Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Azure is generally available in 36 regions around the world, with plans announced for 6 additional regions. AWS Cloud spans 18 geographic Regions and 1 Local Region around the world, with plans for four more Regions. The Asia Pacific (Osaka) Local Region is a Local Region, which is a new type of region that comprises an isolated, fault-tolerant infrastructure design located within a single datacenter. The Asia Pacific (Osaka) Local Region consists of one Availability Zone GCP has 15 regions and 4 upcoming. Google has recently announced that it will be opening a second Japanese GCP region in Osaka which will be the seventh region in Asia Pacific Zoom in and out of the map to view details as required

Application Gateway operates as an application delivery controller (ADC) as a service and offers features like: * Autoscaling is useful for workloads with variable traffic. Application Gateway's  fixed capacity mode is useful for scenarios with consistent and predictable workloads. * Layer 7 routing capabilities including cookie-based session affinity, round-robin load distribution, URL path/content-based routing, ability to host multiple websites. * Web application firewall (WAF) * Zone redundancy * Secure Sockets Layer (SSL/TLS) termination (not a best practice) and end-to-end SSL * Custom error pages * HTTP to HTTPS Redirection Application Gateway is a layer 7 load balancer , which means it works with web traffic only (HTTP, HTTPS, WebSocket, HTTP/2) unlike a Load Balancer which load balances traffic at layer 4 (TCP/UDP).  Application gateway supports hosting up to 20 websites behind a single gateway that could all be protected against web attacks with WAF. Web a

Some slides from the Accelerating your Google Cloud migration webinar presented by Peter-Mark Verwoerd, Head of Migration Architecture, Google Cloud click on images for enlarged view

This Week I Learned - * The Basic & Stamdards service plans with Linux runtime environments support Web App for Containers . The platform automatically takes care of OS patching, capacity provisioning and load balancing. Steps to deploy a containerised app - az group create -n AzureDemoRG -1 "East US" az appservice plan create -n AzureDemoPlan -g AzureDemoRG --is-linux -l "East US" --sku S1 --number-of-workers 1 az webapp create -n LaunchCampaignApp -g AzureDemoRG -p AzureDemoPlan -i toddbaginski/django-starter-app:latest *  Microsoft has made SQL Server Developer Edition a free product for non-production use. This is yet another way you can save on Azure costs for your non-production environments. *  Premium storage can achieve 10 times the IOPS, 3 times the throughput and 1/3 the latency when compared to standard disks. * Microsoft is heavily invested in SAP applications—it uses them extensively to run finance, human resources, global trade, suppl

The beautiful infographic listing a key summary of Azure Services  is enabled by data from a JSON file Looking at that JSON file I wondered if that data could be presented as a HTML table with only specific info that I wanted. I found that there is a readymade service as well as  programmatic ways to parse the JSON & transform into an HTML table. I discovered that the JSON2HTML open source JavaScript library that uses JSON templates to convert JSON objects into HTML simplifies this task With a lot of help from StackOverflow , I put together a code sample  (view page source for the code) that can read multiple arrays within JSON -  [{items: [{ }], },{ items: [{ }],},...]   ....and present the values in a tabular format. View the output - an Azure Services quick reference

Microsoft Azure Essentials started off as a series of free ebooks ( two of them published in 2016 are still relevant today ) on a variety of Azure topics. Expanding on that theme there is great new content on the Azure Essentials microsite The Career Essentials section on that site defines different roles, primary and secondary skills needed to take up the roles and learning content with a Progress Tracker to track your progress in accomplishing those skills Google Cloud Platform similarly defines Learning Tracks  that you can pick based on your technical background and area of interest. Irrespective of the certification exam, the outline defined in the Exam Guides for various Google Cloud Certifications is so good that it can also be used for assessing skills required for other public clouds too. The AWS Certifications site offers four role-based paths  - Cloud Practitioner, Architect, Developer, Operations The structured learning road-map offered by each of these popu

Key takeaways from RightScale State Of The Cloud Report (based on a survey over 1000 technical professionals on their adoption of cloud computing across a broad cross-section of organizations): Multi-cloud strategy is becoming a reality Public cloud continues to grow among enterprises Majority of the container workloads are running on AWS Kubernetes is the most preferred container orchestration tool among enterprises Cost and usage optimization are the critical goals for enterprise IT Microsoft Azure is growing at the cost of AWS Azure, IBM Cloud, and GCP are growing considerably VMware is still the king of private cloud market Databases are the number one workload running on cloud Serverless is witnessing a huge surge in adoption

If you have developed a web site and are deploying it to Azure as an App Service, you can enable authentication through popular Authentication Providers like Google , Facebook , Twitter, Microsoft Account  without doing anything much in code by just configuring some settings within the Azure portal & the Authentication Provider's website for developers.

This Week I Learned - * Reserve a static IP address if you need a fixed IP address that won't change — for example, if you need to create an A record in DNS, or need the IP address to be added to a safe list. * Use a tool such as iostat to monitor disk I/O performance for your workload. * You can scale a VM up or down by changing the VM size. Managed Disk can only be resized to a size greater than the existing disk size. * If you delete a VM, the VHDs are not deleted. To delete the VHD & avoid being charged for storage, delete the file from Blob storage. *  Cloudcraft can be used to create advanced AWS visualizations and diagrams, in both commercial and non-commercial projects. *  Unigma Public Cloud Cost Comparison Calculator  can be used to compare prices in AWS, Azure and Google clouds *  Azure DocKit is a SAAS solution that automatically generates technical documentation of your Azure environment, including complete Visio diagrams, dependencies, track chang

