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kjhosein

10 karma · joined December 7, 2012

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kjhosein··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)
Location: Atlanta, GA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: sampling: AWS, Terraform, Python, Bash, Linux, Windows

Résumé/CV:

- LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalidhosein>

- Cloud & DevOps project experience: <https://www.khalidjhosein.net/cloud-experience/>

Email: hckrnews [at} exocloudventures.com

# Cloud & DevOps Architect & Sherpa

I have 25+ years of experience in IT encompassing architecture, operations, and automation across on-premises, datacenter and cloud environments.

Over the past 10+ years, I’ve been focused on cloud architecture and migrations, and DevOps/automation.

As a consultant with a top-tier AWS partner, I've worked with numerous Fortune 500 clients on complex, custom solutions, in customer-facing roles.

I view the work through a holistic lens that includes security, process and flow, people, repeatability and ROI. My clients love that I not only do the work, but teach them.

kjhosein··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2024)
SEEKING WORK | Remote | Atlanta, GA (ET)

# Cloud & DevOps Architect & Sherpa

I have 25+ years of experience in IT encompassing architecture, operations, and automation across on-premises, datacenter and cloud environments.

Over the past 10+ years, I’ve been focused on cloud architecture and migrations, and DevOps/automation.

As a consultant with a top-tier AWS partner, I've worked with numerous Fortune 500 clients on complex, custom solutions, in customer-facing roles.

I view the work through a holistic lens that includes people, security, process, flow, repeatability and ROI. My clients love that I not only do the work, but teach them.

# References:

- LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalidhosein>

- Cloud & DevOps project experience: <https://www.khalidjhosein.net/cloud-experience/>

- Email: hckrnews {at} exocloudventures.com

kjhosein··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2024)
SEEKING WORK | Remote | Atlanta, GA (ET)

# Cloud & DevOps Architect & Sherpa

I have 25+ years of experience in IT encompassing architecture, operations, and automation across on-premises, datacenter and cloud environments.

Over the past 10+ years, I’ve been focused on cloud architecture and migrations, and DevOps/automation.

As a consultant with a top-tier AWS partner, I've worked with numerous Fortune 500 clients on complex, custom solutions, in customer-facing roles.

My clients love that I not only do the work, but teach them.

# References:

- LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalidhosein>

- Cloud & DevOps project experience: <https://www.khalidjhosein.net/cloud-experience/>

- Email: hckrnews {at} exocloudventures.com

kjhosein··on Google is discontinuing Inbox
I was already a 'power' Gmail user when Inbox was released. I had developed muscle-memory for prob 20 keyboard shortcuts and used Gmail mouse-free, had dozens of labels, used a slew of Gmail Labs, and had given up using an external email client (used Gmail in a browser exclusively).

Yet when Inbox came along, it was incredibly useful, especially on my phone. It was my choice of app for quickly digesting email on-the-go. I stopped using the Gmail app.

But conversely on the desktop, I remained a Gmail user and never used Inbox.

I understand that the rumors are that Bundles are coming to Gmail which is good and necessary. I can only hope that it's as seamless in the mobile app as it is now in Inbox.

Long live Inbox!

kjhosein··on Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?
I can relate. I've probably tried the vast majority of the motivation 'hacks' recommended by the other posters in this thread with varying amounts of success and failure.

The #1 thing I think that anyone in this situation, or any self-improvement challenging situation, should do is to understand themselves fully - what makes you tick, what do you like, dislike, etc.? Beware: this is not a 5-minute task; we could be talking years here. Once you feel like you have a handle on it, or along the way, try out different approaches. (As much as I love the word 'hack', I really shouldn't call them that because you could very well be using it indefinitely.)

--- For me personally, one thing that I've never truly tried is a commitment contract. I've long known about services like Beeminder and StickK, but I never actually fully tried one (where you commit with real money). That changed recently when I discovered a framework for classifying people called The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin.

Folks like us mostly fall into the category of "Obligers", people who meet outer expectations, but struggle to meet expectations they impose on themselves. And one way to beat that is to create parameters (like a commitment contract) that force you into action.

I recently (~6 weeks ago) created a goal on Beeminder and after falling off the wagon tout-de-suite and having to pay up ($5 initially), I haven't derailed since (my current penalty is $10). I know, not an earth-shattering amount of money, for some reason it's keeping me honest.

It's probably too early to tell if this is going to work long-term, but even this feels longer than I've stuck with other methods. I encourage you to check out Rubin's blog posts, interviews [1, 2] and/or podcasts. There's even a book and a quiz, but I learned enough from a single interview to get started.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gretchen-rubin-the-four-tende... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2017/09/12/gretchen...

kjhosein··on Terraform Gotchas and How We Work Around Them
I've been thru the CFN v TF question. We came up with a list of benefits of TF over CFN. (Yes, I know - one-sided, but we wanted to document the decision with a bit more substance than "oh it's just better")

  * Ability to separate data (variables/parameters) from configs.
  * Easier to read (well at least pre-YAML CFN). 
  * Allows comments in the code.
  * Version control changes (diffs) are easier to read.
  * Multi-Cloud support. Works against AWS, Google Compute, Azure, Docker, more.
  * Multi-provider in general: can provision resources across multiple different cloud providers at once.
  * Can write modules in TF that can be reused in multiple different configs.
  * Tracks state via a version-controllable data file.
  * 'terraform plan' is essentially a no-op mode to see what changes would occur without actual running or making changes.
  * Actively developed.
kjhosein··on Amazon Web Services to Reboot 10% of Infrastructure Due to Xen Security Advisory
Just received this note from AWS that they've figured out how to reduce this % to less than 0.1%.

"Since then, the team has been working around the clock to find ways to minimize the impact for those requiring a reboot. We're happy to share that we'll now be able to live-update ‎the vast majority of our older hardware for this Xen Security Advisory. This means that over 99.9% of our total EC2 instances will receive the live-update and avoid a reboot. We can also now assure you that all newly launched instances will land on updated capacity, which means for the less than 0.1% of total EC2 instances that require a reboot, you can proactively re-launch these instances in order to avoid the assigned reboot timing (if you prefer)."

kjhosein··on Ask HN: How do you analyze logs?
Once Splunk was about to break the bank, we abandoned it and started looking for something in the open-source world.

We've toyed with and pretty much failed using Graylog2. Although it has been coming along steadily in features and stability, we just found that the interface-although pretty-was not intuitive to us: lots of links and multi-click scenarios to get to what you want; and creating filters and streams was difficult and prone to failure.

After watching a couple of very compelling presentations by Jordan Sissel (Logstash founder), we decided to test it out. Once I realized that creating a filter (Grok rocks!) that searched for a term and reorganized the log to my liking only took a couple hours, I was sold.

Another selling point for us was that Logstash has over 2 dozen ways to suck logs in, including the usual suspects - syslog, files, tcp, udp and *mq. You can also perform a bunch of log parsing on the client (i.e. the servers with the logs) before sending them to your central ELK server/cluster.

At the end of the day, there is nothing magical about any of these systems. You alone know your logs best and have to figure out how to read/parse/search them. Our switch to Logstash from Graylog2 was our failing, not Graylog2's.

kjhosein··on Ask HN: What is your daily reading list?
Well since the question asked for one website, I'd say Google News. It gets me quickly caught up with what's what in the world.

OTOH, for a longer read with topics I'm interested in, I hit Zite on my iPad or on my Android phone. I've got Zite configured with my favorite subjects, and now I'm fairly comfortable that I'm hitting 80-90% of the most interesting articles/goings-on without having to hit dozens of feeds or sites.