Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

IT consulting firm Gartner's Magic Quadrant is a tool that provides a graphical competitive positioning of technology providers in a complex and fast-evolving market.  These Magic Quadrant market research reports for different IT categories rely on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to demonstrate market trends. The Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems as of December 2023 recognizes & rates 19 companies: LEADERS Amazon Web Services Microsoft Google Oracle Alibaba Cloud MongoDB Databricks Snowflake CHALLENGERS InterSystems VISIONARIES IBM  Cloudera SAP  Teradata Redis Neo4j NICHE PLAYERS EDB Cockroach Labs Couchbase  Yugabyte 

The 90-minute Pluralsight course SAP on Azure: The Big Picture provides a "just enough" backgrounder on SAP & options for hosting SAP workloads on major cloud providers, mainly Azure. My paraphrased notes -  Four common options with major cloud providers: HEC or HANA Enterprise Cloud is a bundled managed service from SAP covering SAP application management, infrastructure services & security services AWS is the first public cloud provider in the market to offer SAP in cloud Google Cloud Azure  AWS, Azure & Google Cloud can run the following SAP products: 1. SAP S/4 HANA – SAP HANA 2. SAP BW / SAP Hybris 3. SAP Business Suite / SAP Business One 4. SAP NetWeaver In addition to the above products, Azure can also run SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, so you can get that SAP contract and still run your SAP instance on Azure.  SAP solutions on Azure can run on a variety of database such as: HANA, Oracle, SQL Server, or PaaS databases like Azure SQL, ...

This Week I Learned -  *  Layoutit grid is an open-source CSS Grid layout generator. It aids in designing web pages layouts by providing CSS grid code as markup. * While you can manage a few containers manually using Docker and Windows, apps often make use of five, ten, or even hundreds of containers, which is where orchestrators come in. Orchestrators help you grow containerized apps at scale, providing functionality for: Deploying at scale Workload scheduling Health monitoring Failing over when a node fails Scaling up or down Networking Service discovery Coordinating app upgrades Cluster node affinity * Open Service Broker for Azure, or OSBA, lets you provision Azure Cloud Services directly from Kubernetes or Cloud Foundry. OSBA in an Open Service Broker API implementation for Azure. The Open Service Broker API is a spec that defines a common language for cloud providers that cloud native applications can use to manage cloud services without lockin. *  Application Pro...

Compiled from SAP blog articles - SAP HANA and S/4HANA – a simple guide &  SAP HANA Cheat Sheet SAP (Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung) is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. SAP was founded by a number of ex-IBM employees in the early 1970s. SAP has a large portfolio of applications. There have been six key versions of its main enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, roughly a major iteration each decade. During the 2000s the number of processes covered by the R/3 or ERP was continuously increased, in addition to that, a number of additional applications were launched to provide more advanced capabilities in certain areas. SAP started to package a number of these together under the name, “Business Suite”.  The main components of Business Suite are: * ERP (enterprise resource planning), basically the evolution of R/3 * CRM (customer relationship management) * SCM (supply chain management) * PLM (product lifecycl...

This Week I Learned - * One ExpressRoute contract can connect to all regions within a geopolitical region (e.g. All EU DCs) image *   Azure features such as Reserved VM Instances, Azure Hybrid Benefit, Constrained vCPU for SQL/Oracle database based SAP systems, and Azure Site Recovery for DR, offer better cost savings for hosting SAP workloads on Azure when compared to on-premises hardware . *  Mover supports migration from over a dozen cloud service providers – including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive – into OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling seamless file collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps and services, including the Office apps and Microsoft Teams. * Adjusted Compounded Annualized Growth Rate (CAGR) is known as Extended Internal Rate of Return (XIRR). Excel does this XIRR adjustment using an approximation technique called the Newton-Raphson method *  The full recitation of one of India´s most ancient Sanskrit texts, the Shukla Yajurve...

This Week I Learned - * Each high scale VM size also has a specific IOPS limit that it can sustain. For example, a Standard GS5 VM has 80,000 IOPS limit. *  Azure Portal or PowerShell can be used to move a VM to a different subscription or another resource group .  Subscription transfer in the Azure portal is available for certain subscription types * Site Recovery provides test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments. You can run failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. In the scenario of migrating to Premium Storage , you can use the failover in Site Recovery to migrate target disks to a premium storage account. * By default, when you enable disaster recovery for Azure VMs, Site Recovery creates target resources based on source resource settings. For Azure VMs configured with static IP addresses, Site Recovery tries to provision the same IP address for the target V...

Microsoft runs 100% of their SAP applications on Azure and is now in the process of moving the company to S/4HANA. S/4HANA is short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, meaning that it is the fourth version of SAP Business Suite, but is designed to run only on SAP HANA The lessons Microsoft teams learnt while moving SAP to Azure are documented in the free ebook " 15 lessons learned migrating SAP to the cloud " Key points: 1. Understand suitability and migration efforts. Before performing an IaaS migration, a best practice is to assess the complexity of your SAP workloads, the underlying infrastructure, the size of each workload and related databases (in terms of velocity, volume, and variety), and the requirements for seasonal elasticity. 2. Clean out your closet. Moving to the cloud is an opportunity to throw out the stuff you’re not using. When you owned that old on-premises server, it didn’t matter how much old stuff you had buried in there. When you’re on the cl...

The following table from the SAP on Azure Solutions home page summarizes what's supported & certified - SAP Product Licensing Database Operating System SAP-certified VMs Storage Support SAP NetWeaver Bring your own license SQL Server, Oracle (Windows and Oracle Linux only), DB2, SAP ASE Windows SUSE Linux Enterprise Red Hat Enterprise Linux A5 to A11 D11 to D14 DS11 to DS14 DS11_v2 to DS15_v2 GS1 to GS5 M-series Premium storage 32 GB–4 TB (recommended for DB and I/O intensive workloads) Standard storage 32 GB–4 TB Managed Disks are recommended Pro Direct Premier Business All-in-One Business Suite Software Windows SUSE Linux Enterprise Red Hat Enterprise Linux Oracle Linux BusinessObjects BI N/A Windows SAP HANA, SAP Business Suite on HANA, SAP S/4HANA (OLTP workloads) SAP HANA SUSE Linux Enterprise Red Hat Enterprise Linux M64s, M64ms, M128s, M128ms SAP BW on HANA, SAP BW/4HANA (OLAP workloads) M64s,...

This Week I Learned - * The Basic & Stamdards service plans with Linux runtime environments support Web App for Containers . The platform automatically takes care of OS patching, capacity provisioning and load balancing. Steps to deploy a containerised app - az group create -n AzureDemoRG -1 "East US" az appservice plan create -n AzureDemoPlan -g AzureDemoRG --is-linux -l "East US" --sku S1 --number-of-workers 1 az webapp create -n LaunchCampaignApp -g AzureDemoRG -p AzureDemoPlan -i toddbaginski/django-starter-app:latest *  Microsoft has made SQL Server Developer Edition a free product for non-production use. This is yet another way you can save on Azure costs for your non-production environments. *  Premium storage can achieve 10 times the IOPS, 3 times the throughput and 1/3 the latency when compared to standard disks. * Microsoft is heavily invested in SAP applications—it uses them extensively to run finance, human resources, global trade, suppl...