Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

WebSockets provide a mechanism for fast, secure two-way communication between a client and a server over the web using HTTP(S). WebSockets is a good choice over HTTP in usage scenarios where the following attributes are required - * Fast Reaction Time * Ongoing Updates * Ad-hoc or “fire and forget” Messaging * High-Frequency Messaging with Small Payloads Some typical usage scenarios are : * Location-based apps * Collaborative editing/coding * Financial tickers * Sports updates - Football scores from the previous week’s game are highly cacheable because they are stable and unlikely to change, so HTTP would be a good fit. Football scores from a game in progress, however, are likely to change frequently. In that case, the resource is not highly cacheable, so a WebSocket becomes the better fit. * Multimedia chat * Multiplayer games * Collaborative drawing on a digital communal chalkboard * Clickstream data - to track user interactions on a website A high level compari...

Example use cases by Vertical: * Manufacturing • Predictive maintenance or condition monitoring • Warranty reserve estimation • Propensity to buy • Demand forecasting • Process optimization • Telematics * Travel & Hospitality • Aircraft scheduling • Dynamic pricing • Social media—consumer feedback and interaction analysis • Customer complaint resolution • Traffic patterns and congestion management * Retail • Predictive inventory planning • Recommendation engines • Upsell and cross-channel marketing • Market segmentation and targeting • Customer ROI and lifetime value • Demand forecasting • Marketing mix optimization • Personalized offers * Financial Services • Risk analytics and regulation • Customer segmentation • Cross-selling and upselling • Sales and marketing campaign management • Creditworthiness evaluation • Portfolio optimization • Investment modelling • Fraud detection * Healthcare & Life Sciences • Alerts and diagnostics from r...

Usage Scenarios for Azure Site Recovery - paraphrased from various online articles: * Disaster recovery in the cloud—You can replicate workloads running on running on supported on-premises Hyper-V VMs, VMware VMs, and physical servers to Azure, rather than to a secondary site. This eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary datacenter. ASR provides orchestrated disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created based on the replicated data. You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero-data loss, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. You can easily fail back to your primary site when it's available again. Advanced network management in Site Recovery and Azure simplifies application network requirements, including reserving IP addresses, configuring load-balancers, and integrating Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switc...

I often find info on Azure topics I need, tucked away in larger articles or books. As it gets difficult for me to fetch it the next time I need it, I like preserving (with attribution) the snippets & nuggets I find along the way  & adding my own annotations Use cases for the AzCopy command line tool from the free ebook " Microsoft Azure Essentials - Fundamentals of Azure, second edition " - AzCopy is a free tool provided by the Azure Storage team to move data around. The core use case is asynchronous server-side copies. When you copy blobs or files from one storage account to another, they are not downloaded from the first storage account to your local machine and then uploaded to the second storage account. The blobs and files are copied directly within Azure. Here are some of the things you can do with AzCopy: * Upload blobs from the local folder on a machine to Azure Blob storage. *  Upload files from the local folder on a machine to Azure File storage. *...

I often find info on Azure topics I need, tucked away in larger articles or books. As it gets difficult for me to fetch it the next time I need it, I like preserving  (with attribution)  the snippets & nuggets I find along the way  & adding my own annotations Since long, I have been trying to compile notes on usage scenarios for the ever growing list of Azure services. I loved this list of use cases for Azure Functions with accompanying illustrations from the official Azure documentation - 1. Timer-based processing -  Azure Functions supports an event based on a timer using CRON job syntax. For example, you could execute code that runs every 15 minutes and cleans up a database table based on custom business logic. 2. Azure service event processing - Azure Functions supports triggering an event based on an activity in an Azure service. For example, you could execute serverless code which reads newly discovered test log files in an Azure Blob St...