John Eaton-Griffin's Cloudy with a chance of Dyslexia.
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John Eaton-Griffin's Cloudy with a chance of Dyslexia.
From Pizza Boxes to Cloud Architecture: Faye Ellis Shares Her Tech Evolution
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What happens when we reimagine IT infrastructure from the ground up? Faye Ellis takes us on a fascinating journey through two decades of technological transformation - from physical "pizza box" servers that took months to deploy to cloud resources available in minutes.
If you've ever wondered how traditional industries like banking embraced cloud computing, Faye offers rare insider perspective from her years supporting financial institutions. She shares how even the most risk-averse organizations have gone "all in" with cloud, and how applications once requiring specialized hardware now thrive in cloud environments.
As Principal Training Architect at Pluralsight and former A Cloud Guru instructor, Faye provides invaluable insights on chaos engineering - the counterintuitive practice of deliberately breaking systems to build more resilient architectures. This shift from monolithic applications to loosely-coupled microservices represents a fundamental rethinking of how we design technology.
The conversation naturally evolves to artificial intelligence, where Faye contemplates profound questions about human identity as machines increasingly master language. Rather than fearing displacement, she envisions AI creating space for humans to focus on our uniquely valuable qualities - empathy, leadership, and communication skills that no algorithm can replicate.
For those considering a cloud career, Faye offers encouraging and practical advice. The technology isn't inherently complicated but does require focused, incremental learning. She recommends "Cloud Career Journeys," featuring stories of 16 individuals who successfully transitioned into cloud careers from diverse backgrounds.
Join us for this thought-provoking exploration of technology's past, present and future through the eyes of someone who's both witnessed and helped shape its evolution. Whether you're a seasoned tech professional or simply curious about how cloud is transforming our world, this episode offers valuable perspective on where we've been and where we're heading.
Introduction to Faye Ellis
Speaker 1Cloudy with a Chance of Dyslexia podcast. Today we have the privilege of Faye Ellis, and she's a principal training architect, but also been working with her at CloudGuru in the past, and also she's now majorly known at Pluralsight as well. Faye's got huge experience in AWS and she's got a great commitment to the learning community and supporting them through their journey. She's made, in my opinion, an indelible mark on the cloud industry and it's really exciting to have her here today. She's going to bring a huge amount of value, and I'm going to start by asking her a question, which is could you share a little bit about your journey in terms of how you got to where you are today, in terms of the journey towards to where you are today, you know, in terms of the journey towards being a cloud guru really? And you know, are there any pivotal moments that made that change for you or anything? So anything you can bring to that would be great.
Speaker 2Oh, thank you, it's lovely to be here. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. Oh, thank you, it's lovely to be here. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. Yeah, so I started out in many, many years ago.
Speaker 2I've been working in IT quite a long time. I think I've been working in IT around about 20 years. So I started out, I guess, doing like a systems engineering role and I was working for like a hardware company, sun Microsystems, and they, of course they were bought by Oracle but they invented Java, right, and they invented Solaris as well, which was like a really solid Unix operating system. So I learned a lot about Unix while I was there. And then after that role, I kind of moved into like a systems administration role, so kind of supporting IT systems, and I worked in a few different banks. You know, I worked in stock exchanges and financial services companies and over the years I kind of moved away from that kind of sysops sort of support administration role and I moved more into like architecture. And actually one of my bosses at the time I was doing in one of my roles I was doing a migration data center migration project and he said to me oh no, you should be an architect and at the time I didn't really know what that meant, but gradually I did learn what that meant. That meant and that's the role that I did move into and it was kind of a perfect role for me and I absolutely loved it and I did that, what that meant and that's the role that I did move into and it was kind of a perfect role for me and I absolutely loved it and I did that for 10 years and I was I actually became a contractor to working loads and loads of different companies, loads of different types of projects, mainly financial services, but always like kind of as an architect. So that person who understands the business requirements and all the stakeholder requirements of a new project that we're putting out and really determines what the infrastructure is going to look like in order to support that project. So you know, working with the security people, the networks people, the storage people, the application owners and product owners and the business people who really want to get that business value out of their IT investment. So working with them to understand all their requirements and wrapping all of that up into a technical design that then somebody can deliver right, so somebody can actually build this system. Based on the information that I've provided.
