![• Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the
University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.
to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate
students.
• [Matt has licensed the guide for sharing with special terms under the Creative
Commons license.]
• Reference: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Keynote - Lead the change around you
- 1. Lead the change around you John Varghese – AWS Community Hero November 13, 2020. Keynote at the AWS Community Day
- 2. • Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students. • [Matt has licensed the guide for sharing with special terms under the Creative Commons license.] • Reference: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- 5. High School
- 8. Research
- 10. Keep researching
- 11. New knowledge
- 12. Ph.D.
- 15. Keep pushing
- 16. Stand on the shoulders of Giants
- 17. “If I saw farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton
- 18. The Computer Age began. ENIAC could do 5000 additions per second.
- 19. The Space Age began. Sputnik became the first artificial satellite.
- 20. ARPANET - one small message to another computer. A giant leap for computer-kind.
- 21. Ray Tomlinson sent the first email.
- 22. I saw an email sent for the first time.
- 23. AWS
- 25. Build a foundation. Build on the foundation. Innovate
- 26. That’s the first step.
- 27. Topics • Building a secure S3 bucket • Building an IoT Application with AWS • Transit Gateway • Observability • New to AWS? • … and more
- 28. One. Two. Three.
- 29. Ask questions live on Sli.do
- 31. • #acd20-support • #acd20-hallway • #acd20-track1 • #acd20-track2 • #acd20-track3 #acd20-* • #acd20-sponsor-fugue • #acd20-sponsor-heimdall • #acd20-sponsor-traceable
- 32. When in Please use threads💬
- 33. Click on the. button Live Chat
- 34. Sponsors
- 40. Volunteers
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone. Welcome back to the fourth Annual AWS Community Day. For those of you who don't know, the AWS meetup group leaders in the Bay Area started the first AWS Community Day, back in June of 2017. We have come a long way since then. We have had almost 100 community day events around the world. I am glad to welcome you to the latest edition of what I now like to call the ACD. Usually we have it in person at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. We start with breakfast, and a keynote from an Industry leader, followed by unbiased talks from the user community. This year, of course, just like everything else, the ACD is also different. But not by much. Due to Covid we have to host the event online. But the quality of the talks, and the opportunities to network with your peers are still just the same as you have come to expect year after year.
- Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. He did this to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.
- He said, "imagine a circle that contains all human knowledge. Everything from how trees get their rings, to how Saturn got its rings."
- By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little bit of many things. You probably understand the basics of math, science, social studies, music, art, and reading. Consider that blue disc at the center of that circle to be that knowledge.
- By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more about all these subjects. That's the green circle.
- With a bachelor's degree, you gain even more well-rounded knowledge (represented here in pink) and you most likely pick up a specialty as well.
- Then with a master's degree you deepen your knowledge in that specialty.
- For a few more years, you do research. You read research papers which take you to the edge of human knowledge
- Once you're at the boundary, you focus
- You push at the boundary for a few years
- Until one day, the boundary gives way
- And that tiny little dent you've made is called a Ph.D.
- Of course, the world looks different to you now. You know everything about that world.
- But when you look at the bigger picture, the fact is you know almost everything about almost nothing.
- But you don't really need a Ph.D to keep pushing the envelope. You don't even need to try to create new knowledge. You do it all the time, just by doing your work.
- I say this because new knowledge for you is just as good as new knowledge for the world. When you do your Ph.D. you are creating new knowledge for the world. Even when you are not doing your Ph.D. you are creating new knowledge. You do it when you create a new document, or a new script, or a new application, or a new deployment, or a new security configuration. Ph.D’s stand on the shoulders of giants.
- Back in1675 Isaac Newton wrote in a letter to his fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “If I saw farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I tell you, when you reference stack-overflow and create a new routine, you are standing on the shoulders of giants. When you reference an ISO standard, and model your processes according to that, you are standing on the shoulders of giants. When you look up the Cloud Control Matrix and answer the CIAQ questions, you are standing on the shoulders of giants. When you reference the AWS Well Architected Framework, and model your cloud infrastructure to align with its principles and recommendations, you are standing on the shoulders of giants. And that is the right thing to do.
