Tag Archives: Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Rostislav Markov, Principal Architect in Strategic Industries

Post Syndicated from Elise Chahine original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/author-spotlight-rostislav-markov-principal-architect-in-strategic-industries/

The Author Spotlight series pulls back the curtain on some of AWS’s most prolific authors. Read on to find out more about our very own Rostislav Markov’s journey, in his own words!

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we obsess over customers, and this drives our daily operations. As an architect, I always look for innovative solutions to common problems our AWS users face. One of my favorite things about my work is the opportunity to influence our services roadmap by taking feedback from our customers. Every topic I write about comes from my work with AWS customers and our service teams.

Since joining in 2017, I have worked on projects ranging from Cloud Foundations to migration and modernization, to new development initiatives. I worked with companies in automotive, banking and insurance, chemicals, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, media and entertainment. Throughout my journey, I have observed first-hand that every company—big and small—has its own journey to the cloud, and there are always common patterns from one experience to the next. The good news is if you face a challenge, chances are somebody has already experienced the same difficulty and found a solution. This is why I love reading about common patterns in the AWS Architecture Blog.

In 2020, my AWS journey took me from Munich, Germany, to New York, US, where I currently live. I still visit my first AWS customers but, now, in their US offices, and have meanwhile worked with many other companies. After 5 years in AWS, I am still constantly learning about our services and innovative solutions for multiple industry issues. Occasionally, I write about them on the AWS Architecture Blog or present at our public conferences.

One of my favorite moments was 4 years ago at the AWS Summit Berlin. I presented together with Kathleen DeValk, former Chief Architect at Siemens, about IoT at Siemens and designing microservices for very large scale. This year, I was back on stage with Christos Dovas, Head of Cloud-Native Automation at BMW Group, talking about BMW’s journey to DevOps.

Left: Rostislav Markov and Kathleen DeValk / Right: Christos Dovas and Rostislav Markov

What’s on my mind lately

My current focus at work is on modern application principles. I work with AWS customers on elevating their application deployment standards and creating solutions for common enterprise use cases in strategic industries. I look forward to writing more blogs on those and many other topics—stay tuned!

My favorite blog posts

Queue Integration with Third-party Services on AWS

I wrote this blog post in 2021 while working with scientific research teams in healthcare and life sciences. It addresses third-party services that do not natively support AWS APIs and best practices, such as polling, that require a fault-tolerant integration layer.

As Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, said at AWS re:Invent in 2019, “Everything fails, all the time.” In this solution, the RunTask API was used to explain how retry and error handling can be added to your application.

Special thanks go to Sam Dengler, former Principal Developer Advocate with the AWS Compute Services team, who helped me find the right focus for this blog post, and from whom I still learn today.

Figure 1. On-premises and AWS queue integration for third-party services using AWS Lambda

On-premises and AWS queue integration for third-party services using AWS Lambda

Save time and effort in assessing your teams’ architectures with pattern-based architecture reviews

This post summarized my lessons working with 500 developers of a global industrial manufacturing company. Their IoT solution had to go live within 6 months, but they did not have prior AWS experience.

By using a pattern-based approach to architecting and building applications, we were able to complete the reviews within 2 weeks and make the architecture reviews fun, inspiring, and a team-based experience.

I have reused this pattern-based development approach on the majority of my projects, including the one I am currently working on: deciding on the V1 AWS design patterns with the data center exits of a large life sciences company. If you are curious and want to learn more, explore the AWS whitepaper on Cloud-Driven Enterprise Transformation on AWS.

Proposed AWS services for use by development teams

Proposed AWS services for use by development teams

Point-in-time restore for Amazon S3 buckets

One of the best things about working with AWS is receiving meaningful customer feedback all the time and having the means to act on it. This blog post is an example of customer feedback in manufacturing, media, and entertainment industries using one of my favorite AWS services—Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Customers requested a simple way to do point-in-time restoration at the bucket level. My colleague, Gareth Eagar, Senior Solutions Architect, and I worked with the service team to influence the service roadmap and published a solution with this blog post.

I love going back to basics, here with Amazon S3 versioning, and learning more about our foundational services, while having a ton of fun with my colleague along the way.

Point-in-time restore for Amazon S3 buckets

Author Spotlight: Lewis Tang, Senior Partner Solution Architect in Transformation and Modernization

Post Syndicated from Elise Chahine original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/author-spotlight-lewis-tang-senior-partner-solution-architect-in-transformation-and-modernization/

The Author Spotlight series pulls back the curtain on some of AWS’s most prolific authors. Read on to find out more about our very own Lewis Tang’s journey, in his own words!

I have been a Senior Partner Solution Architect since joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2019. What I really enjoy about this role is helping AWS partners build successful businesses with AWS services. Not only does this satisfy the customer need, but it clearly demonstrates what we at Amazon use to drive every decision: customer obsession! At AWS, we are encouraged to pick an area of expertise and dive deep into it. I am passionate about helping AWS customers and partners to plan and drive transformation through cloud adoption: transformation and modernization are my areas of expertise!