From Systems Engineer to Cloud Architect
Speaker 2I did that for probably about 10 years and I soon realized that the world was changing right. We weren't going to be putting pizza boxes in the data center forever, and that was phasing out, because there was this brand new thing called cloud. So I had a few friends who were getting involved in cloud, just learning about it a little bit, spinning up EC2 instances and creating web servers in the cloud, and telling me how easy it is. So I thought, well, why don't I? I'll give this a go. So I got myself an AWS account. I started learning. I decided to do the certification the Solutions Architects Associate Certification because throughout my career, certification had been really, really important to me and it had actually been something that helped me to validate my skills, to help me build confidence and to help showcase my abilities. So I decided to do this Solution Architect Associate course and, yeah, I used the A Cloud Guru course to do it.
Speaker 2It took me quite a long time to kind of get there with it, because I wasn't actually working with cloud in my day-to-day job at that point. So all of this I had to do in my own time and anyway, I passed the exam the first time and it was a very challenging exam. But off the back of that, I actually managed to get a new job and I got a new role and that was my first ever role as a cloud architect. So I got a job at Experian the, the company that does the credit checking for organizations and individuals and yeah, I got a job with them and they were putting one of their massive flagship analytics products into the cloud and creating a kind of a software as a service offering. So I got a role helping design that infrastructure for them. So, yeah, that was kind of a pivotal moment for me because that was my very first pure cloud role. And, yeah, I got a good pay rise and I got a great job out of it.
Speaker 2And, and after that, I was actually contacted by a cloud guru. I think it was a little bit a little while after that, maybe about a year after that, they asked me to do a customer testimonial Because so back in the day, you know know, cloud guru was this is probably like six years ago so cloud guru was like a bit of a startup and a small company and customer testimonials were very important and word of mouth, of course, was extremely important. So they asked me to do this kind of customer testimonial and say what impact uh had the cloud, had the cloud had on my career, had you know, doing their course, passing the exam and everything. So I did that customer testimonial and, um, it was like a video, uh, like face-to-face video, actually here in my lounge it was. The camera crew came, they sat here and uh and they did the interview with me and afterwards ryan, the founder of the company, one of the founders, he saw the video and he said, actually she'd be a really good instructor. Do you think that she would consider, you know, would she talk to us about maybe doing a role as an instructor? And yeah, they basically got in touch with me, asked me, you know, in a roundabout way, way they were like feeling out how are you getting on in your job? Do you like it? What's, what's going on for you? Is your contract coming to an end? Would you consider? Um and uh? Yeah, I ended up having that conversation and um, uh, I came and met ryan again like I'd met him before, but I came and met him again and we had this whole conversation around would I join uh and what it may, what it means to kind of move into that kind of a role.
Speaker 2And it was a big transition for me because I'd been, of course, I've been contracting right, so I've been moving around from project to project, you know, moving from one exciting company to another, and could I really exciting company to another and could I really commit to becoming like a full-time employee again and like commit to one, one company and doing one single role? And I decided to take the leap. I could see that that, you know, cloud isn't going away. We all need to learn. We all need to learn new stuff. Their product is brilliant and they were changing people's lives. So Ryan really sold me the dream and yeah, so the rest is history, really. And actually this month I would have been at the company for six years.
Speaker 1I can't believe it. So one of the things you mentioned was pizza boxes, and that I haven't heard that for a little while. Actually, you might be worth sort of trying to explain to the audience in terms of when you start in tech, you know you waste a lot of time on dealing with things that actually don't really help you, because you know you're actually not doing your job, and this is one of the powers of cloud, right? It's the fact you don't need to worry about that stuff anymore. You don't have to worry about that stuff anymore. You don't have to worry about the pizza boxes. You don't have to worry about the tin element, do you? And it's really interesting you brought that up because that's no longer in your psyche. You don't think about it anymore, do you? Whereas did you have to think about it in the past? No, not at all. I need to find more pizza boxes for my architecture.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly, and it used to take ages. It used to take an unbelievably long time for us to get another server. You know, from the moment when you say, oh, actually we need more capacity, to actually having that capacity usable and available to you. It could be, you know, even in the most efficient company it could be three months, because often engineering teams went through this whole process of, like, oh, gathering the requirements, putting together all of the like, the documentation and all of the design of it, getting it approved. Then somebody's got to pay some money, right, somebody's got to like, actually buy this thing from Dell or HP or IBM or whoever you're buying your kit from. Then you've got to wait and it's going to get delivered. Then you've got to wait and it's going to get delivered. Then you've got to find space in the data center.
