Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

After having it on my reading list for a very long time, I finally managed to finish the allegorical novella " Animal Farm: A Fairy Story " and loved it!  The satirical book by George Orwell reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Wikipedia provided me the historical context Vocabulary.com, the modern online dictionary's light-hearted definition of allegory is amusing - An allegory is like a  metaphor on steroids : a writer tells a fictional story where everything and everyone in it is supposed to represent a deeper meaning. Using a plain old metaphor, you might call death "the grim reaper," but an allegory might build a whole tale of how the grim reaper goes around in a black cloak and informs people of their impending doom. Aesop's Fables are allegories, with animals taking the place of different human character types  Though it was written in 1945, Orwell's phenomen...

This Week I Learned - *  You can see a preview (almost like a daily build) of the Azure Portal if you go to https://preview.portal.azure.com instead of https://portal.azure.com *  LogicApps are the enterprise equivalent of IFTT (If This Then That) and allow developers to create complex logic operations that respond to predefined events or triggers. For example, if a file is uploaded to OneDrive for Business, copy that file to a Storage Account and send an email. The difference between ‘Azure Functions’ and LogicApps is that LogicApps offers no way to write custom code . * .NET has turned 15 & Visual Studio 20.  Twenty years ago, Visual Studio 97 brought Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, and Visual InterDev into one single product. * The .NET Standard Library is a formal specification of .NET APIs that are intended to be available on all .NET runtimes (.NET Framework, .NET Core, Mono for Xamarin). CoreCLR is the .NET runtime, use...

Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly Internet Information Server) is an extensible web server created by Microsoft IIS version Windows OS Remarks/Features IIS 1.0 Windows NT 3.51;  1996 IIS 2.0 Windows NT 4.0 1996 IIS 3.0 Service Pack 2 of Windows NT 4.0 1996; introduced Active Server Pages (ASP) IIS 4.0 "Option Pack" for Windows NT 4.0 1997  IIS 5.0 Windows 2000 2000; support for the WebDAV protocol, enhancements to ASP IIS 5.1 Windows XP Professional 2002  IIS 6.0 Windows Server 2003 2003  IIS 7.0 Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista 2008  IIS 7.5 Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 2009  IIS 8.0 Win...

Azure supports SNI & IP based SSL . What is the difference between the two? IP based SSL associates a certificate with a domain name by mapping the dedicated public IP address of the server to the domain name. This requires each domain name (contoso.com, fabricam.com, etc.) associated with your service to have a dedicated IP address. This is the traditional method of associating SSL certificates with a web server. SNI (Server Name Indication) based SSL is an extension to  SSL  and Transport Layer Security (TLS;   TLS is just the ‘proper’ name for modern day SSL ) that allows multiple domains to share the same IP address, with separate security certificates for each domain. Most modern browsers (including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Opera) support SNI, however older browsers may not support SNI.  Server Name Indication was introduced in IIS 8.0 SNI certificates were introduced to get round the problem of the 1:1 mapping between sites and IP addres...

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...

The Pluralsight course " Understanding the Difference Between Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS " by Microsoft MVP, Tim Warner is available for free during this month. It is not too technical or comprehensive & may be suitable for folks looking for a high level comparison of services offered by the top 2 cloud providers. If you don't have the time to watch the 6-hour course, you can download the deck available as PDF files & take the quiz Except the first point, most points are mixed up in the slide and have to be swapped. Also see: AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform – Networking

This Week I Learned - * The Dv2-series CPU is about 35% faster than the D-series CPU. The Dv2-series has the same memory and disk configurations as the D-series. * Your Azure subscription might also limit the number of cores you can deploy in certain size families. * Azure is divided physically and logically into units called  regions . A region consists of one or more datacenters that are close.  A region resides within the same geography as its pair  (with the exception of Brazil South) in order to meet data residency requirements for tax and law enforcement jurisdiction purposes. *  It is possible to try Service Fabric on Azure for free, without any subscription *  Microsoft services support deployment and management through Resource Manager *  The minimum supported size for a Service Fabric cluster running production workloads is five nodes. * Microsoft provides Lab instructions for 2 Service Fabric scenarios -   stateless Service Fab...

