Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. * Azure Service Fabric (SF) came out of Microsoft as it's internal product . SF powers Microsoft Azure. Most of the Azure services in one way or another run on top of Service Fabric. This includes Cosmos DB, Event Hubs, Service Bus, SQL Server, Azure Functions just to name a few you definitely know. Even some parts of Kubernetes' Azure offering (AKS) run on top of Service Fabric. That's funny, considering AKS is supposed to be an alternative platform. Even Azure Container Instances which are lightweight ways to run containers in the cloud without the need of a heavy orchestrator, are powered by SF. * If you can’t draw it, you can’t build it . To come up with a “First Cut” of the Cloud Capability Model suitable for your organization, avoiding using named technologies to a...

This Week I Learned - * Entity group transactions provide  Azure Table  with a  limited form of the atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) semantics   provided by relational databases . * Every Azure subscription has default CPU quotas: 1) Total virtual processors per region 2) Number of virtual processors per series in a region. You can see your usage versus the limits under Subscriptions > [Subscriptionb] > Usage + Quotas . *  Azure reservations helps you save money by pre-paying for one-year or three-years of virtual machine or SQL Database compute capacity .  Customers with active Software Assurance can save up to 55 percent (on region, instance size, and performance tier) using Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server with the new vCore-based purchasing model in SQL Database.  Azure reservations don't auto-renew. * Besides AWS EC2, Reserved Pricing applies to 6 other AWS Services - RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFront,...

Unmanaged disks are the traditional type of disks that have been used by VMs. With these disks, you create your own storage account and specify that storage account when you create the disk. Make sure you don't put too many disks in the same storage account, because you could exceed the scalability targets of the storage account (20,000 IOPS, for example), resulting in the VMs being throttled. If you are using premium storage accounts for unmanaged disks and your application exceeds the scalability targets of a single storage account, you might want to migrate to managed disks. If you don't want to migrate to managed disks, build your application to use multiple storage accounts. Then, partition your data across those storage accounts. For example, if you want to attach 51-TB disks across multiple VMs, spread them across two storage accounts. 35 TB is the limit for a single premium storage account. Make sure that a single premium storage account never has more than 35 TB of pr...