Speaker 2So where's it going to go? What sort of power does it need? What does it need to be hooked up to? So you've got to say, oh well, it's got to go on this network. So that means we need to cable it and it's got to go on this, it needs to attach this storage. So we need to make sure.
Speaker 2Oh, okay, we need to put the fiber cables in, get it attached to the storage, somebody needs to configure the storage, somebody needs to configure all the networking ports, then some poor guy's got to install the operating system, somebody's got to put the software on and give you user accounts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. It all goes on forever and ever and ever. And you know, even in the most organized company it's taking ages. It's a source of frustration and you know, if you compare it to like, how long does it take to build a database now in the cloud, you can do it in just a few minutes, you don't? It's not a month. Months and months and months of waiting time. Uh, and you can do so much more in so in so much, so little amount of time the the the thing is in terms of.
Cloud's Impact on Traditional Infrastructure
Speaker 1Throughout your career, you've seen this transition and and for mention that pizza box moment you know to to where you are today and and and seeing cloud computing technologies and applications evolve right to where they are today, especially with ai and all those different things. But I know you did. You did a lot, a lot in finance and banking, which are very regulated industries. So have you seen that change and have you seen that? You know evolution? I mean, obviously, fintech's a big thing now, but if you think about cloud technologies, they were. You know, even these finance and banking that are very rigorous in their in that space. Have you seen that change yourself, faye?
Speaker 2you know um, well, I've definitely seen, seen the finance industry embrace cloud. You know there's even banks that were born in the cloud, things like banks like Starling, for instance, that they don't have any, they never had any data center, they were just purely born in the cloud. But you know even these old school banks like HSBC if you think about Credit Suisse, you know, you name it they're all kind of going all in with cloud and I think you know, in the banking industry, although they're very risk averse and they don't want to be necessarily the ones doing the experimentation in certain areas, at the same time it's very competitive, and especially in investment banking. So if you've got an idea, having the ability to get that idea to market and actually execute on that idea before your competition is is really going to give you that competitive advantage and that is all made available to you with cloud, with the kind of infinite capacity you know, infinite amount of services. So, yeah, I think that, and even you know, running low latency applications in the cloud is now actually possible Because you know cloud providers have these like high speed network links and, yeah, you are seeing even more you know low latency and latency sensitive applications being run in the cloud as well, which when I worked in investment banking, that would have been unheard of, you know, that wouldn't.
Speaker 2We wouldn't even probably put them on virtual machines. It would have to be a physical server with really good networking, you know, in a specific, even co-located near an exchange or something like that, with very specific hardware requirements. But all of that is possible in the cloud now. So that's, I mean, that just shows you how far it's come really in becoming, you know, a really mature and enterprise product that can, you know, stand the test of performance and reliability and everything you know that you expect for mission-critical systems.
Speaker 1The next thing I I guess is with all the, all the, the new rich fabric that we're using to weave these new sort of cloud modern engineering. I suppose it's changing as we speak, isn't it? With, with ai and the, the evolution of ai, how that sort is going to start, I expect, in the next few years, really weave into what we do every day. Um, if you think about what you did about, this is this is even before, I think, the launch of AI. But I know you did this project about embracing the chaos, right, and, and it was really like, how does that work? And how does that new chaos theory in terms of how engineers should think, how does that um sort of how do you get impact from that? And again, this is like I know you worked on projects around that and you were, you were, you were, you definitely talked around how that works. But how does that work now and how does that work with what's going on? I mean, it's probably a big question, but it's more of a thought process on that today.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's an interesting question.
