Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Spearheading the vision of "All of Microsoft runs in the cloud", Microsoft IT is moving approximately 2,100 line‐of‐business (LOB) applications spread across eight data-centers worldwide, comprising over 40,000 distinct operating system instances to Azure to support its 180,000 internal users. MS has made available a comprehensive Business Case Study & Microsoft Virtual Academy course " Cloud at Microsoft ", that covers the best practices Microsoft has created and employed to design, develop, deploy, and operate in the cloud for their global environment. The 21 module, 18-hour video course also covers an analysis of the cloud migration process using their actual applications as examples. This is useful for learning for anyone involved in Cloud migration.

This Week I Learned - * ..the answer to “AWS or Azure?” is “it depends on the workload.” * Continuum allows Windows 10 Mobile users to have a PC-like experience when connected to an external display and a mouse and keyboard. When connected (via a wired dock or via Bluetooth and Miracast), Universal Windows Apps like Office and Microsoft Edge will adapt their interface and behavior to provide a desktop-like experience tailored to mouse and keyboard input...when the device is connected to a larger display, Microsoft Edge turns into a desktop browser, adapting the interface and rendering characteristics to match Microsoft Edge on PCs - IEBlog *  Chris Heilmann has a way to make a 4 MB CSV easily searchable in a browser using ServiceWorker & client side JavaScript through an offline web app. *  All of the resources in a Resource group should share the same lifecycle. You will deploy, update and delete them together. If one resource, such as a database server, needs to ...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Virtual Machines Scale Sets make it easy to build highly scalable applications by deploying identical virtual machines (VMs) as a set. Built on the Azure Resource Manager model, Scale Sets works with Windows and Linux images, custom images, and extensions. There is no additional cost to use Scale Sets. * Default replication scheme for an Azure storage account is Geo-redundant, which replicates data 6 times, thrice in a remote Azure region. * Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) is only available to store block blobs and not page blobs. VHDs use page blobs only * All storage accounts have a container named $logs that contains the log files stored as block blobs. The $logs container cannot be deleted. *  Uber processes data for millions of trips in over 400 cities in 60 different countries on a daily basis.  In the beginning, Uber managed their trip data via JSON blobs, with each trip requiring about 20 kilobytes (KB) of data. Assu...

Azure offers Storage replication options : " Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously only within a Primary Region. " Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated across multiple facilities. These facilities may be within the same geographical region or across two geographical regions. " Geographically Redundant Storage (GRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously within a Primary Region and then replicated asynchronously to a Secondary Region. You cannot directly read data from or write data to the Secondary Region associated with GRS Accounts. " Read Access Geographically Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously within a Primary Region and then replicated asynchronously to a Secondary Region. You can directly read data from, but cannot w...

Gartner has named Microsoft a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Worldwide for the third year in a row based on completeness of our vision and ability to execute. The following table from an email advertorial summarizes the current Gartner MQs for IaaS, PaaS and Saas solutions for key enterprise workloads where Microsoft is recognized as a leader while showing how the other Cloud Providers fare.

This Week I Learned - * Docker is at the confluence of three major IT investment areas - Cloud, DevOps and Microservices *  Azure RemoteApp is being retired.  Microsoft will be partnering with Citrix in the remote desktop and applications space to address new scenarios on the Azure cloud. * jsDelivr is a free and public CDN that offers hosting for developers at no cost. It’s a lot like Google Hosted Libraries, but with more projects and freedom. Anyone can submit a library for hosting on this CDN. It’s fast with multiple points of presence around the globe — 81. The main backbone of it is built on top of CDN networks provided by MaxCDN and CloudFlare . jsDelivr is the first CDN to support loading multiple files with a single HTTP request *  jQuery Geocoding and Places Autocomplete Plugin is an advanced jQuery plugin that wraps the Google Maps API's Geocoding and Places Autocomplete services. You simply provide an input that lets you search for locations...

This Week I Learned - * Azure in-place virtual machine migration eliminates virtual machine reboots during critical security updates for host operating systems. Critical security updates for host operating systems previously caused a reboot. Now, most virtual machines benefit from Azure in-place virtual machine migration that only pauses them for up to 30 seconds, while the local temporary disk and memory state are preserved.  *  Azure Security Center helps you take control of cloud security policies, monitor the current security of your Azure resources, and detect and respond to active attacks. *  Powershell command to view the Fault Domains and Update Domains for ARM VMs - PS C:\> $AS = Get-AzureRmAvailabilitySet -ResourceGroupName "RGEastUSMinecraft" PS C:\> $AS.VirtualMachinesReferences | ForEach { $VMResource =(Get-AzureRmResource -Id $_.id); *  MariaDB is an open source relations database that can bsed as an enhanced, drop-in replace...