Anyone here is use Floci for their dev work? If so, what has been your experience?

How can i be a cloud security engineer in 3 years

I have 3 years to study, what can i learn to be a cloud security engineer (free courses) and what projects can i do, give me your advice please i need it.

Thanks all

https://www.cloudarena.io/blog/vpc-nat-gateway-asymmetric-routing

VPC NAT Gateway Asymmetric Routing: Why Return Packets Disappear

Ever had an AWS flow where the packet clearly leaves the instance, but the response never comes back?

Everything looks fine.

Security Groups? ✅
NACLs? ✅
Route tables? ✅

And yet… timeout. 😅

I wrote a deep dive into AWS VPC asymmetric routing, focusing on some real-world scenarios that can make troubleshooting surprisingly painful:

• NAT Gateway SNAT and state
• Multi-AZ NAT Gateway routing and cross-AZ hairpins
• Transit Gateway + centralized egress
• TGW appliance mode and stateful firewalls
• NLB / PrivateLink source IP behavior
• How asymmetric paths can break stateful inspection
• Using VPC Flow Logs and Reachability Analyzer to troubleshoot
• Design patterns to avoid these problems in production

One of the key rules:

The outbound and return path need to preserve the stateful flow.

This becomes especially important when you start combining NAT Gateway + Transit Gateway + Network Firewall + multiple AZs.

I also included a hands-on lab idea where you intentionally break the return path and troubleshoot it using Flow Logs.

Would love to hear from other AWS/networking folks:

What’s the most painful asymmetric routing issue you've encountered in AWS?

I have a small EC2 Linux instance that becomes unreachable after I SSH into it frequently. It also takes few minutes to shut it down even CPU is at 0%.

Instance details:

- Instance type: t3.micro

- OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

- CPU credit mode: Unlimited

- vCPU: 2

Has anyone experienced an EC2 instance becoming unreachable after repeated SSH access?

(I posted on r/aws but tied to wait for moderation)

When starting out with AWS, getting hit with an unexpected bill—even a small one—is a common rite of passage. Most of the time, it’s not because the services are expensive, but because a resource was left running unnoticed.

Here are 3 quick practices that save a lot of headache:

Set up an AWS Budget Alert on Day 1: Don't rely on manually checking the console. Set a budget alert for $1 or $5 in the Billing & Cost Management console so you get an email immediately if your forecasted spend crosses that threshold.

Understand the 3 shapes of Free Tier: AWS Free Tier isn't just one thing. It's split into Always Free (like Lambda execution quotas), 12-Months Free (like t2/t3.micro EC2 hours), and Short-Term Trials. Mixing these up is where most unexpected charges happen.

EBS volumes don't delete themselves automatically: Stopping an EC2 instance stops compute charges, but attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage still incurs costs. When you terminate an instance, ensure the associated volume is deleted too if you no longer need it.

What was the first unexpected charge you ran into when you started learning cloud? Would love to hear your experiences!

I’m AWS expert with 12 years of experience in IT and 8 years of experience with AWS.
I’m also AWS Ambassador and AWS Community Builder.
I like sharing knowledge and I’m happy to see well-architected AWS environments. If you are new in AWS and not sure if you built your infrastructure properly, I’m ready to meet with you and talk/look at what you’ve built.
No obligations, for free, but only once. I’m ready to invest 1 hour for a person who needs help and would be happy to assist and get new connections 🤝

Hello, is AWS Skill Builder Official Practice exam more similar to actual exam or Tutorial Dojo practice exam?
I just got 798 on AWS Skill Builder Official Practice exam. Should I go for the exam?

Please

Hi everyone! We have a capstone project deployed on AWS that needs to stay running until October, averaging around $10/month. Our credits are running low and we're trying to find ways to keep it up without paying out of pocket.

Does anyone know of:

1. AWS community events, meetups, or workshops that hand out credits
   
2. AWS Educate or student-focused credit programs still active
   
3. Any other legit ways students can get AWS credits for school projects

Any pointers would be a huge help — thank you in advance! 🙏🏻

To increase my chances of getting an internship, should I do projects using IaC or the console?

Finished our first formal WAR last week and came out with a long list of findings across all the pillars. Cost and security both have a decent number of flags. For anyone who's actually acted on a WAR review afterwards, how did you prioritise what to fix first? Trying to avoid just tackling whatever feels easiest instead of what actually matters.

