Wednesday, 18 September 2024

Top Strengths and Themes

Top Strengths and Themes

Top Strengths and Themes

1. Achiever®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Achiever theme work hard and possess a great deal of stamina. They take immense satisfaction in being busy and productive.

2. Analytical®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Analytical theme search for reasons and causes. They have the ability to think about all of the factors that might affect a situation.

3. Harmony®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Harmony theme look for consensus. They don’t enjoy conflict; rather, they seek areas of agreement.

4. Focus®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Focus theme can take a direction, follow through, and make the corrections necessary to stay on track. They prioritize, then act.

5. Communication®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Communication theme generally find it easy to put their thoughts into words. They are good conversationalists and presenters.

6. Self-Assurance®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Self-Assurance theme feel confident in their ability to take risks and manage their own lives. They have an inner compass that gives them certainty in their decisions.

7. Consistency®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Consistency theme are keenly aware of the need to treat people the same. They crave stable routines and clear rules and procedures that everyone can follow.

8. Learner®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. The process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.

9. Responsibility®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty.

10. Arranger®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to determine how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity.

11. Significance®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Significance theme want to make a big impact. They are independent and prioritize projects based on how much influence they will have on their organization or people around them.

12. Deliberative®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate obstacles.

13. Relator®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Relator theme enjoy close relationships with others. They find deep satisfaction in working hard with friends to achieve a goal.

14. Discipline®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Discipline theme enjoy routine and structure. Their world is best described by the order they create.

15. Positivity®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Positivity theme have contagious enthusiasm. They are upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do.

16. Woo®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Woo theme love the challenge of meeting new people and winning them over. They derive satisfaction from breaking the ice and making a connection with someone.

17. Belief®

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Belief theme have certain core values that are unchanging. Out of these values emerges a defined purpose for their lives.

18. Context®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Context theme enjoy thinking about the past. They understand the present by researching its history.

19. Competition®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Competition theme measure their progress against the performance of others. They strive to win first place and revel in contests.

20. Restorative™

Executing

People exceptionally talented in the Restorative theme are adept at dealing with problems. They are good at figuring out what is wrong and resolving it.

21. Developer®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Developer theme recognize and cultivate the potential in others. They spot the signs of each small improvement and derive satisfaction from evidence of progress.

22. Command®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Command theme have presence. They can take control of a situation and make decisions.

23. Futuristic®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They energize others with their visions of the future.

24. Activator®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They want to do things now, rather than simply talk about them.

25. Maximizer®

Influencing

People exceptionally talented in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. They seek to transform something strong into something superb.

26. Empathy®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Empathy theme can sense other people’s feelings by imagining themselves in others’ lives or situations.

27. Input®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Input theme have a need to collect and archive. They may accumulate information, ideas, artifacts, or even relationships.

28. Connectedness®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Connectedness theme have faith in the links among all things. They believe there are few coincidences and that almost every event has meaning.

29. Ideation®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

30. Includer®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Includer theme accept others. They show awareness of those who feel left out and make an effort to include them.

31. Strategic®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.

32. Intellection®

Strategic Thinking

People exceptionally talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.

33. Individualization®

Relationship Building

People exceptionally talented in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique

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Tuesday, 17 September 2024

CliftonStrengths® - Top 5 for Ajay Gandhi

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CliftonStrengths® - Top 5 for Ajay Gandhi

This report presents your five most dominant CliftonStrengths® as revealed by your responses to the CliftonStrengths assessment. Use this report to understand your unique strengths, how they manifest in your life, and how you can use them to fulfill your potential.

1. Achiever®

What Is Achiever?

Achievers have a constant need for attainment. They are driven by a burning internal fire to do and accomplish more. They feel that every day starts at zero, and they must accomplish something meaningful to feel fulfilled. This drive extends to every day, including weekends and holidays. After completing a project, they rarely take time for rest, instead pushing forward to the next goal.

Why Your Achiever Is Unique

You motivate others with your passion for moving ideas from the planning stage to the action stage. You're drawn to start-up activities and push yourself to reach goals, consistently ensuring everything is in place.

2. Analytical®

What Is Analytical?

People with strong Analytical talents challenge others to prove their assumptions. They want to understand how patterns affect each other and whether the results fit the theory. Others see them as logical and rigorous, and they bring an objective examination to situations.

Why Your Analytical Is Unique

You prefer to sequence tasks by importance before moving into action. Your methodical approach allows you to break problems into smaller parts and make informed decisions based on the facts.

3. Harmony®

What Is Harmony?

People with strong Harmony talents seek peace and try to bring others together. They prefer consensus over conflict and steer others away from confrontation towards reconciliation. They focus on what people have in common and help individuals, families, and organizations work together.

Why Your Harmony Is Unique

You team up with others and expect them to accomplish what is assigned. You value brevity and concise speech, preferring simple and direct interactions with people who exhibit common sense.

4. Focus®

What Is Focus?

People with strong Focus talents prioritize and then take action. Their goals serve as a compass, helping them determine priorities and make alterations to stay on course. This powerful focus allows them to filter distractions and concentrate on what's important.

