This Week I Learned - Week #19 2022

This Week I Learned - 

* Crisp article comparing Azure Container options

  • Azure Container Apps (Preview)
  • Azure App Service
  • Azure Container Instances
  • Azure Kubernetes Service
  • Azure Functions
  • Azure Spring Cloud
  • Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Both Linux and Windows containers are supported in Service Fabric since 2017.

Enterprise customers prefer to have a “golden” image (an image that meets all their organisational requirements) that they can reuse when deploying additional VMs than deploy additional VMs and then run a provisioning script post-deployment. Reusing an image makes scaling out faster and more reliable while keeping you in policy. And once you have the process in place to build images, you can easily rebuild them regularly to include OS and application updates. But creating and managing your own image pipeline to build those custom images means running extra infrastructure and managing extra software. Azure Image Builder offers you that as a cloud service making it easier to maintain a ‘Golden’ image without having to manually apply customizations or patch updates. You get custom images that follow your security and management policies. AIB started out as a feature on Azure Kubernetes Service that used Hashicorp Packer to build VHD images. 

Azure Image Builder service offers unification and simplification for your image building process across Azure and Azure Stack with an automated image building pipeline. Whether you want to build Windows or Linux virtual machine images, you can use existing image security configurations to build compliant images for your organization and patch existing custom images using Linux commands or Windows Update. Azure Image Builder supports images from multiple Linux distributions, Azure Marketplace, and Windows Virtual Desktop environments and you can build images for specialized VM sizes, such as creating images for GPU VMs.

* The cloud landing zone setup should include designing account structures, federation to identity directories, virtual private cloud (VPC) networking, role-based access control (RBAC) roles and rule sets, and infrastructure for monitoring, security and configuration management. Ensure that the setup of these environments is considered well in advance of the migration and included in the scope of work. 

* “The future is multi-cloud.” - Michael Dell

* Architecting Cloud Native .NET Applications for Azure eBook [PDF; 192 pages;2022]

Comparison of Compute Instance prices of different cloud providers

* FBI profilers, also called behavioral analysts, are law enforcement officials who specialize in forming theories to build profiles of unidentified criminals at large, especially serial killers. The FBI method of profiling is a system created by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used to detect and classify the major personality and behavioral characteristics of an individual based upon analysis of the crime or crimes the person committed.

* In 1980 the World Health Organization declared smallpox the first – and so far only human – disease to be eradicated globally.

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in Florence, Tuscany, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth.  In her youth she was respectful of her family's opposition to her working as a nurse, only announcing her decision to enter the field in 1844. Despite the anger and distress of her mother and sister, she rejected the expected role for a woman of her status to become a wife and mother. Nightingale worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing, in the face of opposition from her family and the restrictive social code for affluent young English women. Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly £40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career. Nightingale gained her reputation as a tireless nurse during the Crimean War. She was appointed to oversee the introduction of female nurses into the military hospitals in Turkey in 1854. She earned the name “The Lady with the Lamp” because she would attend to sick soldiers at night with a small lantern in her hand. She never married as she was convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing. She is believed to have suffered from a bipolar disorder. Like her most beloved confidante Mary Clarke (who was 27 years older than her) age difference, she felt women could be equal to men. She often referred to herself in the masculine, as for example "a man of action" and "a man of business". Nightingale was a pioneer in statistics; she represented her analysis in graphical forms to ease drawing conclusions and actionables from data. She is famous for usage of the polar area diagram, also called the Nightingale rose diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram. This diagram is still regularly used in data visualisation

"Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" by Florence Nightingale.

* The Royal Statistical Society was so impressed with Florence Nightingale's work that they made her their first woman member in 1858.


Hagia Sophia, officially known as the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque and formerly as the Church of Holy Wisdom, place of worship in Istanbul. Built in 537 as the patriarchal cathedral of the imperial capital of Constantinople, it was the largest Christian church of the eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire) and the Eastern Orthodox Church, except during the Latin Empire from 1204 to 1261, when it temporarily became a Roman Catholic cathedral. In 1453, after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, it was converted into a mosque by Mehmed the Conqueror. It became the principal mosque of Istanbul until the 1616 construction of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. Upon its conversion, the bells, altar, iconostasis, ambo, and baptistery were removed, while iconography, such as the mosaic depictions of Jesus, Mary, Christian saints and angels were removed or plastered over. Islamic architectural additions included four minarets, a minbar and a mihrab. In 1935, the secular Republic of Turkey established it as a museum. In 2020, it was reconverted into a mosque. This redesignation drew condemnation from the Turkish opposition, UNESCO, the World Council of Churches, the International Association of Byzantine Studies, and many international leaders.

* Crocs shoes are manufactured using proprietary closed-cell resin, Croslite that gives each pair of shoes soft, comfortable, lightweight, non-marking and odor-resistant qualities. Crocs are certified by the U.S. Ergonomics Council and the American Podiatric Medical Association. 

* The use of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium (NPK) fertilisers is crucial for plant growth, yield and production. However, fertiliser prices have soared since February 24, when the Ukraine war broke out. Over 95 per cent of nitrogen fertiliser is produced using natural gas. 

* Wheat is India's primary winter crop. Weather plays a key role. Lower the maximum temperature, higher the yield. 

* PhonePe, founded in 2015 and led by Sameer Nigam, became part of Walmart after the retailer’s acquisition of Flipkart Group in 2018. Flipkart owns about 87% stake in PhonePe, while its parent Walmart owns about 10%. 

* UPI currently has about 200 million users. 50% UPI transactions are below Rs 200. 

* There are 1.18 billion mobile phone users in India - 400M Feature phone users & 780M Smartphone users.

* ToneTag offers digital payments through feature phones by using voice-based technology. It has developed a device, the Retail Pod, through which data can be transmitted through sound. A merchant can programme any mobile phone — feature or smart — and do a transaction through a sound signal.

* Legislators from Telangana State are the highest-paid compared to their counterparts from all other states, including by way of salaries and allowances. While a Telangana MLA takes home a cool Rs 2.50 lakh every month, an MLA from Tripura draws a measly Rs 17,500. Telangana legislators also draw substantial amounts as monthly pension up to a maximum of Rs 70,000. - DC

Asher yatzar ("Who has formed man") is a blessing in Judaism. It is recited after engaging in an act of excretion or urination, but is also included in many Jewish prayer books as a part of daily prayer 

* An apocaloptomist hopes for the best and prepares for the worst.

* Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intention of disorienting a victim and/or steering them on a certain course of action.

* Many desires arise through imitation of other people’s desires, which the French polymath, Rene Girard, termed as ‘Mimetic Desires’.

* "Crime is the result of free will" - Jeremy Bentham

* "I always worked in the nights...it is like another world...the night world ...nobody disturbs you" - A R Rahman 

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