- The computer age began when ENIAC was completed in 1945. It was the first multipurpose computer. The ENIAC set speed records with an amazing 5,000 additions per second. Computers have come a long way since then—a laptop today can do billions of additions per second today. In the late 1950s, computer systems were usually room-sized mainframe systems, costing millions of dollars to purchase and operate. By the mid-1950s the industry had bifurcated from “number crunchers” into scientific and business users. Scientific customers would typically use the FORTRAN programming language; business users typically used the COBOL programming language. Just like we rent VMs in the cloud today, these enormous devices could be rented to save money. Back then, if you had access to an electronic computer you were at the very forefront of science. The new space program made ample use of this technology.
- On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union opened the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. By the late 50’s more and more people were using electronic digital computers. NASA was an early adopter of electronic computers because they performed a lot of routine calculations to conduct simulations. By the time of the Apollo program’s first flight in 1966, nearly all aspects of the mission were either controlled or supervised with computers. These included mission planning, rocket countdown and launch, guidance, navigation, control of the spacecraft itself, telemetry and tracking, touchdown on the Moon, and return to Earth.
- You may all remember that in July 1969, man first set foot on the moon. It still gives me goose bumps to just imagine that. When I visit Hawaii just six hours away by plane, when I set foot outside the airplane, the warm air greets me and it feels so wonderful. I’m so far way from the mainland, on a remote island but still here on Earth. It feels like a whole new world out there, but the moon is literally, by definition, a whole new world. Neil Armstrong placed one small step for a man. [CLICK] But something else more important happened in 1969. On October 29, 1969, the first successful message was sent over ARPANET. UCLA student Charley Kline transmitted from an SDS Sigma 7 computer at UCLA to an SDS 940 machine at the Stanford Research Institute. The first message was just the two letters “lo”. It was supposed to say "login" but the computer sending the message crashed before the letter "g" was typed.
- In just two more years, we went from the first inter-computer communication to full blown email. Ray Tomlinson is generally credited as having sent the first email across a network. He was the first to use the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine in 1971. He sent a message from one DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10.
- When I was in high school, my mom used to work at the IBM data center in San Jose. On the "take your kids to work day", she told me about this thing called email. She said, I can send a message to a colleague in Germany. Then she sent a simple hello message to him. Two minutes later, we got his reply. I was wonderstruck. Today email is like air. Millions of transactions happen every second that generate emails. When you breathe in a lungful of air, you breathe in fewer molecules of air than the number of emails generated and sent during that same breath. And email is just one of the many innovations that have changed the world.
- Fast forward two decades to 2006. SQS the first and only AWS service had been in the market for two years. In 2006 the rest of AWS was introduced. Hundreds of thousands of developers signed up. But that was just the beginning. Now there dozens of services and products on AWS and the list keeps growing. AWS has kept innovating. I remember back in 2006, we had to rack and stack servers. I had no idea what the cloud would be. Even today there are large firms that have not yet embraced the public cloud. But the fact is that it is becoming easier and easier.
- What I would like to ask you today is to look at AWS as an example and keep innovating. Keep pushing the boundary – in 2020 and beyond. AWS has made it much easier for new startups to manifest innovative ideas into reality without having to spend much on capital. It is now easier for established firms to conduct innovative experiments at a moment’s notice in the cloud, on machines that is built to their specs using cloud-formation and terraform thanks to AWS. The cloud has made it easy for everyone to do what they want faster and more securely.
- What you need in order to innovate is a strong foundation. You already have it. All these years of working and learning in whatever field you chose to do your Ph.D. in, or to hone your craft, has basically enabled you to build the foundation. Now to build on top of that foundation, I recommend you try and learn something new every time you have a chance. If you think about it intelligently before you pick the new shiny thing to learn, it might work out better. But you don’t really have to. It may not at once lead to any significant achievements or profit. But over time it will. In the worst case you will at least learn where you should not be headed. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are hot opportunities today. So are IoT and Serverless. You could try out a new domain - maybe for several years and then go back to where you started. When you come back to a field after a break of a few years, you will see that while the guiding principles remain the same, the mechanics are fundamentally different. And always more interesting. It stimulates your mind. When you are out of a field for a while, there are others who are continuing to work in that discipline, and will push the boundaries of knowledge in that line of work. When you come back you can learn all the new stuff.
- We have a great show for you today. We have two dozen talks lined up. I hope they will inspire you to consider new topics to learn from. This is an opportunity to learn new things. These talks cover a range of ideas and services.
