Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I attended the Google Cloud OnBoard event in Hyderabad where the very accomplished  Google Cloud Trainer, Jasen Baker  was the tour guide to Google Cloud Platform services. Jasen's talk was peppered with funny & interesting tidbits and anecdotes - * Google data centers are warmer than regular data centers * Google cloud hypervisors run on RedHat KVM * Much like the article Azure and AWS services compared , GCP has an article on Google Cloud Platform for AWS Professionals . The  Map Microsoft Azure services to Google Cloud Platform products &  Map AWS services to Google Cloud Platform products articles are useful to know about equivalent services in AWS & Azure * Google has a customer that uses over a exabyte (1000 petabytes) of data * The Site Reliability Engineering book can be read online for free * 8 Google products have more than 1 billion users * China needs access to physical hardware (so data centers have to cater to special regul...

This Week I Learned - * With the availability of Geographic Routing capability in Azure Traffic Manager, you can now direct user traffic to specific endpoints based on the geographic location from where the requests originate. As an example, an e-commerce site can localize the site content and merchandise items to users in a specific region. Knowing where the users are coming from makes it easier to implement mandates related to data sovereignty - Azure Blog *  Kubernetes Pod is a group of one or more containers that are always co-located, co-scheduled, and run in a shared context *  Gartner's Hype Cycle, attempts to capture the perceptions and reality of a given technology. Technologies typically undergo a period of inflated expectations, only to be followed by a downward slope into the trough of disillusionment, whereby the promises of the technology fall short of reality. At some point, a realistic perception of the technology gains momentum and technologists become...

This Week I Learned - * L-Series virtual machines are optimized for storage-intensive workloads.  S series VMs (S192m offers 4.0 TB RAM & 16 TB storage) are optimized for SAP HANA *  Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native platform based on open source technology, for building and deploying applications . Pivotal Cloud Foundry can be run on Google Cloud Platform *  Google follows the API Design Guide when designing Cloud APIs and other Google APIs. This guide is a living document. *  Ionic & PhoneGap are cross-platform mobile frameworks built on top of Cordova * Xamarin comes from Microsoft and takes a unique approach to cross-platform app development. Xamarin applications are written entirely in C#. Xamarin then compiles the C# code into native iOS and Android distributions. The underlying layer on which Xamarin is built on top of is Mono and this enables cross-platform development. The benefit of building applications with Xam...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure SQL Database can now support up to 4TB of storage *  Blobxfer  is an AzCopy-like OS independent Azure storage blob and file share transfer tool *  Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise (GA) is now available on Google Compute Engine, with support for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability (GA). * Google's Cloud Spanner beta is the first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable. With automatic scaling, synchronous data replication, and node redundancy, Cloud Spanner delivers up to 99.999% (five 9s) of availability * The Docker API and container format is now supported on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, every Linux distro, and Windows. *  SQL Server containers are named instances, complete with data and configuration, delivered in seconds.  A mounted 1 TB database is delivered in a container instance in less than one minute. * Go...

Books can't keep pace with the constantly evolving Azure landscape so the best way to learn is through video tutorials.Here's my compilation of Azure PowerShell & related videos - *  Getting Started with Microsoft PowerShell (featuring Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PowerShell) - 30 July 2013 : 6 hours 9 modules *  PowerShell for Beginners - Nov 15, 2016 : 28 mins * What's New in PowerShell v5 - 25 May 2016 : 6 hours 7 modules *  Install PowerShell for Azure - Oct 12, 2016  : 18 mins *  PowerShell and Azure Automation  - Nov 01, 2016  : 24 mins work in progress....

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 similarities between Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Blob Storage are as interesting as the differences Azure Data Lake Store Azure Blob Storage Purpose Optimized storage for big data analytics workloads General purpose object store for a wide variety of storage scenarios Use Cases Batch, interactive, streaming analytics and machine learning data such as log files, IoT data, click streams, large datasets Any type of text or binary data, such as application back end, backup data, media storage for streaming and general purpose data Key Concepts Data Lake Store account contains folders, which in turn contains data stored as files Storage account has containers, which in turn has data in the form of blobs Structur...

Both AWS & Azure provide RSS feeds for all incidents related to the cloud services they provide from their globally distributed data centers. Services like IFTTT & Azure Logic Apps can be used to parse the RSS feed & have them send notificatons via email or text message Azure Logic Apps is an Azure service for implementing simple, scalable integration and workflow across applications. IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web based automation service for small tasks between Internet-connected services. The "This" in "If This Then That" stands for a trigger while the "That" stands for an action. The trigger-action combinations are called recipes. The IFTTT RSS feed to email recipe takes a Feed URL as trigger and the action can be set to send an email while the IFTTT  RSS feed to Text Message recipe takes a Feed URL as trigger and the action can be set to send a text message click on image for enlarged view If the services are healt...

Slide from the Microsoft Virtual Academy video course Microsoft Azure for IT Pros Content Series: Virtual Machines click on image for enlarged view

Slides from the 9-minute Channel9 video Microsoft Azure Stack: Azure Services On-Premises Azure Stack helps create a truly consistent hybrid cloud platform click on images for enlarged view

This Week I Learned - * Amazon Web Services 5-hour outage of S3 (Simple Storage Service) in the highly popular data centre US-East-1 region (North Virginia),  knocked offline not only websites big and small, by yanking away their backend storage, but also knackered apps and Internet of Things gadgets relying on the technology. Its own AWS status dashboard  was down & the S3 downtime ('S3izure'), impacted the following: Docker's Registry Hub, Trello, Travis CI, GitHub and GitLab, Quora, Medium, Signal, Slack, Imgur, Twitch.tv, Razer, heaps of publications that stored images and other media in S3, Adobe's cloud, Zendesk, Heroku, Coursera, Bitbucket, Autodesk's cloud, Twilio, Mailchimp, Citrix, Expedia, Flipboard, and Yahoo! Mail. Other AWS services knackered in the data center include: Elastic File System and Elastic Load Balancing, Simple Email Service, Relational Database Service, Lambda, Elastic MapReduce and Elastic Beanstalk. - The Register * "While ...

Compiled from various online resources: * Learn and use web standards. * Make cross-browser testing part of your tool-chain. * Learn how to remote-debug mobile devices ( Firefox , Chrome ). * Learn how to use device emulators ( Firefox , Chrome ). * Start testing on real mobile devices, on a variety of devices and network speeds, if possible (or simulate these speeds with developer tools). * Try testing on mobile and desktop with services like BrowserStack  via their Real Device Cloud *  Track emerging technologies and maturing standards. References: Doubling Down on Cross-Browser Testing