Whether it’s an AWS service partner in consulting business or an AWS ISV partner offering software services, building products and winning customer mindshare can be very challenging. To Amazonians, every day is Day 1. Learning with partners about these challenges and collaborating on solving problems are big parts of my daily Day 1.

Prior to joining AWS, I was a transformation architect for close to a decade. I travelled to work with customers throughout Australia, New Zealand, and the ASEAN region on their cloud transformation strategy, cloud governance and management, and to build their cloud foundational capabilities. Learning with customers face-to-face, diving deep into the industry problems, and helping them invent and simplify their business practices taught me how to leverage the power of cloud technology to deliver results. These experiences made me want to pursue this with AWS.

Now, I collaborate with partners at AWS, working backwards from their target business outcomes to identify and implement the solutions that will boost their success rates. I also provide guidance on adopting wide range of AWS services to develop an offering that can scale and solve specific problems in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Many folks know about the AWS 7Rs migration strategy. What you may not know is I am an enthusiastic practitioner of Replatform and Refactor/Re-architect to modernize business applications. To promote and scale the adoption of modernization best practices, I work with other subject-matter experts in the Application Modernization Technical Field Community to develop thought leadership content and publish whitepapers, blogs, and prescriptive guidance (I share my favorites a little later).

I have recently created a Back to Basics video, which explores multiple patterns of running Microsoft SQL data service on AWS and the automation that these options provide, allowing you to refocus on business innovation.

At events like AWS Global Summits or AWS re:Invent, I receive feedback on these publications and answer questions about application modernization. With partners who are present at these congresses, I am able to provide guidance on building and modernizing their applications with AWS services.

In my role with AWS, I am educated and rewarded daily: I learn a lot from my AWS partners when working with them to integrate AWS services into their intellectual property solutions and tool chains, which helps to accelerate AWS customer application modernization journey. Throughout these experiences, I became a SME of modernization. It’s educational and fulfilling to help builders, customers, and partners solve their most difficult problems.

Lewis’s favorite posts!

What to consider when migrating data warehouse to Amazon Redshift

My very first blog at AWS! Many customers are looking to modernize data warehouses by migrating to Amazon Redshift because their existing data warehouse is not built for today’s data analytics needs (like data types, volume, and velocity).

A data warehouse migration project can be challenging. This post helps you secure a successful delivery of a data warehouse migration project by discussing data warehouse migration strategies and the adoption of an optimal migration process for a presented use case and the best practices of AWS migration tools, such as AWS Schema Conversion Tool.

What to consider when migrating data warehouse to Amazon Redshift

Running hybrid Active Directory service with AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory

When migrating and modernizing application with AWS, customers often need to have applications on AWS to work with other applications located outside of AWS, such as an on-premise data center. Many of these applications use Microsoft Active Directory (AD) service for authentication, configuration, and management.

In this post, I discuss the benefits of using AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory service and the design patterns of a hybrid AD service using AWS Managed Microsoft AD.

A single AWS account and multi-region model

Considerations for modernizing Microsoft SQL database service with high availability on AWS

Microsoft SQL database is a common relational database service. AWS customers often lift-and-shift a Microsoft SQL database to AWS, and they seek guidance on how to architect high-availability database service on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in single or multiple AWS region scenario.

In this post, I shared all the options of modernizing Microsoft SQL database service with high availability on AWS, including lift-and-shift to Amazon EC2, replatform with Amazon Relational Database Service, and refactor with Amazon Aurora.

High availability across multiple Regions with Amazon Aurora global databases

Augmentation patterns to modernize a mainframe on AWS

I’ve had pleasure working with an AWS partner on building an AWS-focused mainframe modernization practice. I learned side-by-side with my partner using mainframe modernization use cases. By working with AWS Mainframe Modernization service team and SMEs in Technical Field Community, I published this post to share the design patterns of modernizing a mainframe through building augmentation solutions on AWS. Plus, my partner is building service offerings based on these patterns!

Mainframe data backup and archival augmentation

Strengthening Cloud Governance and Optimizing FinOps with LTI Infinity Ensure

My very first AWS Partner Network blog, co-authored with my AWS partner Larsen and Toubro Infotech (LTI). At AWS, customer obsession is probably everyone’s favorite leadership principle—and, perhaps, it is the best-known leadership principle among AWS customers.

As a partner solution architect, AWS partners—like LTI—are my immediate customers. Nothing excites me more than working with my partner to make a solution better and publish a blog explaining it to all AWS readers!

Strengthening Cloud Governance and Optimizing FinOps with LTI Infinity Ensure

Author Spotlight: Margaret O’Toole, WW Tech Leader in Sustainability at AWS

Post Syndicated from Elise Chahine original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/author-spotlight-margaret-otoole-ww-tech-leader-in-sustainability-at-aws/

The Author Spotlight series pulls back the curtain on some of AWS’s most prolific authors. Read on to find out more about our very own Margaret O’Toole’s journey, in her own words!

