This Week I Learned - Week #49 2022

This Week I Learned - 

* Azure purchasing options:

• Customers under the Pay-as-you-go subscription model enjoy the benefits of no minimum purchase requirements and have flexible pricing. 
• In Azure in Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, end-customer pricing for Azure services is determined by the channel partner. Microsoft pricing to the CSP partner is under the pay-as-you-go model with the benefits of no minimum purchase requirements and flexible pricing.
• Customers or partners who purchased Azure within an Enterprise Agreements (EA) or Enterprise Subscription Agreements (EAS), Microsoft Product and Services (MPSA), or Server and Cloud Enrollments (SCE) agreement have price protection on currently offered Azure services and will receive the lower of the baseline price or the new market price. A baseline price is the price at the beginning of an Azure agreement or the price at which a new Azure service was made generally available. If the new market price is higher than the baseline prices, customers may see an increase up to but not above their baseline prices. New Azure services will be priced as noted on the then-current pricelist.

* Azure supports these SQL Server technologies for business continuity:

1. Always On availability groups
2. Always On failover cluster instances (FCIs)
3. Log shipping
4. SQL Server backup and restore with Azure Blob storage
5. Database mirroring - Deprecated in SQL Server 2016
6. Azure Site Recovery

You can combine the technologies to implement a SQL Server solution that has both high-availability and disaster recovery capabilities. 

* Azure Storage Mover (Preview) is a fully managed, hybrid migration service that makes migrating files and folders into Azure a breeze.

* With your pay-as-you-go account, you now have a high availability secondary and a disaster recovery secondary server for your SQL Server on Virtual Machines at no additional license cost. With the new high availability/disaster recovery benefit, you can license up to two passive secondaries for free. The only license cost for them would be the primary and not for their secondary instances.

* ChatGPT and GPT 3.5 were trained on an Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure.

* Hardeneks is a tool that runs checks to see if an EKS cluster follows EKS Best Practices.

* Use serverless functions for connecting your platform, serverless containers for running services

* Cloud Run lets you deploy your service with a single containerized app. Examples of applications for which you could choose Cloud Run:

• Any web-based workload
• REST or gRPC APIs for mobile apps or games
• Internal custom backoffice apps

* The second generation of Cloud Functions is built on the enhanced infrastructure of Cloud Run

* The Google Cloud Storage price for the archive class is 6% the storage price for the standard storage class. Cloud Storage Autoclass is a bucket-level setting that simplifies and automates lifecycle management of all your Cloud Storage data based on last access time. Autoclass automatically delivers cost savings and removes inefficiencies by moving data to the storage class with the most favorable pricing for customer workloads. It helps organizations achieve price predictability by removing surcharges associated with colder storage classes - there are no early deletion fees, retrieval fees or operations charges for class transitions when Autoclass is enabled on a bucket.Disablement doesn’t require any data movement or any changes to storage classes of objects and hence, incurs no charge. It is useful for workloads with unpredictable and unknown access patterns.

* VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS), formerly Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), is a modern application platform. It is based on Cloud Foundry, an open-source multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Born on a container-based architecture, Cloud Foundry is able to support innovation in containers through collaboration with other projects and standards such as Open Container Initiative (OCI) and Container Network Interface (CNI). Cloud Foundry Application Runtime can be deployed to many different infrastructure providers, including VMware’s vSphere, OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, SAP Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud and others using the Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) capability of the Cloud Foundry BOSH project.

* Net new application - An application that results from a refactoring of existing applications.

* Hackers can also manipulate CSS for destructive activities. Inside the CSS code they can gain access through a breach, a CSS variable can be added which stores the URL location of the web skimmer code they want to load inside a hacked store.

* Much like a WiFi network, each cell tower in a mobile network is broadcasting a constant signal “Connect to me” over an area, which is called a cell. (Which is why some people call mobile phones cell phones). Our mobile connects to the nearest tower, and then exchanges some data – the ID of the mobile phone (called the IMEI), the ID of the network, what sort of speed they operate at, and how much bandwidth the cell tower gives to the mobile phone.

* cookup.ai has ChatGPT curations - use cases & limitations

* ChatGPT does not provide factual scientific information. It will give information that will sound reasonably accurate and is hard for a qualified expert to distinguish but in the end, it will be incorrect.

* GPT-3 is a meta-learner. It has learnt to learn. And this remarkable, emergent ability to follow directions is the key to producing complex, tailored behaviour for use in various applications.

* Jean-Luc Jucker has a created a map of Ahmedabad using Python's open source OSMnx package using data from OpenStreetMap Foundation. OSMnx helps to etrieve, model, analyze, and visualize street networks and other spatial data from OpenStreetMap. 

* The circle road is called 132 ft ring road connecting the entire city. The river flowing in between is Sabarmati river and there is path along the river cutting through the city called the riverfront

* A melee weapon, hand weapon or close combat weapon is any handheld weapon used in hand-to-hand combat, i.e. for use within the direct physical reach of the weapon itself, essentially functioning as an additional extension of the user's limbs.

* Oranges are a type of citrus fruit cultivated as a hybrid of a pomelo (Citrus maxima) and a mandarin (Citrus reticulata). Oranges and tangerines are different varieties of the same species. In the United States, tangerines are often called mandarins.

* An attack by the fungus Phomopsis azadirachtae called "Twig Blight" can affect the neem tree’s ability to produce its prized fruit, in many cases reducing its ability to flower. The extract from neem seeds are used in manufacturing pharmaceuticals, while neem oil is used as an insect repellent.  More than 150 compounds have been isolated from different parts of this tree. India is the leading exporter of neem and neem products.  - DC

* Melanin is the pigment responsible for giving skin and hair its color. As people age, their skin produces less melanin. 

* As a general rule, financial planners suggest that rental expenses should not be more than 20-25% of one’s income

* Hyderabad Public School ...was ...earlier known as Jagirdars College, it was established in 1923 as a school exclusively for the sons of the nobles and aristocrats of Hyderabad State. It was renamed as Hyderabad Public School in 1951 after Zamindari system was abolished in 1950. It sits in the middle of the city on a hundred-acre campus with buildings ranging from the Qutub Shahi style of architecture to our latest nightmares in RCC, Modern Indian Horrible. Proves that you don't have to be ignorant to be a philistine—the modern buildings were sanctioned by the Board of Governors of the school, about whom it is believed that they were educated.

* The more I know, the more I don't know. 

* Passion, no matter how insane it may seem to others, is the key to success. The good news is that it is only those who are involved in a task need to be passionate about it. So as long as you are passionate, get on with it but be sure to get those who are not passionate off the team. That is equally important. 

* It is said that the English-speaking world is divided into two groups; those who have read Lord of the Rings and those who haven't. If you belong to the latter group, now's the time to change your status.

* "The bird doesn't sing because it has a message. It sings because it has a song." 

* "If you can laugh with joy at a sunset, you will laugh every day. If you wait for a big incident to make you happy, you will wait a long time. time. I can't remember ever being bored. I always had something interesting happening in my life, not because there were so many engaging things occurring but because I chose to see them as such. Anyone who is inquisitive and who can read can't be bored." - Mirza Yawar Baig, It's My Life