Banking Industry's Cloud Adoption
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, back in the day we used to do things like disaster recovery testing. So you know, pulling the plug on your production server and making sure that everything fails over and you know, nothing gets broken in the process of disaster recovery. And you know, when I was working in the banking industry, that was something that we tested. We used to test it quite frequently, but it was a manual process. You know, when I was working in the banking industry, that was something that we tested. We used to test it quite frequently, but it was a manual process, you know, and very controlled. But chaos engineering, of course, takes it to another level, and if you haven't heard of chaos engineering, it's all about breaking things on purpose to find the areas of weakness in your architecture and in your setup and really to give you that opportunity to, you know, identify those areas of weakness and fix them so that you can understand. You know how resilient is my system and it was something that was pioneered by Netflix, I think, and they had a system called the Chaos Monkey that used to be let loose onto the system and it could just go and destroy anything it wanted to. But it also challenges your mindset in terms of how you design systems. So if you know that this is going to be applied to your system right, somebody is going to go in there and start tinkering and try to destroy things, then it makes you build things in a very different way. Uh, so you're thinking more about, you know, instead of monolithic applications where, um, or kind of stovepipe applications, where there's a lot of dependencies between one thing and the next, and if you, if you switch something off, or if you lose it or it gets rebooted or restarted, then it's going to have this whole cascading knock-on effect and it's going to kill your whole environment. Instead, you kind of start thinking about okay, well, what happens if this piece of the puzzle suddenly disappears? You know, are we able to spin up another one? And if we do that, is that going to have a knock-on effect? Is that going to have have an impact on something else? Or are we building systems that are resilient, that are going to be kind of resilient to something disappearing suddenly?
Speaker 2And I think, yeah, that's cloud has kind of accelerated that as well, this whole idea of, you know, availability zones and different regions, and you know how do we, how we utilize those and how we architect for, you know, resilience and to be able to cope when something fails over, for instance, if a whole rack of servers goes down. You know how is that going to. We don't want that to impact our service. Although it will cause things to restart, we want to basically keep that service up and running. So, yeah, chaos engineering is, uh, is one way that you can, that you can start to approach that and start testing yourself and uh, yeah, really getting into that mindset of um, I really like what you said there, actually, because it reminds me of the terminology that was used in some of the training I did, which is about loose coupling and making sure you build the.
Speaker 1You know the connections between things, so it's OK if they break. Yeah, that's OK, because you don't want everything to go down. So lots of little small microservices that you build and then you attach, you know and you build out the. You know the api connections where you need them as well, where you want to use other services. So, yeah, it's really exciting the way things have been re-engineered today versus the way they were. You know the monolithic ways of building things with. You know I. I tried to build into the podcast a little bit about things like waterfall management, the difference between waterfall and agile, because agile is so much better, but you still need some sort of way of checking people are doing things in the right way, and you need some way because you can go off and be too agile, can't you people?
Speaker 1people don't do the break test right. They don't do the chaos engineering. So it's it's. It's exciting. So, in terms of, I noticed you're doing a lot around ai, right, so I couldn't get through your session without asking you about that recently. So I'm really excited about AI, right.
Speaker 1I've been using chat GPT since it was launched and mucking around with it, but I think it's a huge impact on society as well. I think that it opens the door specifically for what I raised on the podcast was talking about things like dyslexia. It actually removes the barrier by people that are are dyslexic. Now they don't need to have to worry about it anymore because by just using AI in the right way and then implementing into a working environment, they no longer have a challenge. They don't have to worry about summarizing documents or, you know, or taking ages to write an email. You can do it in minutes and seconds once you learn how to use it. So it's exciting. You're doing a lot about that in the community and I think that's really really important. So, yeah, talk about what you're doing there. Yeah, it'd be really interesting to know and why you're excited and why you think it's going to change things.
