hosting, design 2 pages of a website with an index page and
for error403, apply Bucket Policy, Make bucket objects public.
Managing Virtual servers.
Using SNS to send Notification to your account whenever an IAM
user fails to log in. Used Lambda function to trigger Notifications.
A few I worked with: xD.
Services we Play with:
S3, EC2, Lambda, CloudWatch, SNS, CloudTrail, CodeCommit,
SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, VPC, IAM, SageMaker Notebooks
are some that I can recall.
What I learned:
It's exciting to start something new. Going through almost 4 to five
challenges during the Jam session was a lot of fun! The Fun doesn't
necessarily mean laughing for four hours straight. To me, the
experience was fun because it felt like four hours passed in a blink.
I tried to check and play with every challenge. I found some really
difficult, but that's what jams are for, to test your capacity. Therefore,
I did. Through testing my potential, I have learned some new things,
such as how to stay calm in a competitive environment, how to find
solutions to problems, and how to deal with uncertain situations.
"Basically, be fun, or else try something else."😀
Conclusion:
If you are someone with a basic understanding of cloud computing
and little experience of AWS services and want to try them all with
some real-world scenarios or if you’re an enterprise and want to test
the capacity of your employees, I would definitely recommend
participating in Jam.
Due to how useful this event has been for me personally, I may also
host few internal exercises in the future.
Challenges are always healthier to improve yourself. Don’t be afraid
to accept challenges. Despite not being very good at something,
don't get discouraged. Accept the challenge and step up.
You won't regret it, I'm sure. By the Way, Google is here to help you
along the way, so that's not a problem. :xD
Leaderboard:
Bingo, here's the leaderboard of AWS Jam 2021.🎉
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