Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Azure originally provided only the classic deployment model or the Service Management model in which each resource existed independently; there was no way to group related resources together. To deploy a solution, you had to either create each resource individually through the Classic Portal or create a script that deployed all the resources in the correct order. In 2014, Azure introduced Resource Manager, which added the concept of a resource group. A resource group is a container for resources that share a common lifecycle. For Compute, Storage, and Networking resources, you have the option of using either Resource Manager or Classic deployment in the  Azure Portal  which was initially referred as Preview Portal. In December 2015, portal.azure.com (codename Ibiza), achieved general availability (GA) status and is the default portal for Azure. Microsoft guidance for new deployments is to make use of the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) model The Azure Portal is on...

App Wallet UPI Bank Transfer Send On Mobile # Android App Remarks Airtel Money Yes No Yes Yes Link Built in collaboration with Infosys and SmartTrust, the platform was launched on 5 April 2012 Axis Bank Lime Yes No No No Link BHIM App No Yes Yes Yes Link Transaction Limits: Maximum of Rs. 10,000 per transaction and Rs. 20,000 within 24 hours. Chillr No Yes Yes Yes Link Citi MasterPass Yes Citrus Pay Yes No No Yes Link Freecharge Yes No No No Link Most features on native mobile app are also available through mobile & desktop browser versions. Terms & Conditions of offers often have a catch FTcash No Yes No Yes Link HDFC PayZapp No No No Yes Link Offers ICICI Pockets Yes Yes Yes Yes Link Offers Itzcash Yes No Yes Yes Link Jio Money Yes No No No Link launched in 2016. Offers Mobikwik Yes Yes Yes Yes Link Founded in 2009. Maximum outstanding balance must...

SLA for Service Fabric reads thus : Service Fabric is a free service, therefore, it does not have a financially backed SLA itself. The availability of your Service Fabric cluster is based on the SLA of the underlying virtual machines and storage resources used. Please see the Virtual Machine SLA and Storage SLA for more details. The product documentation for most Azure services is clearly listed but the cost calculation for Service Fabric is not straight-forward. There is no charge for the Service Fabric service itself but the cost of creating the Service Fabric clusters has to be calculated on your own by finding out the resources required which typically include Virtual Machines, Storage, IP Addresses that you're going to use. Questioning the production readiness of Service Fabric, a concerned SF explorer asked on the MSDN forum when SF will be ready for serious deployments . Matt Snider , #AzureServiceFabric  PM's reply in October 2016 - SF is GAd both for our ho...

 This Week I Learned - *  Cloud Foundry is Generally Available on Azure *  On Twitter...both the US president-elect and the leader of ISIS can communicate with equal ease with tens of millions of their respective followers through Twitter — without editors, fact-checkers, libel lawyers or other filters. * Yahoo has not been able to identify how one billion Yahoo accounts and their sensitive user information were hacked in 2013. * "internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information" * 52% of all websites are in English, but only 25% of the world understands English. *  One StackExchange forum user gifted Amazon/iTunes Gift Cards to those who answered his question * A  source map  provides a way of mapping code within a compressed JavaScript or CSS file back to it’s original position in a source file. This means that – with the help of a bit of software – you can easily debug your applications even after your assets have been optimi...

A question on this topic has been viewed on the StackOverflow forum 115,028 times since it was asked 4 years ago! And why would any one want to disable CSS? A developer or tester may want to see how a web page would look if the external CSS files fail to load when viewed over a slow internet connection. If the print output forced by the print stylesheet imposes style settings on the content of the web page that isn't to your liking, you may want to get rid of the meddlesome CSS. There are many good ways to tackle this scenario but I liked the JavaScript bookmarklet approach Also see: HOW TO disable JavaScript in a browser after the page loads

This Week I Learned - * RightScale offers a free tool called Cloud Comparison  that enables you to compare features across the leading public clouds. *  Service Fabric leverages Docker for container management on both Linux and Windows containers. Under the covers, Docker is used to create, manage, and delete containers and container images. *  Service Fabric treats containers like services. Containers are optional. *  A scenario where you can use the ‘Service Fabric Services inside a container’ approach is when you want to take advantage of the container portability and immutability. By packaging the services inside container images you create and immutable environment. Think about a scenario where your service depends on a library, if you don’t use containers you need to make sure the library is present on an SF cluster. If you package the library into a container image it will travel with the app. *  By combining containers with VMs, fewer Virtu...