Native apps are extremely easy to install  & use by even lay people but even the most experienced users can fall prey to evil apps This list from a Google blog post explains how they can be harmful: “Potentially Harmful Applications,” or PHAs, are Android applications that could harm you or your device, or do something unintended with the data on your device. Some examples of PHA badness include: Backdoors : Apps that let hackers control your device, giving them unauthorized access to your data. Billing fraud : Apps that charge you in an intentionally misleading way, like premium SMS scams or call scams. Spyware : Apps that collect personal information from your device without consent Hostile Downloads : Apps that download harmful programs, often through bundling with another program Trojan Apps : Apps that appear benign (e.g., a game that claims only to be a game) but actually perform undesirable actions. Just because the app has been downloaded from Google Play...

Unlike most Azure PaaS services, there is no charge for the Service Fabric service itself but the final cost of creating the Service Fabric clusters & running them has to be calculated on your own. A  minimum of the following IaaS resources are at least created for you: Virtual Machine Scaleset Public IP address Virtual Network Load Balancer Storage accounts I was curious to know what are the minimum and maximum capacities you can have for the cluster components so I monkeyed around the Service Fabric blades click image to enlarge Node types can be seen as equivalent to roles in cloud services. In each node type you can define the VM sizes, the number of VMs, and their properties. A Service Fabric cluster must have at least one node type and upto 3 in a cluster. Durability tier determines the SKU size for your node type. The default Bronze tier supports Standard_A/D/DS SKUs. Gold tier supports G5 as the largest VM type possible if available in chosen re...

This Week I Learned - *  HockeyApp is Microsoft's mobile DevOps solution. With it, you can distribute builds to beta testers, collect crash data, and get user feedback. It also integrates with Visual Studio Team Services enabling easy build deployments and work item integration. *  Microsoft and Cisco have had a partnership since 2014 to develop products and services designed to “modernize data centers.” Cisco will expand its hybrid cloud offerings by integrating Microsoft Azure Stack into its Unified Computing System. * Hans Rosling's son, Ola Rosling, built the Trendalyzer software to animate data compiled by the UN and the World Bank that helped him explain the world with graphics. Rosling co-founded the Gapminder Foundation together with his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund to develop Trendalyzer to convert international statistics into moving, interactive graphics. The provocative presentations that have resulted have made him famous and h...

ExpressRoute is an Azure service that lets you create private connections between Microsoft datacenters and infrastructure that’s on your premises or in a colocation facility . Related: T echEd - ExpressRoute: Connecting Private and Public Clouds through Network Service Providers

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. One of the main use cases for IoT Hub is to gather telemetry from devices. For this reason, IoT Hub is often compared to Azure Event Hubs. Like IoT Hub, Event Hubs is an event processing service that enables event and telemetry ingress to the cloud at massive scale, with low latency and high reliability. However, the services have many differences : Area IoT Hub Event Hubs Communication patterns Enables device-to-cloud communications (messaging, file uploads, and reported properties) and cloud-to-device communications (direct methods, desired properties, messaging). Only enables event ingress (usually considered for device-to-cloud scenarios). Device state information Device twins can store and query device state informat...

Should you use a particular Azure Service? To decide that it helps to know when it started so that you can judge if it is mature enough.  Timeline of when Azure Services became General Available  (keep checking this link for the latest updates): March 2019 Azure Backup for SQL Server in Azure Azure Lab Services February 2019 Azure Data Explorer Lsv2 Azure virtual machines  Azure Cost Management for EA customers  Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 January 2019 Azure Data Box Disk December 2018 Azure Monitor for Containers Disaster recovery for virtual machines deployed in Availability Zones to another region Native disaster recovery solution for applications running on Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Site Recovery Azure SQL Database managed instance business critical tier October 2018 Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Business...

This Week I Learned - * The development environment of the Azure Service Fabric SDK is identical to the production environment with no emulators involved. * With Word Lens feature in Google Translate app , you just need to fire up the Translate app, point your camera at Japanese text, and the English translations will appear overlaid on your screen—even if you don't have an Internet or data connection. The app can translate 52 languages when you have no Internet. * It is good to hear if " there is an API for that " rather than an App for that. Native Apps are hard to maintain * Under NIXI, the INRegistry functions as an autonomous body with primary responsibility for maintaining the .IN ccTLD and ensuring its operational stability, reliability, and security. INRegistry has assumed responsibility for the registry from the previous registry authority, The National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) and its Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). Nat...