Chaos Engineering and Resilient Systems
Speaker 2So yeah, I think ai is going to change a lot of things for all of us, and it's already creeping into um some of the some of the tools that we're using today. Yeah, at Pluralsight, we're experimenting loads with it to kind of use it to help us understand our vast catalogue of content, to help us kind of surface the right content to you at the right time. Instead of telling you to watch a 22-hour course to learn how to configure API Gateway, well, why not identify the exact lesson and the exact piece of video, the exact 30 seconds of video, that you need in order to do that piece of your job, so that you can then move on to the next thing? Yeah, so we're experimenting with it in loads of different ways and we really see it as a time for experimentation to find the kind of tools that are going to work for you. Yeah, I actually gave a talk about AI.
Speaker 1Sorry, my dog is just snuggling under my feet at the moment. I'll just say to anybody who's listening because this may not be video listening, this might be, but Faye has a very famous dog and he he's been on um all covers of magazines and everything you know. You know he'll be in Forbes in a few years, right right, and he's a sausage dog, lovely little sausage dog yeah, yeah, he's a naughty sausage and what's his name? He's very cute um, and he's nice, his name is Ralphie, that's it.
Speaker 2His name's Ralphie. His name's Ralphie, yeah, and he appears in some of the courses. Actually, he's got his own bank as well, so we developed a bank a while ago. This is for one of my courses. So, yeah, ralphie Bank yeah, so he's a good contributor to my content. Yeah, so I gave a talk actually a few weeks ago at one of the universities in the UK and this talk was for PhD students and researchers and everybody was part of the business management faculty and yeah, so they were all very concerned about AI and one of the things that one of the kind of ideas that I came up against, which I hadn't heard about before, was this whole idea of AI challenging human identity.
AI's Impact on Work and Identity
Speaker 2Like who are we anymore If we're not the ones you know, if we're not the only ones who understand language, interpreting language and interpreting the world through language, and if machines are going to take over some of these elements of our jobs that some of us probably hold quite dear and that are kind of intrinsic and part of our identity, where does that leave us? And it kind of got me thinking about the future of work and the future of AI, and what is our place in the world if machines are going to be kind of land grabbing, a lot of this, like these activities around language. But, you know, I think that it's going to give us, like different ways of finding meaning in our work and different ways of finding fulfillment, and there's a lot of things that, like, machines can't do right, so they can't interpret body language, they've got no empathy, they haven't got feelings or like a physical body, so they haven't got senses. And I think that kind of softer skills are going to become very, very important for all of us over the coming years. So things like, you know, communication and understanding, leadership, empathy for others, negotiation skills, that kind of thing is all going to be majorly important, because a machine isn't going to do that for us, and nor do we want machines negotiating on our behalf, do we?
Speaker 2But yeah, so I think there's a lot. I think it will majorly enhance our life in lots of ways in terms of getting rid of some of the boring tasks that I don't want to do anymore. You know, helping me with research we've all got a research assistant at our fingertips now and yeah, so I think taking away some of the heavy lifting from our day-to-day lives, but also giving us that opportunity to move into, you know, higher value activities and using our brains for different things that you know, the things the machines can't do, and I think it's it's going to give us all a lot of kind of spiritual enlightenment as we uh, yeah, as we embrace uh different realms that we've not really uh had the opportunity to think about.
Speaker 1I think it lowers the bar as well for um a lot of other people, which is, which is really good right now, the the thing. I think you're right there's always going to be the dark and light of any new machine, right? I mean, even if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, you think about the Luddites, you know we always had those that wanted to break the machine, and I don't think that ever will change. You're always going to have the dark and the light and you're always going to have bad and good outcomes of these. But if you think back to even back to the 1920s, 1930s in America, right, in America, 50% of the population in the 1920s were farmers, right, and so now it's about 2% of the population, right.
Speaker 1So if you think about that transition, it's just transitions of roles into different roles. There's going to be so many new types of roles that people will have in the future because of AI, you know. So there's some things that you consider in terms of this transitional move of people. You know, nobody knew what in the 1920s what a database engineer was or a training architect. You know. They wouldn't even have dreamed what that was, right, you wouldn't even imagine it. Yeah, what is this person that does this right? Or you know, what you do today wouldn't have existed right. So you know the exciting thing I think about AI it's going to create a whole load of new roles, and you're right that the skills that you need are different. The skills are very different, and so we need to make sure that we help build those skills. You know especially us. You know people that are in tech today. We need to really help people build those skills and so what your job becomes even more important in companies like Pluralsight and A Cloud Guru and all these companies that are evolving into online learning, our guru and all these companies that are evolving into online learning.
