Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  SAP HANA has been certified by SAP to run on both Amazon EC2 cr1 and r3.8xlarge instance types with support for production , a feature  currently missing in Azure * Eighty-seven percent of Fortune 500 customers are on the Microsoft cloud *  From a presentation by Bill Wilder : - There is no “best” architecture – it is situational, a Technical Business Decision - Performance is what an individual user experiences; scalability is how many users get to experience it - Sticky Load Balancer (on Azure) has problems of its own when we get to auto-scaling - Sharding - Horizontal scaling approach for data stores - SLA penalties are limited to the service costs. Service costs != your business losses * a9t9 offers free online OCR & OCR API services *  youtube-dl  is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. *  When Microsoft releases a product, it of...

A compilation of important points from the Cloud Governance articles I read: Cloud services governance involves applying specific policies or principles to the use of cloud services. It can be useful to think of cloud governance by examining its opposite: the free-for-all chaos in which cloud services are used by an organization without any oversight in place. To avoid this chaos, put polices in place for cloud service use to control the leakage of private information to the cloud and to control the  excessive use of cloud services (which must be paid for, after all). With governance and security in place, cloud computing can be used in safety and confidence. The idea of Cloud governance is to monitor cloud resource usage, such as servers and services, and to limit what systems and users can do with those resources. Cloud governance comes in many flavors, including service level, data level and platform level Service­ level or API governance installs policies around acces...

With Chrome & Internet Explorer, it is possible to print only selected text within a web page . Today, I had need to print a web page without some sections like video and unwanted subtitles. It turns out, with Chrome Developer Tools (keyboard shortcut F12) you can delete the tags representing that section and then print the page. After the web page loads, hit F12 to open the Developer Tools pane and use the Magnifier icon to select the element in the page to delete Within the Developer Tools pane, select the tag containing the content that needs to be deleted and hit the Delete key to remove it from the web page before printing it. Also see:  HOW TO extract sets of pages from a PDF document or web page to a new PDF

The documentation on Azure Services is getting better. As I work with Azure & keep reading and watching videos about its ever growing & improving services ( currently, 59 are listed on the Azure Status page ), I keep discovering new facts. I plan to note down the most essential information for each service to have a executive summary style list that can be reviewed often. ~#~ * Azure Media Indexer is a media processor that leverages natural language processing (NLP) technology from Microsoft Research to make media files and content searchable. *  By utilizing the output files of Azure Media Indexer in conjunction with a search engine like SQL Server or Apache Lucene/Solr, developers can create a full-text search experience . * For companies delivering large quantities of digestible media, using the Azure Media Indexer is the most comprehensive way to organize and classify media. * The service helps generate captioning, subtitles & transcri...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Access Control Service (ACS) is going to be merged with Azure AD * Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s multi-tenant cloud based directory and identity management service.  Azure AD runs out of 28 data centers around the world with automated failover . *  ADAL JS  is the JavaScript version of our Active Directory Authentication Library – a set of developer libraries that offer you a consistent way of connecting your apps to Active Directory on your platform of choice. * Starting in October 2015, Azure SQL Database Update (V12) will be the new default for logical servers. * Azure Media Services supports PlayReady DRM encryption. Fairplay is DRM encryption used in iTunes. * SQL Server Express uses dynamic ports for communications. You cannot use this over a Azure Hybrid Connection * Bitnami offers a pre-configured, ready to run image on VM Depot for running ThinkUp on Microsoft Azure.  T...

I liked reading through the book Exam Ref 70-534 Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions and there were some questions in the quizzes that stood out. Rather than go through the entire book again, I thought I'll compile the ones I found useful. 1. Which Azure Services can help you connect to on-premises resources? * BizTalk API Apps Hybrid Connections * Service Bus Relay * Azure Application Proxy * Azure Virtual Network 2. What are the evaluation criteria you would use while choosing SaaS offerings to integrate with your applications? QoS is an obvious metric for evaluating services. When evaluating a service, its scalability, availability, reliability, manageability, and security need to be evaluated to verify that the service matches with your application requirements. In addition, its simplicity and extensibility are also important aspects to consider in terms of productivity. On the business side, the service’s price, SLA agreements, and even level of custom...

