This Week I Learned - Week #47 2019

This Week I Learned -

A resource group can contain resources that are located in different regions.

Microsoft Azure Storage Team has found the need to support direct FTP and SFTP access to Azure Blob storage decrease over time as customers move to REST based tools that provide greater throughput and better security than legacy protocols. There are external solutions that provide direct FTP and SFTP access to Azure Blob storage such as http://ftp2azure.codeplex.com

* D15_v2/DS15_v2 isolated Azure VMs will be replaced with Azure Dedicated Host.

* Virtual networks are a traffic isolation boundary in Azure. By default, VMs in one virtual network can't communicate directly with VMs in a different virtual network. However, you can explicitly connect virtual networks by using virtual network peering.

* The Azure platform uses a virtualized environment. User instances operate as standalone virtual machines that do not have access to a physical host server.

* The Azure hypervisor acts like a micro-kernel and passes all hardware access requests from guest virtual machines to the host for processing by using a shared-memory interface called VMBus. This prevents users from obtaining raw read/write/execute access to the system and mitigates the risk of sharing system resources.

* Azure Storage runs on separate hardware with no network connectivity to Azure Compute except logically.

* SQL Azure servers are not physical or VM instances, instead they are collections of databases, sharing management and security policies, which are stored in so called “logical master” database.

* "Day 1 companies" is Bezos' name for companies that are always operating with a beginner's mindset, which is his preference. "Day 2 (Day 2 companies think they've already figured everything out) is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1 at Amazon".  Sayings like "Move fast and break things", "Fake it till you make it", "Fail fast" are all attempts at reinforcing a bias for action, because it's better than the alternative of hesitating and thereby guaranteeing that a decision will be late — without much improving its chances of being right. To develop honest bias when it comes to acknowledging a need to act in uncertainty, it's best to take Bezos' advice and admit there's a chance you may need to turn around and head back if you find out your decision was wrong - CNBC 

The current evolution of machine learning research and technologies have prioritized supervised models that need to know quite a bit about the world before they can produce any relevant knowledge. In real world scenarios, the acquisition and maintenance of high quality training datasets results quite challenging and sometimes impossible. In machine learning theory, we refer to this dilemma as the ice(cold)-start problem. The solution to the ice-start problem can be described using the popular phrase “knowing what you don’t know”. Understanding the missing data in a given context is as important as understanding the existing data. Extrapolating that to machine learning models, the key to address the ice-start problem is to have a scalable model that knows what it does not know, namely to quantify the epistemic uncertainty. This knowledge can be used to guide the acquisition of training data. Intuitively, unfamiliar, but informative features are more useful for model training.

* Some common failure scenarios to test for resiliency by measuring the recovery times and verifying they meet your business requirements, are as follows:
- Shut down VM instances.
- Pressure resources such as CPU and memory.
- Disconnect/delay network.
- Crash processes.
- Expire certificates.
- Simulate hardware faults.
- Shut down the DNS service on the domain controllers.

* The vagus nerve which emerges from the brain stem and wanders across the heart, lungs, kidney and gut, is one of the pathways through which the body and brain talk to each other in an unconscious conversation.

* We are often asked direct, difficult questions. Because the compunction to answer a direct question is so strong, many people offer responses in the moment that they later regret, from revealing costly information to telling a lie. By focusing on how to deflect difficult questions, we can guide a conversation and protect our interests - HBR

* "A diplomat is somebody who thinks twice before saying nothing" - Shashi Tharoor, studied history at St. Stephen's College and went on to get his Masters in International Diplomacy from The Fletcher School of  Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

* Manabendra Nath Roy moved away from Marxism to espouse the philosophy of radical humanism, attempting to chart a third course between liberalism and communism.

* Scott Adams on creating Dilbert: “When they offered me a contract, I was talking to the editor, and I said, ‘You know, I’d be happy to get an actual artist to partner with me to do the drawing,’ and she said, ‘No, there’s no reason to do that, your drawing is fine.’ And I said, ‘Really? It’s fine?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, just the way it is. It’s fine.’ And that simple statement that I could do it made the quality of my art improve about 500 percent in two weeks, after being pretty much the way it was my whole life up to that point. But the simple fact that somebody who was credible—and exactly the right person in the world—would tell me that I was good enough, that actually made me good enough. It was a ridiculously quick transformation.”
* Google's Quick, Draw! is basically Pictionary, played against a neural network. An analysis of how much time it takes to doodle different types of objects reveals that the animals category takes relatively longer to draw

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