- We have a talk about securing S3 buckets by properly configuring them. You may all have heard several times on the news that S3 buckets were exposed or hacked. These attacks can be avoided by properly configuring them. Josh Stella will dig into the complex layers of S3 security, and how other AWS services such as IAM and EC2 can create S3 vulnerabilities that you may not be seeing—and how malicious actors exploit them. If it is IoT you are interested in, Mischa Spiegelmock will show you how to set up an ARM device to run with AWS Lambda, IoT Core and Greengrass. He will cover building an OS image, Greengrass topics, messaging and monitoring. We have at least two talks that cover the new Transit Gateway that was introduced at re:Invent last year. Our own Dr. Steffen Gebert will touch upon that in his talk on “serverless networking”. Nitin Ashok and Rodrigo Balan will cover the benefits of the Transit Gateway and some of the best practices. Rick Sherman will talk about how introducing monitoring and observability earlier provides greater visibility for both developers and operations. If you are new to AWS it is easy to feel lost at sea among the options. There is so much documentation out there. How do you sift through the hype for real knowledge when it comes to cloud technologies? – What are the anti-patterns in cloud technology, and how do you avoid them? Josh Reed looks at how we could do a better job onboarding people to the cloud.
- We have three tracks so you can pick what you want to watch. If there are two talks you want to watch happening at the same time, don’t worry. You can always go back to a completed talk and watch it from the beginning on demand. And if you don’t have time today, it will soon be available on YouTube.
- During the talk if something is not clear, or if you have a question for the speaker, feel free to ask your question on Slido. The moderator will ask the question for you at the end of the talk, or if the speaker so prefers - during the talk. There will be a sli.do board for each track.
- One of the most attractive features of the AWS community day is the ability for people from different companies and varying experiences in AWS to come together and chat with each other. To network – mostly during the breaks. While we have plenty of breaks in our online version of the conference as well, there are even more opportunities to network, since everyone is always on slack. But that’s not all. Unlike the in-person conference, you can take the conversations home, and continue them later.
- Slack offers a very important asynchronous communication mechanism for this conference. We have automatically added you to a few channels. They all start with acd20. Each channel has its own purpose. If you have any questions or concerns and need support, please ask in the support channel highlighted in purple. For networking with others, the best channel would be the hallway channel. Think of this as the water cooler or the grand hall in the computer history museum. Each of the three tracks has its own channel where people can discuss the presentations in that specific track. This conference is made possible by the generosity of our sponsors. We have three channels where you can interact with our sponsors and engage with them.
- In large groups like we have on slack, a good practice is to keep conversations in threads. Just hover over the message you want to respond to and click on the thread icon which looks like this to start a thread.
- Most importantly, one of the best features of this platform is the ability to speak face to face with the speaker. Note that there will be plenty of time between talks. After every talk there is at least 15 minute and in many cases 30 minutes to talk face to face with the speaker. This is like the informal Q&A you usually have in a live conference after the presentation is over, where the audience members hang out and chill with the speaker. Just click on the “Join Face2Face” button in the presentation page.
- Like I said earlier thanks to the sponsors for making this event possible.
- I would like to thank Fugue for being our top sponsor. They have a giveaway in the digital swag page. A free forever trial account for developers.
- I would like to thank Heimdall Data, whose database proxy is available in the AWS Marketplace to accelerate Amazon RDS scale without application changes. Notable features are query caching, read/write split and connection pooling.
- I would like to thank Hypertrace by traceable. It is an open-source distributed tracing & observability platform. They will help you add distributed tracing to your microservice with Hypertrace on AWS!
- Loudswarm is the platform on which we are conducting this conference. They have gladly agreed to sponsor this event for the benefit of the AWS Community. They would love to receive your feedback on this platform at the loudswarm feedback slack channel.
- And last but not least, Intuit is a great company to work for. They have one of the largest installations of AWS and have always supported the AWS Community in the Bay Area. Special thanks to Jonathan Korn and Yogish Pai for their full support from day 1. Without them the world would be a different place. They have been shining examples of people leading the change around them.
- The AWS Community Day is an event organized by volunteers. Without their help managing an event of this scale free for attendees would be in a word impossible. Every year, our volunteers arrive as early as 7 AM to start arranging the registration desk and other facilities to make the event smooth for the attendees. This year due to COVID we had to improvise. Volunteers had to spend even more time than usual – and started engaging weeks in advance. My heartfelt thanks to all the volunteers who made this possible. You can navigate to the Volunteers page on the conference website and find their contact information. Feel free to express your gratitude to them over slack.