Speaker 1I just think it's so critical to have those available. Very, very. You know I'm not saying but affordable, affordable resources, yeah, and I mean it's really important to me. I love using these tools, right, and I use them every day and I have a mindset of one percent every day that I've got from. You know these are all stolen ideas. I've not. None of them are mine. They're all from people that have shared these ideas. James clear wrote the book you know around. You know that that mindset, that shift in terms of atomic habits, right. So yeah, all these things that we can do because of AI, it's just really exciting. So what do you see, though, as the future of cloud technologies, looking forward and emerging trends? Have you got any view on that in terms of where cloud computing is going? What are you most excited about? Is something going wow, I love this. Or is it AI right now? Is that the thing?
Speaker 2about. Is it something you're going wow, I love this. Or is it AI right now? Is that the thing? Yeah, I am really excited about AI and I'm really excited about data as well, and, of course, data is the fuel for AI, and with good data going in, you're going to get good results. With bad data going in, you're not going to get such good results.
Speaker 2So, yeah, for me, I think all you know, anything that helps us kind of manage our data, clean our data, make sure our data is correct, those are activities that kind of spark interest for me, because I really do think that AI has got an AI and machine learning has the power to solve so many problems for us, including especially healthcare. Yeah, healthcare problems. So if you think about like diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, dementia, those kind of diseases which have a lot of lifestyle factors, the data is probably there to help us to solve some of those problems, but without computers, we're not going to get to what those answers could be. So I do feel like AI has got the potential, especially in things like genomics, so, and like pharmaceuticals being tailored to you, know your genetic profile, to you know what works on you doesn't necessarily work on me. So all of that I find really, really, really fascinating. So, yeah, that's, that's something that I'm looking forward to, but maybe that's the stage of life I'm at now Getting towards middle age, thinking about my own mortality.
Speaker 1They can monitor your heart and make sure you know. See how long you work out roughly. You'll probably have to have something you'll be able to strap on soon and say you're going to live to about 92, right, you can do these things. And if you do these things, you might be able to live for five years.
Speaker 2I for five years. I don't think I'll be far off that value.
Speaker 1Yeah, I really hope so, because I want to live to 100. Yeah, that's my goal. Look, um, in terms of aspiring cloud professionals. You know there's obviously. You know what. What I want to try and present here is look, some leadership. You know.
Data as Fuel for AI Innovation
Speaker 1I believe everybody's a leader in terms of their approach to the world. And you can give, you can. You can be a positive person. You can be a negative person. You've got a choice. Yeah, that's always a choice. So, if you want to be a leader, it's about contributing in a positive way, in a positive manner in terms of how you can give people foundations they can work on Right and if they, if you can give them layers of things they can do. And that's why it's really important that you know people like you are really elevated because you're doing so much good work and you are inspiring other people. And it's just, what advice do you give to somebody who's just, oh, I could never get into a cloud? Or you know how do I start on this journey? And you know, what advice would you give somebody that may be in the darker side, a little bit like, oh, there's no way I could ever do that. You know, what would you suggest?
Speaker 2yeah, I would say there's space for everyone and there's always a shortage of cloud expertise and cloud engineers. It isn't difficult. I think some of the elements of working in a tech career are difficult, so things like, of course, anything to do with people can be difficult and challenging. But the technology is not complicated, but it does take focus and it does require you to kind of take that first step, and I think you know it's a cliche, but if you want to learn how to swim, you've got to jump in the water. So, and like you said, just doing a little bit each day, you know, don't don't feel overwhelmed or like you have to understand everything immediately, because none of us understand everything. Uh, we, there isn't time in the human lifetime to understand every different technology in a in a deep way. Um, so, try just focus on learning something. Give yourself some goals. Focus on learning one thing this month and something else next month. If you are somebody who is starting out in your career or just transitioning, or maybe you've had a career break.
