I’m glad that people like my post How to Become a Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect. Google has sent me a hoodie and a mask for participating in their exam. However, my employer Indeed selects AWS as its Preferred Cloud, so these gifts won’t stop me from pursuing certificates from the cloud leader. Amazon hosts re:Invent annually to announce AWS updates. The just ended 2020 one would be the best chance to catch up with their latest progress.

This is the first time hosting the whole event online for safety. It’s both unlikely and unnecessary to watch all sessions of several thousand minutes in total. Here are my top 7 updates worth noting:

Blog — a living fossil on the internet. Nowadays, people are immersed in short videos, let alone images and tweets. For writers striving for impact, social publishing platforms like Medium would be a better choice. But in the eyes of engineers, their code syntax highlighting sucks, and provide only limited config options. That’s why I can’t give up on a stand-alone blog. However, renting a VPS or using a cloud platform is breaking a butterfly on the wheel. Github Pages is just fine, though its document is a mess.

After about two months’ preparation, I got my Professional Cloud Architect certificate this week. This experience gives me a lot on Google Cloud Platform(a.k.a. GCP) and architecture design principles. The exam is not difficult at all for a veteran engineer, and I haven’t tried GCP before in my life. I’ll explain how to pass it quickly, and how you can get the most of it rather than just a certificate.