This Week I Learned - Week #288

This Week I Learned -

Azure Migrate helps you visualize dependencies of on-premises VMs and create move groups based on the dependencies. 

* The whitepaper Azure Virtual Datacenter: Lift and Shift Guide by the Azure Customer Advisory Team (AzureCAT) has useful guidance for identifying and planning the migration of applications and
servers to the Microsoft Cloud. The Azure VDC home page has more learning resources

* The Azure "Cloud Shell" is an embedded terminal in your browser. You can use vim, emacs and even a slimmed down VS Code experience in the Azure Cloud Shell. Your browser sends commands to an actual Unbuntu terminal instance in the background - InfoQ

A lightning strike exposed a glaring hole in Azure cloud’s availability strategy & caused an outage affecting close to 40 Azure services hosted in the South Central US cloud availability region (which consists of multiple data centers), a few Azure services in other regions, as well as Office 365 services, such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams. The affected services either relied directly on the failed storage systems or had dependencies with services that relied on them. Going forward, the VSTS team (or the Azure DevOps team as it’s now called) which was one of the customer that was impacted, is building its resiliency strategy around Availability Zones. Because they are much closer to each other than different regions are, low-latency, high-bandwidth network links between multiple Availability Zones in a single region can enable synchronous replication, providing the kind of application resiliency that could keep services running even if a lightning strike had taken out an entire data center, Buck Hodges, Director of Engineering, Azure DevOps, wrote in a postmortem - ITProToday

Amazon's voice assistant isn't limited to the Echo; you can also get Alexa on your smartphone. Alexa allows purchasing by voice using your default payment & delivery settings. You can require a speakable confirmation code

* "The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds."

* We are suffering from the career myth — a delusional belief in the outdated idea of linear career progression....Being overly attached to a specific path can turn into a career trap — blinding us to nonlinear opportunities for growth... We no longer need to be good at predicting the future; we now have to succeed when the future is unpredictable...“What skill gaps are standing in your way or holding you back?” - HBR

* Humans recognise 5,000 faces...the brain has an almost limitless capacity to memorise words and languages -- the limits on these instead come from study time and motivation. The range of faces recognised by participants went far beyond what may have been evolutionarily useful: for thousands of years humans would likely only have met a few dozen people throughout their lives....it was not clear why we developed the ability to distinguish between thousands of faces in the crowd - NDTV

* The Dublin-headquartered consulting firm, Accenture, clocked incremental revenues of $4.72 billion in the 12 months to August 2018, only marginally lower than the combined $4.78 billion by TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro and HCL - Mint

* Veteran environmental activist, IIT Professor, GD Agarwal alias Swami Gyanswarup Sanand (87), who was fasting for the past 111 days demanding a clean Ganga, died in Haridwar becoming the second fasting seer  after Swami Nigamanand (36) to die for the cause of Ganga after fasting for more than 2 months in 2011.

* There are 784 dams, 66 barrages, 92 weirs & 45 functional lift schemes located at present in the Ganga river basin.

* English was made official government and court language in 1835, the same year Macaulay wrote his Minute on Education in which he criticized almost everything Indian.

* At least a million & a half Indians died in the Orissa Famine of 1866

* Spanish Influenza epidemic killed 12.5 million in India, 21.6 million worldwide in 1918

Comments