This Week I Learned - Week #10 2022

 This Week I Learned - 

* If you don't deploy a gateway, clients must send requests directly to front-end services. There are some potential problems with exposing services directly to clients. Some options for implementing an API gateway in your application are:

* Reverse proxy server - Nginx and HAProxy

* Service mesh ingress controller - linkerd or Istio

* Azure Application Gateway - managed load balancing service (layer-7 routing and SSL termination) & web application firewall (WAF)

* Azure API Management - turnkey solution for publishing APIs to external and internal customers. It provides features that are useful for managing a public-facing API, including rate limiting, IP restrictions, and authentication using Azure Active Directory or other identity providers. API Management doesn't perform any load balancing, so it should be used in conjunction with a load balancer such as Application Gateway or a reverse proxy.

* Nginx and HAProxy will typically run in containers inside the cluster, but can also be deployed to dedicated VMs outside of the cluster. 

* The self-hosted gateway feature of Azure API Management enables hybrid and multi-cloud API management. With the self-hosted gateway, customers have the flexibility to deploy a containerized version of the API Management gateway component to the same environments where they host their APIs.

* Azure API Management is supported for Availability Zones to achieve high availability.

* An Azure Compute Gallery helps you build structure and organization around your Azure resources, like images and applications

* The Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS) is an independent, nonprofit organization develops, validates, and promotes globally recognized best practices for securing IT systems and data.  CIS Hardened Images provide security beyond what's offered in base virtual machine images. They are preconfigured to the security recommendations of the CIS Benchmarks, trusted configuration guidelines developed and used by a global community of IT experts. CIS Hardened Images are available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and are Azure certified. CIS is a Microsoft Partner. Hardening is a process that helps protect against unauthorized access, denial of service, and other cyber threats by limiting potential weaknesses that make systems vulnerable to cyber attacks. 

* MySQL HeatWave was designed to compete with Amazon’s version of MySQL called Aurora, Snowflake and other popular cloud databases.

* The book Machine Learning Simplified: A gentle introduction to supervised learning by Andrew Wolf is available for online reading as well.

* WordPress powers 40% of the web.

* Improving business performance through software development comes down to empowering developers, creating the right environment for them to innovate, and removing points of friction. Industry leaders refer to this capability as “Developer Velocity. 

* Companies across industries are pursuing digital strategies and transforming their business through software development. Doing this effectively requires companies to achieve superior Developer Velocity Index (DVI) scores. 

* McKinsey & Co's created the Developer Velocity Index (DVI), which pinpoints the most critical factors (related to technology, working practices, and organizational enablement) in achieving Developer Velocity. Developer Velocity Index (DVI) takes into account 46 different drivers across 13 capability areas [PDF].

* At the Goldman Sachs Group, computer engineers make up about one-quarter of the total workforce. Of the 20 million software engineers worldwide, more than half are estimated to be working outside the technology industry, and that  percentage is growing.

* ‘Tech-washing’ is a practice of imposing/superimposing new trendy labels on legacy solutions, leaving the users struggling for clarity.

* Meta (formerly Facebook) runs a network of 10 fact-checking partners that fact-check 20 Indian languages along with English. 

* More than a quarter of Australian homes have rooftop solar panels. 

* More than 90% of all almonds, walnuts, pistachios, broccoli, strawberries in the US come from California.

* The best Hospitals in India according to Newsweek

* Adopting buyouts as a growth strategy, Byju Raveendran has conducted eight takeovers in the past four years, the size of which progressively became bigger year after year. In 2019, it bought educational-games startup Osmo for USD120 million. In 2020, it paid USD330 million for coding tutor WhiteHat Jr. and in 2021, it acquired Aakash for USD 1 billion. Buying interesting companies and plugging them into the flywheel of its superactive sales engine, manned by around 15,000 people, is what Byju’s has been perfecting over time. Byju’s revenue per user is around INR25,000 and Aakash’s INR100,000 plus. While Byju’s has its origins in CAT coaching, it built its ed-tech empire on K-12 preloaded video content that was aimed to make learning fun. The share of the test-prep business in Byju’s top line is small. Amazon Academy has started with test prep — a weak link in Byju’s array of offerings.  

