Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Key takeaways from Ryan Kitchens talk "How Did Things Go Right? Learning More from Incidents" based on his experience at Netflix: Failure is ever-present in modern software systems Success isn’t necessarily the absence of failure, and having 99.999% uptime is practically meaningless if the users are unable to use the system as they intend.  Safety, great performance, and sources of resilience do not come from the absence of failure but rather the presence of adaptive capacity . Moving from "Why did things go wrong?" ask "How did things go right?" is a challenging but valuable exercise. Find out - What's going on when it seems like nothing is happening? When failure does occur, what's going to keep it from being worse? How do teams adapt successfully when preventative techniques fail? How should we prioritize the effort to develop systems that help us safely manage the consequences of failure? Recovery is better than prevention. An incident occurs w...

SRE adoption is greatly influenced by the organizational culture at hand. Westrum organizational culture is one of a set of capabilities that drive higher software delivery and organizational performance. These capabilities were discovered by the DORA State of DevOps research program , an independent, academically rigorous investigation into the practices and capabilities that drive high performance. Similar to Dr. Westrum's findings, DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) research shows that a high-trust, generative culture predicts software delivery and organizational performance in technology. Teams can identify helpful practices to create a generative culture that fosters information flow and trust by examining the six aspects of Westrum's model of organizational culture, focusing on those behaviors seen in the generative culture: High cooperation. Messengers are trained. Risks are shared. Bridging is encouraged. Failure leads to inquiry. Novelty is implemented. Related: SR...

This Week I Learned -   *  All of Azure SQL is built on Azure Service Fabric, which serves as the Azure backbone . * Azure SQL Edge is an optimized relational database engine geared for IoT and IoT Edge deployments. Azure SQL Edge is built on the same engine as SQL Server and Azure SQL. Azure SQL Edge is a containerized Linux application. The startup-memory footprint is less than 500 megabytes (MB). * Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform that securely delivers virtual desktops and remote apps. * Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port. Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications.  * Redshift’s SQL dialect is based on PostgreSQL * BigQuery also lets you do geospatial data analysis using familiar SQL with BigQuery G...

This Week I Learned - * Windows 7, Windows Server 2008/R2, and SQL Server 2008/R2 all have end-of-support dates in the next 12 months. That means no more security fixes unless you pony up some large piles of money for extended security fix support. Microsoft has promised that customers that move Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2 to Azure (or Azure Stack) will continue to get free security fixes for up to 3 years. * Back up of virtual machines is done at the fabric level. These backup jobs that protect the entire machine are unaffected by what we do with firewalls, such as Azure Firewall - Petri * DevOps is a loose set of practices, guidelines, and culture designed to break down silos in IT development, operations, networking, and security.  CA(L)MS—which stands for Culture, Automation, Lean (as in Lean management; also see continuous delivery), Measurement, and Sharing—is a useful acronym for remembering the key points of DevOps philosophy -  How SRE...

This Week I Learned - *  Chargeback and showback are terms used to describe ways in which technology costs are tracked. Chargebacks are internal charges assigned to various departments. Showback is an analysis of technology usage across the board. *  EC2Instances.info  offers Amazon EC2 Instance comparison similar to what AzurePrice.net does for Azure VM types.  AzurePrice.net offers cost optimization & auditing services *  Having end to end monitoring infrastructure in place helps you track : • Health • Performance • Security • SLA *  Forrester prediction for 2018: “Kubernetes will win the war for container orchestration dominance.” *  Developing a cloud strategy has been cited as the top issue every year since 2012, according to Gartner. * Site Reliability Workbook is the hands-on companion to the bestselling Site Reliability Engineering book. The 508 paged ebook from O'Reilly is available for free till Aug 23rd . * With HA th...