Your Personal Brand Phase at Encora Apprenticeship — Week 3

Photo by Sai Kiran Anagani on Unsplash

This post is part of a weekly assignment at Encora Apprentice and in this series, I’ll share my journey as a Software Engineer Apprentice. I hope these stories help and motivate others on their tech journey.

This week at Encora

This week at Encora, I got to learn about Linux and some AWS services. It has been very interesting to dive deeper into the world of cloud computing, so follow me along in this adventure!

Linux

This week, I started to dive into Linux topics, a great book to start approaching this is How Linux Works, since the first chapter gives you the big picture of how Linux works on a more low level while also being beginner-friendly.

First, we can start by using abstractions to understand the layers of a Linux system, which can be separated into three categories:

1. User processes: The highest level of the OS, and is basically all the code that runs outside kernel mode.
2. Linux kernel: This is the bridge between user processes and the hardware. The kernel has to take care of many tasks such as determining which processes have access to the CPU and for how long, it manages the memory and device drivers and takes care of the system calls from the processes.
3. Hardware: We are now referring to all the physical components from a computer system.

AWS ECS cluster

On my quest into AWS, I’ve been studying ECS and ECR. I found a simple architecture to deploy an ECS cluster, which is illustrated below:

ECS architecture diagram

With this architecture, we are creating a VPC, in which we have a Load Balancer to redirect the traffic to our ECS cluster, which will be able to scale up or down since it has an Auto Scaling group.

Serverless and AWS Lambda

Serverless is an execution model that lets developers focus on the code that is being written instead of the infrastructure on which will run since the Cloud provider will take care of the allocation and scaling of resources. Some characteristics of Serverless is that:

1. Automatic scaling.
2. High availability.
3. Pay as you go.

This week I also got to learn a little about AWS Lambda, which is defined as a serverless, event-driven compute service. This means that we can define a Lambda function that will be triggered when “something” happens, like an upload to an S3 bucket or a request to API Gateway.

Recap

Understanding Linux operating systems is very valuable when jumping into the Cloud environment, and it has been very interesting to learn more about the tools we use as developers on a more low level. Learning about infrastructure has been an adventure, but I can’t wait to keep learning about AWS and Linux!