* Essentially, an IT company sells the knowledge and talent of its employees, and paying them accounts for 55%-65% of its revenue. So, employees are the majority of its assets as well as costs. - ET

* India has the highest share of female airline pilots at 15% while the world average is barely 5%.

* Definition provided by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) locates the middle class between a household income of 2 Lakhs per annum to 10 Lakhs per annum. 

* Economically Weaker Section (EWS). Announced in 2019, a candidate is eligible for reservation under the EWS category if their household income is less than 8 Lakhs per annum. People who own property (agricultural land, residential flat or residential plot) of notified sizes are excluded from this category. Economically weaker section and the middle class are not replaceable or synonymous

* Twenty-seven countries currently have federal political systems, encompassing 40% of the world’s population. India opted for a unique model of federalism — fairly centralised, but with a strong degree of interdependence between the Centre and the state, and with the capacity to modify the rules along the way to tackle the issues that inevitably arise in pluralistic societies. - ET

* The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has cleared Amazon’s proposal to acquire Catamaran Ventures’ entire 76% stake in Prione Business Services, which houses Cloudtail, one of the largest sellers on the ecommerce major’s Indian platform. Catamaran is the investment office of Infosys cofounder NR Narayana Murthy – in Prione. - ET

* At one point of time, Cloudtail was clocking more than 50% of total sales on Amazon India before government tightened rules in 2016, which stated that a single seller cannot account for over 25% of total sales on an online marketplace.

* API Holdings, one of India’s largest healthcare platforms owns PharmEasy & Medlife which operate in the online pharmacy retail business; Thyrocare, a diagnostic service player; and Aknamed, a tech-enabled supplier of specialty medicines and medical consumables to hospitals in India. Dr A Velumani, who started Thyrocare over 25 years ago, completely exited the business. Reliance Retail has a majority stake in Netmeds while Tata Digital has acquired a majority stake in 1mg.

* BharatPe was founded in 2018 by Shashvat Nakrani, a drop-out of the Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi, one of the country’s most prestigious schools. After teaming up with Bhavik Koladiya, a commercial pilot, the duo canvassed small businesses to understand problems with digital payments in India. A few months into the work, they asked Ashneer Grover, a former investment banker, to join as a cofounder. - ET

* The total assets under management (AUM) of the two schemes - NPS and the Atal Pension Yojana (APY) - rose 28.21 per cent to Rs 7,17,467 crore. APY mainly caters to the unorganised sector workers for their pension needs.

* Hyderbad Pushpak Airport Bus Live Tracking has been built by citizen volunteers

* In Hyderabad, the police extracts sensitive data from the ‘Integrated People Information Hub, which provides a 360 degree view of the citizens. The info hub links CCTV footage, biometrics, call data records, etc. and contains information about citizens’ family, voter ID, Aadhaar number, passport details, address, and bank transactions to determine and profile who would be more likely to commit crimes. - ET

* The Telangana government has created a comprehensive dataset of all citizens across the state called the Samagram “360 degree citizen tracking system" which is built on the Integrated Household Survey that the government had conducted in 2014 in order to collect demographic and socio-economic details - Mint

* The Jagannath temple at Behta Bujurg in UP is known locally as the "Rain Temple". It is of great interest to local farmers as the ceiling is said to drip water several days before the rains arrive.

* Death by a thousand cuts is a form of torture and execution originating from Imperial China. In psychology, it refers to the way a major negative change which happens slowly in many unnoticed increments is not perceived as objectionable

* "Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time"- Steve Uzzal

* "Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people to keep the rest of us poor." - Marla Grayson, I Care a Lot (2020)