From the deck on Microservices with AWS Lambda and Azure Service Fabric by Paul Affentranger AWS Lambda Azure Service Fabric Features • Functional approach • Stateless • “Serverless” compute service • Runs code on events • Extends AWS services • Provides back-end service • High-availability • Built-in Fault Tolerance • Automatic scaling • Integrated Security Model • Java, Node.js, and Python • Massively scalable • Self-healing • Programmming in .NET, Java or node.js. • Stateless and stateful • Actor Model • Highly reliable. • Simplify by stateful microservices in place of caches • Deploy to Azure or to on-premises clouds • Running on Windows or Linux • Develop with a "datacenter on your machine" • Deploy support • Applications at higher density • Different Versions side by side • Manage lifecycle without downtime • Upgrade independently • Monitor and diagnose • Scale up or scale down...

A fundamental difference between Cloud Services and Service Fabric is the relationship between VMs, workloads, and applications . Services Density Comparison - click to enlarge image From Matthew Snider's 30 minute tour of Service Fabric - Azure Cloud Service Azure Service Fabric 1 role instance per VM Many microservices per VM Uneven utilization Even utilization (by default, customizable) Low density High density (customizable) Slow deployment & upgrade (bound to VM) Fast deployment & upgrade Slow scaling & failure recovery Fast scaling of independent microservices Limited fault tolerance Tunable fast fault tolerance Microservices enable development and management flexibility​ ​ Service Fabric is the platform for building applications with a microservices design approach​ ​ Service Fabric is ba...

This Week I Learned - *  Nearly every major IT player has latched onto the open source container movement driven by Docker Inc. *  Azure Site Recovery is much cheaper than running a backup data center. Site Recovery keeps images of all your active servers so that you can switch over to them in a disaster. * Jet.com did not find Azure Service Fabric to be production ready for their use cases (as of Sep-16) due to the long time it takes to deploy and lack of documentation & tooling * Channel 9 is producing a lot more videos for developers than earlier like this one on SOLID, Design Patterns with theory, code examples, best practices . *  .NET has  three main runtimes : 1) .NET Framework - The .NET framework helps you create mobile, desktop, and web applications that run on Windows PCs, devices and servers. 2) .NET Core - .NET Core gives you a fast and modular platform for creating server applications that run on Windows, Linux and Mac. 3) Mo...

Containers have been called the next generation of virtualization because they provide application abstraction in much the same way that VMs provide hardware abstraction. Instead of virtualizing the hardware like a VM, a container virtualizes at the OS level. Containers run at a layer on top of the host OS and they share the OS kernel. Containers have much lower overhead than VMs and a much smaller footprint. Containers are not replacements for VMs or operating systems. You install containers on VMs Containers and virtual machines have similar resource isolation and allocation benefits - but a different architectural approach allows containers to be more portable and efficient. click to enlarge image A high-level feature comparison of VMs and containers - Feature VMs Containers "Default" security support to a greater degree to a slightly lesser degree Memory on disk required Complete OS plus apps App requirements only Time taken to start up ...

Taxi aggregators have disrupted transportation services across the globe & faced stiff opposition. The week long cab strike in Hyderabad has bought to the fore the positions of cab drivers, taxi aggregators and the local Government. Some facts that have come out - According to the Telangana Cab Drivers and Owners Association (TCDOA) which has a membership of only 7,000 drivers, Hyderabad has about 1.2 lakh cabs of which 90,000 are running under Ola and Uber. Ola and Uber have attracted many people to join the cab-leasing programme that allows them to run a car on lease and earn Rs 60,000-70,000 per month. Several new drivers have joined in this programme to own a car at the end of four years with a minimum payment. Currently, over 20,000 cars have been registered with Ola while more than 33,000 cabs with Uber run in the city.   Ola pays an minimum business guarantee (MBG) of Rs 2,200 for nine rides a day and Rs 5,800 for 17 rides a day, even if the rides worth is below that a...