My favorite part of working at AWS is collaborating with my peers. Over the last five years, I’ve had the pleasure to work with a wide range of smart, passionate, curious people. Many of whom have been co-authors of the blogs we’ve written together.

When I joined AWS in 2017, I joined as a Cloud Support Associate in Northern Virginia. My team focused on DevOps, and while I focused on Containers mostly, I was also pushed to expand my knowledge. With that, I started to invest time with AWS OpsWorks (in large part thanks to Darko Mesaroš (Sr Developer Advocate), who many of you may know and love!). Although I was really excited about the agile, scalable nature of containers, I knew that it was important to understand how to manage configuration changes more broadly.

In 2019, I decided to leave AWS Support and become a Solutions Architect (SA) in Berlin. I’ve always been really interested in systems and how different components of a system worked together—in fact, this is exactly why I studied computer science and biology at university. My role as an SA pushed me to look at customer challenges from completely new perspectives. Now, instead of helping customers with a single component of their workload, I worked with customers on massive, multi-component workloads. I was exposed to new technology that I hadn’t worked with in my Support role, like AWS Control Tower, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS IoT. In many ways, I was learning alongside my customers, and we were bouncing ideas around together to make sure we were architecting the best possible solutions for their needs.

However, I always had a passion for sustainability. When I was in university, I was mostly interested in the intersection between natural systems and synthetic systems—I really wanted to understand how I could combine my passion for sustainability with the power of the AWS Cloud. And, as it turned out, so did many others at AWS! We spent most of 2020 working on experiments and writing narratives (the Amazonian version of a pitch), to better understand if customers wanted to work with AWS on sustainability related challenges, and if so, on what topics. My work today comes directly from the results of those initial customer interactions.

These events also marked a big change in my career! In 2020, I transitioned to a full-time sustainability role, becoming a Sustainability Solutions Architect—a novel function at the time. Today, I’m based in Copenhagen, and my focus is to help customers globally build the most energy-efficient and sustainable workloads on AWS. Every day, I find ways for customers to leverage AWS to solve challenges within their sustainability strategy.

Favorite blog posts

Perform Continuous cookbook integration testing and delivery for AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate

My very first blog at AWS was on how to do Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery with AWS OpsWorks. A group of us in AWS Support were asked to build out a lab that could be used at ChefConf, which we turned into a blog post.

Many customers are using tools like Chef Automate and Puppet to manage large sets of infrastructure, but finding cloud-native approaches to these tools was not always super obvious. My favorite part of writing this blog post was combining cloud-native ideas with traditional infrastructure management tools.

How to setup and use AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate or Puppet Enterprise in an isolated subnet

We also saw that customers wanted to understand how to leverage cloud network security in their OpsWorks environment, and so we decided to build a walkthrough on how to use OpsWorks for Chef Automate or Puppet Enterprise in an isolated subnet.

How to set up automatic failover for AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate

In addition to wanting to move fast and be secure, our customers also wanted to have reliability baked into their workloads. For many customers, their Chef Automate Server is a critical component, and they cannot afford downtime.

Sustainability content

Ask an Expert – Sustainability

In August 2021, Joe Beer, WW Technology Leader, and I worked on Architecture Monthly discussing the overlap between sustainability and technology.

Sustainability is a really broad topic, so in order to help scope conversations, we broke the topic down into three main categories: sustainability of, in, and through the Cloud:

  • Sustainability of the Cloud is AWS’s responsibility, and it covers things like our renewable energy projects, continuous work to increase the energy efficiency of our data centers, and all work that supports our goal of operating as environmentally friendly as possible.
  • Sustainability in the Cloud is the customers’ responsibility. AWS is committed to sustainable operations, but builders also need to consider sustainability as a core non-functional requirement. To make this clearer, a set of best practices have been published in the Well Architected Sustainability Pillar.
  • Sustainability through the Cloud covers all of the ways that the cloud solutions support sustainability strategies. Smart EV charging, for example, uses the AWS Cloud and AI/ML to lessen the aggregate impact to the grid that may occur because of EV charging peaks and ramp ups.

Throughout 2021, we worked with customers in almost all industries on both sustainability in and through the cloud, putting together a lineup of various sustainability talks at re:Invent 2021.

A highlight for me, personally, was seeing the AWS Well-Architected Framework Sustainability Pillar whitepaper released. After spending most of my AWS writing career on internal documentation or blog posts, leading the development of a full whitepaper was a completely new experience. I’m proud of the result and excited to continue to work on improving the content. Today, you can find the pillar in the Well-Architected tool and also explore some labs.

Architecting for sustainability: a re:Invent 2021 recap

We also did a deep dive into one of the sessions to highlight some of the key themes from the Well-Architected Pillar and the unique actions Starbucks took to reduce their footprint.