Why Your Focus Is Unique

You challenge yourself to exceed goals and persevere through long hours of work. You establish objectives and document knowledge gained over time, always striving for progress.

5. Communication®

What Is Communication?

People with strong Communication talents enjoy explaining, presenting, and writing. They bring ideas and events to life, using words to captivate their audience. Their ability to turn thoughts into stories draws people in, helping them communicate effectively and inspire action.

Why Your Communication Is Unique

You feel energized when you can engage in conversation with others. Your natural talent for storytelling and language allows you to keep people entertained and engaged.

How Your Top Strengths Blend

Achiever + Analytical: Your mind works overtime to understand how something functions, while your hands work overtime to accomplish tasks.

Achiever + Harmony: You improve productivity by managing emotional tension in teams.

Achiever + Focus: Your goal orientation directs your diligence, helping you prioritize the most important tasks.

Achiever + Communication: You deliver results while clearly communicating your message to others.

How to Apply Your Strengths

Achiever: Use a scoring system to track your achievements and keep yourself motivated by displaying metrics that matter.

Analytical: Provide logical advice based on facts and break complex situations into understandable actions.

Harmony: Help others manage conflict by identifying areas of agreement and steering conversations away from confrontation.

Focus: Prioritize tasks that align with your goals and avoid distractions to maintain efficiency.

Communication: Use your storytelling ability to captivate and engage your audience, making complex ideas simple to understand.

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Friday, 13 September 2024

Preparation on How to Start

The internet is flooded with resources, so it takes time to sort through them and find the best study techniques. For me, watching learning videos helped clarify what I was studying. Below are some key directions:

AWS Exam Roadmap

How to Study

Online Resources

  • AWS Free Tier
    Sign up for AWS Free Tier to get hands-on experience with AWS services while preparing for the exam.

Exam Tips

Courses

Free Resources

Paid Resources

Practices

Free Practice

Paid Practice

Cheatsheets

Free Cheatsheets

Tips

  • Take notes, make comparisons, and summarize: AWS services can be quite similar, so I often compare their similarities and differences to fully digest the knowledge. Searching for well-written notes and asking AI tools like ChatGPT is helpful too.
  • ESL Time Extension: If you’re a non-native English speaker, make sure to apply for the extra 30 minutes offered for ESL candidates.
  • Exam Venue: It’s better to take the exam at an examination center due to strict rules for online proctored exams. At the center, you'll only be allowed to use the provided desktop, reducing the risk of failure.
  • Promotions: Follow AWS on LinkedIn as they occasionally offer 50% off discounts for certification exams.
  • Pass and Save: If you pass the exam, AWS offers a 50% off coupon for your next certification.

Study Process

Initial Phase: Building Cloud Concepts

I didn’t push myself too hard in the beginning. I watched the online course videos during free moments, like when I was commuting on the MTR or during lunch breaks.

Second Phase: Deepening Understanding

At night, I would dive deeper into the concepts, taking notes, researching topics, and doing hands-on labs to reinforce what I learned.

Final Phase: Practice Exam Papers

I booked the exam a month in advance and spent the last month practicing exam papers. I would review them the next day using any available free time, like while commuting.

Conclusion

The AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam was quite challenging for me as a cloud rookie. It’s essential to know how to learn, as that will set the foundation for your journey. Digesting new information through comparison and summarization is a great way to ensure deep understanding. Lastly, stay relaxed, and don’t cram—come to the exam well-prepared and in good condition.

By following these structured resources, you can streamline your study process and successfully pass the AWS exam. Best of luck on your certification journey!

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Sunday, 4 August 2024

Highly Available API

 We want to tell you about a few common patterns that can be used to build highly available APIs on top of AWS infrastructure. We will highlight each of them and briefly describe the pros and cons.

Overview

You could easily ask the question, why should an API be highly available? In our world of big data and unpredictable users load, you should guarantee the responsiveness of your application. It is the minimum necessity to save the business money and not lose your clients. Such important architectural characteristics like high availability and scalability can help you with this. You have to always keep them in mind while creating new modern applications. And as you know, today, the API is one of the main parts of any system.

High Availability in your application

Let’s start off  with a brief explanation of high availability and the main challenges of achieving it.

High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system, which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period.

As you might understand, availability usually measures in “nines” like 99.999% “five nines”, that means a percentage of uptime in a given year. In other words, only 5 minutes and 15.6 seconds, your system can be in a downtime state during the whole year. So the question is — how to reduce the downtime?

The usual answer is to add additional components, which will provide the service while the main components will be broken (in downtime). The idea is to eliminate the single point of failure by adding redundancy to your application.

The typical application implementation has three main parts Client(1), API(2), and Data Store(3). Therefore, if you want to make your application highly available, you must guarantee availability for each of the 1, 2, 3 parts. Moreover, if you’re going to create an unbeatable system, you have to follow the AWS best practices for fault-tolerant systems. Say, use multiple availability zones or even regions, together with failover rules in the Route 53 service.