This Week I Learned - * Microsoft developed Service Fabric over ten years ago. Service Fabric powers many of Microsoft's hyper-scale cloud services, including SQL DB, DocumentDB, Intune, Cortana and Skype for Business, as well as many internal Azure infrastructure services. *  BuiltWith estimates that Bootstrap is being used on over 7 million websites, worldwide . Since version 2, the Bootstrap site has included a Customizer that allows you to pick and choose the bits you want from the sizable buffet of options. With the Customizer, rather than ending up with a build weighing in at over 200 KB (before you even include the jQuery dependency), you can slim things down to as little as 40 KB. *  The average web page is currently 2.4 megabyte big and has over 200 requests. *  ‘how-to’ searches on YouTube are growing 70% year-over-year *  68% Indian Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are still offline due to a  lack of understanding of the benefits of digit...

Azure VMs receive an internal and an external IP address by default. The internal IP address allows all inbound and outbound traffic to use the local network by default.  External IPs are assigned an external Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol-allocated IP address. The external Azure  VM IP address comes with firewall rules for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Secure Shell rules that are  configured to allow a connection from the outside world for management purposes. Administrators must expose port 80 (HTTP) to connect a VM to external network traffic. The Azure VM IP address can be retained across reboots with a static, reserved IP address. The administrator also  can assign this IP address to alternate machines, which provides backup if the machine must be rebuilt.  Reserve a static IP address if you need a fixed IP address that won't change — for example, if you need to create a DNS 'A' record or add the IP address to a safe list. You can also c...

As part of my learning, I keep looking out for info presented through tables & comparison charts as they summarize lengthy topics & are useful to review what I learn. I post them with the tag ComparisonChart to revisit occasionally. The following comparison chart maps out the key differentiators for each of Azure's four fully-managed NoSQL services : click on image for enlarged view Also see: Azure Management Models: ASM vs ARM AWS vs Azure Services Differences between Cloud Services and Service Fabric

All about AMP, paraphrased from multiple sources - Google introduced the open-source project, Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, in October 2015 AMP serves faster mobile web pages. Google said serving up articles from its own internet network was the best way it knew to achieve the AMP speeds, which are as much as four times faster than a regular mobile web page.  Google caches AMP pages and serving cached version from their search results. The AMP vision includes a web cache that would allow content providers (Google, Bing, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc) to serve the content much faster. The web cache is the core aspect of AMP project and the benefits of using AMP without cache are greatly reduced. Another benefit of AMP is the ability for publishers to syndicate articles across the mobile web without losing advertising or traffic. Publishers get full accounting of traffic, data and advertising revenue. Publishers also retain control of their content and design. Pages delive...

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a graphical language for visualizing, specifying, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of a software-intensive system. This diagram neatly summarizes the 14 UML diagram types defined in UML 2 Talk about a picture speaking a thousand words!

Availability is basically the same as uptime. It’s often measured by “Nines” . Availability specified as a number of nines is often seen in marketing documents. The table below lists the downtime that the nines translate to - Nines Downtime 99% Daily: 14m 24.0s Weekly: 1h 40m 48.0s Monthly: 7h 18m 17.5s Yearly: 3d 15h 39m 29.5s 99.9% Daily: 1m 26.4s Weekly: 10m 4.8s Monthly: 43m 49.7s Yearly: 8h 45m 57.0s 99.95% Daily: 43.2s Weekly: 5m 2.4s Monthly: 21m 54.9s  Yearly: 4h 22m 58.5s 99.99% Daily: 8.6s Weekly: 1m 0.5s Monthly: 4m 23.0s Yearly: 52m 35.7s 99.999% Daily: 0.9s Weekly: 6.0s Monthly: 26.3s Yearly: 5m 15.6s Service Level Agreement (SLA) summary for Azure services  (info as of September 2016; refer to the link for updates) Azure Service SLA Azure DNS vali...