Advice for Aspiring Cloud Professionals
Speaker 2There's actually a really good book that came out last week. It's called Cloud Career Journeys, and so this is a self-published book by my friend, prasad Prasad Rao and Ashish Prajapati, and I'll give you a link to this actually. So it's available on Amazon in the UK and the US and India as well. And what these guys did was they interviewed 16 people about their cloud career journey, and that's the name of the book cloud career journeys um. So yeah they. They interviewed 16 people about how they got wet, to where they were in the cloud.
Speaker 2Um, and it's people. One guy was an uber driver, um one and then other. We've got ryan queenberg is in there as well. So of course, the um, the uh co-founder of a cloud guru. He tells his story, which is like a really remarkable story about how he got into cloud. He was not, he didn't come through the traditional route, he was originally an immigration lawyer and yeah, so that's an interesting story and yeah so these are all first-hand stories from people who have come from all different walks of life and become highly successful individuals in the cloud space. They give some advice as well, and it's very readable. It's not like a textbook, it's just very nice, very easy to read and dip in and out of. So I would say, if you have a friend who's starting out in cloud, or you would like to, or you've got a cousin, sister or relative, yeah, this is a great book to read.
Speaker 1If you drop me a link afterwards I'll put it in and we'll. We'll definitely promote that because I think anything that's going to help people or, you know, if they're young career people that maybe they've fallen into the wrong direction in their career and it's not really suiting them. You know there is, there is plenty to learn in the the cloud space and there's plenty of open opportunities, especially for young professionals, to move into that space. So you know, a lot of this is about building confidence, supporting people. You know, if they do have, you know, challenges like dyslexia or any neurodiversity as well. So it's more about, look, it doesn't matter where you come from, where you are, you can still learn, there is a capacity to learn. So where you are, you can still learn, there is a capacity to learn. So you know that's the whole mindset of be that person that has a growth mindset, anyway. So look, faye, thank you so much for coming on Cloudy with a Chance of Dyslexia, if there's in terms of any time, you want to come on again. I really really do appreciate you coming on, really excited, really enjoyed it and you know it's great to hear your story and all that you did and love what you do every day as well, so keep doing it.
Speaker 1So, if anybody also wants to have, you know, look at A Cloud Guru, or look at pluralsight as well please do go and have a look, because they've got some great capabilities there for you to learn any sort of technology, um, particularly cloud. It doesn't have to just be specifically what um faye focuses on. You know, they've got a great capability overall in terms of any cloud platform you can go on and learn about. So, um, it's really exciting. Whether you want to learn azure or you want to learn aws or you want to work with google, you can go onto a cloud gurus platform and you can learn. So, um, and it's and it's way, in my opinion, the ability for hands-on labs. It just really puts it up there outside of any other platform on the market. In my opinion, in my humble opinion, um, but, uh, please do um, give it a go, because I think there's a 14-day money back guarantee or something, or there's a 14-day trial still. I think that's still available.
Speaker 2But, you know, have a look on yeah, there's a seven day trial and I think if you buy this book, you get one month free with pluralsight as well, and you get a lot of things as well. All right, lots of freebies good, all right faith.
Speaker 1Thank you so much and I really do appreciate your time. To come on to um, my little podcast, I really hope some people can learn from this and you know my plan is to do it for 10 years and keep keep trying to get more people on. So that is the plan. So it's not something I don't expect to have millions of users immediately. I have very much a tortoise methodology rather than a. You know, I don't expect it to spike immediately, so I'm hoping to build it over time.
Speaker 1So thank you so much for being my third podcaster. So, and I'm going to create some, I'm going to create some t-shirts as well, so my wife will do those. They'll all be manually made, you know, and I'll be giving them out to my guests, so so, to thank them and uh, yeah, so so watch out for that. I'll probably need to reach out for your home address to send them, but, um, yeah, we'll be doing those soon with a little um. We've got a little logo, the little logo up in the corner. I don't know where you've seen it, but yeah, yeah, I'll let you know when they're ready as well.
Speaker 1So I'll probably ask you for the size that you might want as well, because we'll probably do them all individually. But yeah, so I'll let you know.
Speaker 2Yeah, oh, I love it. Oh, amazing. Well, thank you so much for having me on, congratulations on launching the pod and I wish you all the success with it. I, yeah.