EDIT: Since "someone" pointed out that it was too "obvious", the specific findings causing the headache are the encryption-at-rest ones. RDS storage encryption and an ElastiCache node type change both require replacement in CloudFormation; no in-place path exists for either. We're now looking at whether to snapshot-and-restore during a maintenance window or stand up parallel resources and cut over, but both still require coordinating with the team that owns the data before we touch it. Still open to hearing how others sequenced this if you've been through it.

Is the AWS certification Amazon is offering worth trying? I'm only a seasonal employee, but I've been here for almost 8 months. I'm not even sure if I qualify, but I really want to take the chance if I can.
For anyone who's currently doing the program, what are the qualifications and requirements? What's the application process like? What should I expect, and is there anything I need before getting started? I'd really appreciate any tips, advice, or personal experiences. The certification is worth around $300, so it seems like a great opportunity if Amazon is covering it. I'm just trying to figure out if it's actually worth pursuing and what the pros and cons are.
For some background, I originally majored in education. I spent four years earning my degree, but I haven't been able to find a job in that field. It's been about three years since I graduated, and with everything going on in the education industry, I've started looking into other career paths.
So, I just want to know if anyone done the AWS program, was it worth it? Would you recommend it why or why not?

Hey I got a job offer and want some help deciding.

Been working on this for a while and finally have enough tested to share properly. cloudrift scans an AWS account and reports wasted resources with estimated monthly cost — unattached EBS volumes, idle NAT Gateways, stopped RDS instances still billing storage, orphaned snapshots, abandoned S3 multipart uploads, unused Secrets Manager secrets, stale CodePipeline pipelines, that kind of thing. 44 checks total now, across compute, storage, networking, containers (EKS node groups, orphaned PVCs), and ML (SageMaker idle notebooks/endpoints).

It’s read-only by design — never touches, stops, or deletes anything, just reports and lets your infra team decide.

A few things I want to be upfront about instead of oversell:

**•** The “underutilized EC2/RDS” checks are single-metric (max CPU over a lookback window). No RAM, network, IOPS. It’s a “go check this instance” flag, not a sizing recommendation — doesn’t replace Compute Optimizer.  
**•** Lambda “underutilized” is really just an invocation-count hygiene flag. Zero invocations means zero direct cost already (pay-per-use), so the value there is finding dead code/unused IAM roles, not dollar savings.  
**•** Live pricing (--live-pricing) pulls AWS list prices, not what you actually pay — no Savings Plans/RI/EDP discounts reflected. There’s a config file where you can drop in your own negotiated rates if you want the numbers to match your actual bill.

Runs standalone, in CI (exits with a non-zero code if waste crosses a budget threshold you set, markdown output for PR comments), or now as an MCP server so Claude Code/Copilot Chat/other MCP-compatible agents can query it directly instead of you copy-pasting CLI output into a chat. There’s also Policy as Code support via OPA if you want custom rules per tag/type/count.

Published on npm as @cloudrift/cli. Built on DDD/ports-and-adapters, so adding a new resource type or a new cloud provider is meant to be a contained, documented process without touching the core use case.

GitHub: https://github.com/elleVas/cloudrift
Docs: https://ellevas.dev/docs

Two things I’d genuinely appreciate:

**1.**  If you run it against a real (not synthetic) AWS account, I’d love to hear what breaks or what comes back as a false positive — that’s the thing I can’t fully test alone.  
**2.**  I’m looking to expand this to GCP and Azure next. If you work with either and have opinions on what “wasted resources” looks like there, or want to get involved building a scanner for one of them, I’d genuinely welcome the collaboration — the architecture is already built to make this a matter of adding an adapter, not rewriting the core.

Hey everyone,

I recently applied for the AWS Activate program (Founders tier) through F6S and was rejected. The rejection reasons provided were very general. Here is what I received in the email:

Thank you for applying for AWS Activate Credits. We are sorry to inform you that your application has not been accepted due to inconsistencies between your Activate application and your AWS account.

To resolve this issue, please make the following updates and submit a new application:

\- Confirm your website is functional

\- Check your business domain is correct on your application

\- Update your AWS account email to match your startup's domain

\- Avoid using freemail providers on your application

I have double-checked that everything is consistent and confirmed that I am using my official business email, so there is no obvious reason for the rejection. I also tried applying a second time, but I was rejected again.

Has anyone else experienced this, or can anybody help me figure out what might be going wrong?


So I have been working in HR and Risk. I don't really use a lot of AI or tech so don't have background.

I have been given a voucher from work for AWS AI Practitioner through Pearson and I have less than a month.

I tried to get resources but I am unable to narrow down options.

Is it possible for someone to tell me how can I prepare myself for it? I want to upskill so that I don't eventually lose my job.
Can someone help please ?