Besides disaster recovery of on-premises and Azure VMs,Site Recovery can help with the following types of migration : Migrate from on-premises to Azure : Migrate on-premises Hyper-V VMs, VMware VMs, and physical servers to Azure. After the migration, workloads running on the on-premises machines will be running on Azure VMs. Migrate within Azure : Migrate Azure VMs between Azure regions. Migrate AWS : Migrate AWS Windows instances to Azure IaaS VMs. It has some limitations though - ASR does not support the recovery of machines with desktop OS’es .  ( Also, some client virtual desktop flavours (eg. Windows 7) are not yet supported for licensing in Azure .) Failback to on-premises from Azure VM with managed disks is not currently supported. Replicating and recovering Azure virtual machines from one region to another region with ASR using PowerShell, CLI & REST API is not currently supported You can only replicate a classic virtual machine and recover it as a classic virt

Azure Blogs & Feeds I like & follow: Azure Product Team Cloud Solution Architect AzureCAT Guidance Azure in Education Azure Friday SAP on Azure   Keith Mayer Reddit Azure   Premier Developer work in progress...

The following table from the Azure Architecture Guide compares Azure compute services across several axes . Refer to the linked article for additional notes & updates. Criteria Virtual Machines App Service Service Fabric Azure Functions Azure Container Service Cloud Services Azure Batch Application composition Agnostic Applications Services, guest executables, containers Functions Containers Roles Scheduled jobs Density Agnostic Multiple apps per instance via app plans Multiple services per VM No dedicated instances  Multiple containers per VM One role instance per VM Multiple apps per VM Minimum number of nodes 1  1 5  No dedicated nodes  3 2 1  State management Stateless or Stateful Stateless Stateless or stateful Stateless Stateless or Stateful Stateless Stateless Web hosting Agnostic Built in Agnostic Not applicable Agnostic Built-in (IIS) No OS Windows, Linux Windows, Linux Windows, Linux Not applicable Wi

*  You can now configure Azure Backup while you're creating a virtual machine * Brand Detection is a new capability in Microsoft Video Indexer, which enables you to index brand mentions in speech and visual text, based on a large built-in brands catalog as well as with customization. Brands are disambiguated from other terms using context. * Speech recognition systems are composed of several components. The most important components are the acoustic and language models. Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech API gives developers access to state of the art speech models.  Custom Speech Service enables acoustic and language model adaptation with zero coding. * Azure Active Directory supports Oauth and other authentication protocols but not Kerberos, Hadoop supports only Kerberos for strong network authentication. To support applications/technologies that require Kerberos authentication, and in conjunction with Azure Active Directory for identity and access management (IAM), Mi

Comparison chart paraphrased from following articles: Five questions to ask as you compare VDI vs. DaaS Compare desktop virtualization options: DaaS vs. VDI ~ Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) Desktop as a Service (DaaS) What it is  Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) virtualizes a host desktop operating system onto a central server that can display to a remote device. VDI allows users to access full desktop capabilities on thinner machines, as most of the processing and computing happens on the back end. DaaS is similar to VDI, in that it also deploys an operating system from a hosted desktop to a remote device. DaaS differs from VDI because instead of hosting desktops in an on-premises data center, DaaS uses a cloud-based back end from a third-party provider. DaaS offers companies the opportunity to have VDI capabilities, while maintaining a subscription-based price. When to use When companies have a large employee base (this option is cost effective) When all

Back in my teens when I was doing a cartooning course, I was amazed to learn about the geometry involved in human anatomy Adulthood is when growth stops: this is the tallest one gets in one’s life. At that point, Height= 7.5/8 heads Leonardo da Vinci's drawing,  Vitruvian Man , is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise De architectura. Vitruvius described the human figure as being the principal source of proportion among the classical orders of architecture. Vitruvius determined that the ideal body should be eight heads high.  the length of the outspread arms is equal to the height of a man the maximum width of the shoulders is a quarter of the height of a man. the distance from the elbow to the tip of the hand is a quarter of the height of a man. the distance from the elbow to the armpit is one-eighth of the height of a man. the foot is one-seventh of the

Unmanaged disks are the traditional type of disks that have been used by VMs. With these disks, you create your own storage account and specify that storage account when you create the disk. Make sure you don't put too many disks in the same storage account, because you could exceed the scalability targets of the storage account (20,000 IOPS, for example), resulting in the VMs being throttled. If you are using premium storage accounts for unmanaged disks and your application exceeds the scalability targets of a single storage account, you might want to migrate to managed disks. If you don't want to migrate to managed disks, build your application to use multiple storage accounts. Then, partition your data across those storage accounts. For example, if you want to attach 51-TB disks across multiple VMs, spread them across two storage accounts. 35 TB is the limit for a single premium storage account. Make sure that a single premium storage account never has more than 35 TB of pr

This Week I Learned - *  Does Azure VM pricing include storage?  Just temporary storage, you have to pay for OS & Data disks * Azure Premium Storage uses Locally Redundant Storage * AzCopy is available both for Windows & Linux platforms. An alternative to AzCopy is Blobxfer *  You can expand the OS drive of a Virtual Machine in an Azure Resource Group *  The cost of the same Azure VM hardware spec can vary by as much as 33% across regions. * The XenApp/XenDesktop cost calculator for Azure will help you scope the appropriate VM size based on defining typical Citrix worker roles and bandwidth considerations. *  You can build a single and monolithic-deployment based Web Application or Service and deploy it as a container. * The PDF version of Designing Distributed Systems - Patterns and Paradigms for Scalable, Reliable Services by Brendan Burns, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, works on Azure and is cofounder of the Kubernetes project, is available as a f