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Office Hours Topics

Cloud Fundamentals & AWS​

  • Subnets (overview and how they work)
  • Route tables
  • Target groups and port connections (why they’re needed for load balancers)
  • Tags in AWS (what they are and when to use them)
  • VPS vs EC2
  • Hosting: local vs cloud (considerations for choosing)
  • Why big companies use AWS/cloud instead of private clouds
  • Why different AWS Linux flavours have different prices (Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.)
  • What is Linux and how it differs from Windows/macOS

AWS Services & Serverless​

  • AWS Lambda and serverless computing (use cases, FaaS examples)
  • Docker, Kubernetes, containerisation, and VPCs
  • Data pipelines (what they are and examples)
  • Consistency across RDS instances
  • Working with RDS-hosted databases (storing scripts locally vs on RDS)

AWS Security & Monitoring​

  • Common AWS security measures and attack prevention
  • Security measures for stored data in AWS (shared responsibility vs extra measures)
  • CloudTrail overview (what it is and what it shows)
  • Monitoring and logging in cloud environments
  • Redundancy in cloud systems (geographic, zone, load balancer redundancy)
  • How server traffic is monitored (IPs, requests, etc.)
  • ABAC vs RBAC (access control models)
  • How to troubleshoot common AWS issues

Load Balancing​

  • Load balancing algorithms (round robin, sticky round robin, IP/URL hash)
  • How are load balancing algorithms configured?
  • Is there an industry standard load balancing algorithm? How to choose between them?
  • Designing a load balancer using HTTPS instead of HTTP

Security & Cryptography​

  • How SSH works
  • Public key cryptography
  • Using .env files securely (including uploads to servers)
  • How to patch variables from .env in test files

Git & Collaboration​

  • Git branching workflows (git flow, trunk, GitHub flow)
  • How to use git branch (create, work on, merge, delete)
  • Git branching, rebasing, merging (best practices)
  • GitLab vs GitHub (key differences)
  • GitHub Actions workflows (runners, jobs, steps, triggers, events)
  • How to add workflow results as guards (e.g. tests must pass before merging)
  • Is there a method for testing GitHub Actions locally?

Python & Testing​

  • Difference between @patch and with patch
  • What a type hint is in Python
  • Why the complexity of in differs for sets vs lists in Python

Tools & Scripting​

  • Basic shell scripts (avoiding repetitive commands, connection strings)
  • How to stop/restart background processes (nohup)
  • Difference between scp and sftp
  • How to get around JavaScript rendering when web scraping