Typical Application Parts

AWS helps you to resolve the availability challenge for each layer. It provides all the required HA services for this.

  • Client (1) — for UI implementation, you often create a web app, which can be stored on Amazon S3 and served via Amazon CloudFront.
  • Data Store (3) — AWS provides multiple options to persist data. You can choose between relational and NoSQL databases, like common Amazon RDS, or Serverless Amazon Aurora, or DynamoDB, etc.
  • API (2) — here, AWS offers a broad set of tools for making API highly available. As you may have guessed, it will be the main focus of this article. We will describe the common deployment patterns of highly available API.

Just a few disclaimers before we start:

  1. We assume that services like AWS API Gateway or AWS ALB are fault-tolerant and highly available by themselves.
  2. We won’t show all possible API architectures, just the common ones.

Required preparations

Before making API highly available, it must support one important property — to be idempotent. By idempotent, we mean that each request must be independent, produce the same outcome, and not related to the previous one. So, when it is multiple API instances, then it doesn’t matter to which server request is redirected.

There are two standard techniques on how to achieve it:

  1. Use some long-time storage for user sessions, like shared-memory or databases. On AWS, it could be Elasticache or DynamoDB.
  2. Send all the required user information with each request using cookies or tokens.

The front door to your API

As an API developer, you always tackle a lot of challenges. And a lot of them come from the fact that usually, the API is public. Therefore, you have to protect the API, documents, monitors, etc.

AWS API Gateway comes to the rescue. It addresses all these problems and reduces the operational complexity of creating and maintaining your API. It has several important features like requests throttling, authorization, request and response transformation, import and export documentation, advanced logging and caching. We will use it in all API patterns below.

Classic EC2 way

The traditional pattern is to host your API on several EC2 instances and configure the application load balancer to redirect traffic between them. Moreover, to add scalability, you can set the Auto Scaling group to add or remove EC2 instances based on the current load.

HA API — EC2

✔️Pros

  • It is simple to setup such infrastructure
  • It supports any API framework, like Java, .NET, Python, etc.
  • Configurable — you can put on the EC2 whatever you want
  • Almost no limits, you can increase storage, memory, CPU, etc.

❌Cons

  • Infrastructure costs
  • You are responsible for instance images management

Containerized API on top of AWS ECS

AWS provides Elastic Container Service, which allows you to run your API in the Docker environment.

The pattern is straightforward — you build your API inside the Docker image. Then ECS will manage everything else, host it, run and connect to other AWS services. ECS supports auto-scaling policies and rules, as well as built-in monitoring and metrics.

HA API — Containerized

ECS has different flavors:

  1. Amazon EC2 — runs Docker on top of EC2 worker nodes, can be On-Demand or even Spot instances.
  2. Amazon Fargate — also named serverless, as it decides where to run Docker containers, you just need to specify the desired network, memory, and CPU parameters.
  3. Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) — allows you to setup a Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

✔️Pros

  • Easy to build and test API on your local Docker environment
  • Configurable — you can use any available Docker image, or create your own with all required libraries
  • Simple high availability and scalability settings
  • Cheaper infrastructure costs in comparison to classic EC2 approach
  • No server management overhead in case of AWS Fargate

❌Cons

  • It still has some limits, for example, storage for AWS Fargate
  • Infrastructure management, except AWS Fargate
  • Docker images management and version updates

Elastic Beanstalk Application

AWS Elastic Beanstalk service allows you to create an application in only a few clicks. The steps for this pattern are pretty simple

  1. Develop an API code.
  2. Open AWS Console and create a new AWS Elastic Beanstalk application.
  3. Choose desired runtime, auto-scaling, and other configuration parameters.
  4. Run your application.

Please note, that you can use classic EC2 pattern or Docker with ECS service for application deployment.

HA API —  Elastic Beanstalk Application

✔️Pros

  • Easy to learn and to start with AWS deployments
  • Supports EC2 or Docker deployments
  • Simple high availability and scalability settings
  • No server management overhead
  • No additional service costs

❌Cons

  • Slow and not flexible deployments
  • Application versions management
  • Hard to fine-tune, control the whole application stack
  • Not suitable for all API frameworks and libraries

Serverless AWS Lambda approach

Nowadays, it’s popular to build serverless applications. They eliminate the server management overhead and bring a lot of cool features by default, like high availability and scalability.

The pattern is to build your API as a Lambda functions and use API Gateway to trigger them for all incoming requests.

HA API — Serverless

✔️Pros

  • Highly available and scalable by default
  • Easy to build
  • No infrastructure management
  • Low infrastructure costs

❌Cons

  • AWS Lambda has some limits, including configuration, timeout, memory, CPU, etc.
  • Not suitable for all API frameworks and libraries
  • Hard to monitor and troubleshoot in the event of complicated deployment schema

Conclusion

We hope the patterns above will help you to make the right decision for your future API infrastructure on top of AWS. That will guarantee high availability and scalability for your application. Of course, there are a lot of other factors and decisions, such as choosing the right database, storage, etc. However, at least you will be confident with the API level.

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