Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  You can use Windows Server 2012 Standard for the SQL server nodes-unlike in previous Windows releases, you can enable the failover cluster feature in the Standard edition of Windows Server 2012 as well as Windows Server 2012 Datacenter. SQL Server 2012 does require the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2012 to use the AlwaysOn feature *  SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups are supported between Microsoft Azure Regions * There is a web application with code on Github that can detect a user's location and find the latency of various Azure data centers  with respect to the user. For Amazon Web Services timings, there is CloudPing.info * The whitepaper " On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services " [PDF] by James Hamilton summarizes the best practices accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live * The game The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land which currently occupies #1 spot (over 1,000,0...

The AWS Well-Architected Framework consists of a set of questions you can use to evaluate how well an architecture is aligned to AWS best practices. I found the 56-paged white-paper  [^PDF] thought-provoking. The same questions could be applied to Azure as well. For my reference, I plan to adapt the answers that are written for AWS in the white-paper & jot down notes making them Azure specific The AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on four pillars—security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The white-paper raises 45 questions across those four categories. As a first step towards compiling Azure specific answers for the questions to ask while building cloud solutions, I've replaced the AWS references in the questions with Azure equivalent keywords (work in progress) - SEC 1. How are you encrypting and protecting your data at rest? SEC 2. How are you encrypting and protecting your data in transit? SEC 3. How are you protecting access...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft’s cloud business has grown by 8 percent, to $5.9 billion . *  PowerShell one-liner to list the VM names, cloud service names and availability set names (if any) for all your VMs - (Get-AzureService).servicename | foreach {Get-AzureVM -ServiceName $_ } | select name,AvailabilitySetName *  SQLIO (SQLIO Disk Subsystem Benchmark Tool) is a tool provided by Microsoft which can also be used to determine the I/O capacity of a given configuration. *  This PowerShell script sample from Technet Gallery demonstrates how to utilize Azure PowerShell to deploy a Windows based virtual machine from the Azure image gallery and configure Storage Spaces to get the highest storage performance currently available. *  Solid-state drives (SSDs) are in a class of their own that deliver extremely high random I/O performance, often a factor of 20+ over that of 15,000 RPM hard disks .  * IBM has set up its first public cloud...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft Azure suffered more downtime than its main rivals in 2014, with almost 54 hours of downtime for its two main services , according to CloudHarmony , a third-party that monitors cloud provider uptime. *  Availability set can be specified during VM provisioning or after a VM has been provisioned * There is a nice PowerShell script in the Technet Script Center that can be used to keep Azure PowerShell current by checking for updates on Github *  Failure to ensure the OS disk has the necessary IOPS may result in the Azure VM restarting .  The IOPS limit for a storage account is 20,000 IOPS and the limit for each individual disk is 500 IOPS. Therefore the most disks that should ever be placed in a storage account is 40. If you have more than 40 disks in a storage account all being used then they will not be able to get their typical 500 IOPS and obviously the more disks the less IOPS they will get. If an OS disk gets a small enou...

From the Azure ExpressRoute SLA - If we do not achieve and maintain the Service Levels for each Service as described in this SLA, then you may be eligible for a credit towards a portion of your monthly service fees. Among other limitations, the SLA and any applicable Service Levels do not apply to any performance or availability issues arising from - "your failure to adhere to any required configurations, use supported platforms, follow any policies for acceptable use, or your use of the Service in a manner inconsistent with the features and functionality of the Service (for example, attempts to perform operations that are not supported) or inconsistent with our published guidance;" The responsibility to monitor service levels and report outages remains wholly on the customer (something many cloud customers may want to try to avoid).   "Service Credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for any performance or availability issues for any Service under the Agre...

This Week I Learned - * Rather than list all VM instances at one place, AWS separates the an optimized list of Amazon EC2 Instances from the  Previous Generation Instances which are still fully supported. * The whitepaper AWS Well-Architected Framework offers best practices and core strategies for architecting systems in the cloud * “ Cloud is the new normal ” - Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer *  An analysis of the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites reveals that more than half of all data came from ads *  OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is an open source computer vision and machine learning software library. * The first international cloud privacy standard, ISO/IEC 27018, developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is  to establish a uniform, international approach to protecting privacy for personal data stored in the cloud. The British Standards Institute (BSI) has now i...

A compilation of Frequently Asked Questions on Azure Services from the official documentation: Azure AD B2C  Azure App Service Web Apps on Linux FAQ Azure App Service Web Apps - Deployment FAQs Azure App Service Web Apps - Application performance FAQs Azure Application Gateway Azure Backup Azure Container Service (AKS) Azure Data Catalog Azure DevTest Labs FAQ ExpressRoute Azure Data Factory DocumentDB Event Hubs Azure File storage Azure IoT Suite Azure - Lifecycle Azure Machine Learning  - 1 Azure IaaS VM Managed Disks  Azure Marketplace Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Azure Notification Hubs Operational Insights Azure Purchase Azure Redis Cache Azure RemoteApp Azure Site Recovery SQL Database   SQL Database Business Continuity Storage   Azure Support Azure Traffic Manager Virtual Machines - Hybrid Use Benefit Azure Virtual Machines created with the classic deployment model   Virtual Machines Licensing Virtual Net...

The promotional PDF ebook from Microsoft “ Myths About Moving to the Cloud ” dispels the following myths with insightful explanations: Office 365 is just Office tools in the cloud, and I can only use it online If our data moves to the cloud, our business will no longer have control over our technology Keeping data on-premises is safer than in the cloud I have to move everything to the cloud; it is an all-or-nothing scenario. Cloud migration is too much for my business to handle. Corporate spies, cyberthieves, and governments will have access to my data if it is in the cloud. Skype and Skype for Business are one and the same. Email isn’t any simpler in the Cloud. Continuously updating Office 365 will break my critical business applications. Some facts like the info about Microsoft being the first major cloud provider to adopt the world’s first international standard for cloud privacy, ISO/IEC 27018  and Skype for Business feature to add up to 250 people to onli...

Following is the current list of Azure services that operate globally  and do not require customers to specify a particular region when using the service: Service Fabric SQL Data Warehouse Traffic Manager DNS CDN BizTalk Services Azure Active Directory Multi-Factor Authentication Visual Studio Application Insights Azure Resource Manager Some points to note about Azure services: Not all services may be available in a particular region or data center (for example, the G-series VMs are only available from 3 data centers) Data centers in a region (currently, Australia & India) may not be available to businesses not directly operating in the country where that Azure Region is. The cost of Azure services may vary significantly for some services across data centers (Thought: if just an internet presence for an entity's website is required without up-time or latency concerns, what would be the cheapest DC to host it from?)

This Week I Learned - *  When creating a new Linux VM, Azure will provide you an OS disk (/dev/sda) and a temporary disk(/dev/sdb), subsequently added disks will show as /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd and so on. Be aware that content on this disk may be lost in case of specific events like VM resizing or Azure Host OS failure. Even if content will survive VM reboots, should be considered a temporary storage *  Jet.com which competes with Amazon, built its entire e-commerce platform, including development and delivery infrastructure, on Microsoft Azure, using both .NET and open-source technologies. It uses Visual F# and a microservices architecture. Node is used on the front end. To get its code through development and into production as fast as possible, Jet uses a mix of Azure App Service, Azure Web Roles and custom servers, with deployment happening from Jenkins. To make it easier for merchant partners to integrate with the platform, it has created a developer portal for its APIs u...