This Week I Learned - *  About 100 people work on ASP.NET at Microsoft. Outside of the 4 PMs (Damian and the three that report to him).  There are 8 engineers working on dnx, another 8 on MVC, 2 or 3 working on middleware, 8 people working on Entity Framework. A total of 25 working on the runtime.  The tooling team that works on Visual Studio is another 13.  There are 5 development managers on ASP.NET  The .NET team that manages the frameworks is much larger than the ASP.NET team.  The total between the two groups is about 100. * Through its Amazon Machine Learning service, Amazon offers the ML technology it uses to perform critical functions like supply chain management, fraudulent transaction identification, and catalog organization. * Amazon offers 50 plus opaquely named services and some nice folks have nicely listed plain English descriptions of them. *  Facebook stores, accesses, and analyzes 30+ Petabytes of user generated d...

Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB) is the latest to join the app bandwagon with its own Android app . Was this really required? Unsurprisingly, it doesn't have the funds to implement and manage the infrastructure that is the sole reason of its existence. Update [17-Dec-2015] -   The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) will be launching an app ... that will help citizens click and send photographs of bad road conditions. Considering that the Internet penetration in India is around 19 per cent of which 50 per cent are mobile-only internet users , this app will cater to a minuscule portion of Hyderabad's population using mobiles running Android. Couldn't their website have been made friendly enough to be accessible from ANY device? In the absence / lack of enforcement of any guidelines by the Government of India on how governmental agencies & government run utility companies should build their websites and apps, no though...

There is a lot more literature on investing in mutual funds in India due to better performing stock markets than a decade ago. The mutual fund houses also have a vested interest in having potential investors better informed. Here is a compilation of the useful content I have found on various sites - Large-cap mutual funds are those which invest in large sized companies , which usually are market leaders in their industry. Some commonly used names of large-cap funds are top- 50, top-100, top-200, blue-chip and focused large-cap. Another characteristic of a large-cap stock or fund is that they usually demonstrate better resilience in times of heightened stock market volatility. Furthermore, these companies usually have a dividend paying track record though this cannot be guaranteed always.  The term mid-cap is an abbreviation for 'middle capitalisation' stock.  The ' capitalisation ' indicates the size of the company in terms of its market value. The market valu...

This Week I Learned - * There is a constantly updated compilation of information related to SAP on Microsoft Azure on the SAP website * There is nice online tool to view Azure SQL Database status & performance history of different Azure data-centers *  Web browsers prevent client-side web applications running from a specific domain to issue requests to another domain for security reasons. CORS is a mechanism that would relax such restriction and allows domains to give each other permissions for accessing each other’s resources. CORS(Cross Origin Resource Sharing) is supported for Windows Azure Storage Blob, Table and Queue services. It can be enabled for each service through the Windows Azure Storage Client Library 3.0 . Cynapta Azure CORS Helper is a free desktop utility to manage CORS rules for Azure Blob service *  Coursera uses isomorphic rendering so that its home page is rendered by the browser & server. “Isomorphic” means the U...

I liked the theme of the Cory House's Pluralsight course Architecting Applications for the Real World in .NET  (released in January 2014) but I did not find it as exhaustive as I had imagined from the title Some slides & points that I found interesting - A comparison of Level 1 (simple architecture) and Level 3 (complex) architecture approach selection - * Lines of code changed for a given feature is a sign of complexity. 

1. All IaaS VMs and PaaS role instances in a VNet can access the public Internet by default - True or False True.You can control access by using Network Security Groups (NSGs). 2. What is the difference between External load balancer and Internal load balancer? You can use an external load balancer to provide high availability for IaaS VMs and PaaS role instances accessed from the public Internet whereas internal load balancer to provide high availability for IaaS VMs and PaaS role instances accessed from other services in your VNet. 3. What is a virtual appliance? A virtual appliance is just another VM in your VNet that runs a software based appliance function, such as firewall, WAN optimization, or intrusion detection. 4. Is there a limit to the number of subnets in my virtual network? There is no limit on the number of subnets you use within a VNet. All the subnets must be fully contained in the virtual network address space and should not overlap with one an...