Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  With Azure Monitor Notifications you can receive alerts via SMS, email, or a WebHook when Azure is experiencing an incident or when something is logged to your Activity Logs. * Windows Azure Active Directory Sync (DirSync) or Azure AD Sync are deprecated and reached end of support on April 13, 2017.  Azure AD Connect can be used to integrate your on-premises directories with Azure Active Directory. This allows you to provide a common identity for your users for Office 365, Azure, and SaaS applications integrated with Azure AD. * Bare metal is a single tenant server. Compared to the cloud model where multiple users (multi-tenancy) reside on the same physical server, the bare-metal server only has one customer on the server. * A Man in the Middle attack, or MITM, is a situation wherein a malicious entity can read/write data that is being transmitted between two or more systems (in most cases, between you and the website that you are surfing...

Example use cases by Vertical: * Manufacturing • Predictive maintenance or condition monitoring • Warranty reserve estimation • Propensity to buy • Demand forecasting • Process optimization • Telematics * Travel & Hospitality • Aircraft scheduling • Dynamic pricing • Social media—consumer feedback and interaction analysis • Customer complaint resolution • Traffic patterns and congestion management * Retail • Predictive inventory planning • Recommendation engines • Upsell and cross-channel marketing • Market segmentation and targeting • Customer ROI and lifetime value • Demand forecasting • Marketing mix optimization • Personalized offers * Financial Services • Risk analytics and regulation • Customer segmentation • Cross-selling and upselling • Sales and marketing campaign management • Creditworthiness evaluation • Portfolio optimization • Investment modelling • Fraud detection * Healthcare & Life Sciences • Alerts and diagnostics from r...

This Week I Learned - * Azure HDInsight is the only fully-managed cloud Hadoop offering that provides optimized open source analytical clusters for Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and R Server backed by a 99.9% SLA. *  Users can now use H2O.ai’s open source solutions on Azure HDInsight, which allows reliable open source analytics with an industry-leading SLA . *  Azure Site Recovery now supports creating failed over virtual machines in an availability set. *  All of AWS Whitepapers *  The architecture of the internet has tremendous influence over what is made, and what is seen; algorithms influence what content spreads further on Facebook and turns up on top of Google searches. YouTube’s most serious ad change yet came in the wake of reports from The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal that ads were appearing on YouTube videos that espoused extremism and hate speech. according to YouTube creators, that shift has also punished video make...

This Week I Learned - *  Q: What is the maximum number of virtual machines I can have in an Azure Availability Set? A: 50 *  Q. Can I use the same storage account for all the VMs in an availability set? A. Yes but it is better to use different storage accounts for each VM in the Availability Set. *  Q. Can I create more than 100 NSGs per region per subscription? A. Yes. 100 is the default limit but can be increased to 400 for ARM (200 for ASM) . *  Q. Can an Azure resource be in more than one Resource Group? A. No *  Q. Can an Azure VM have more than one public IP? A. No. While an Azure VM can have multiple vmNICs, only the primary adapter can be assigned a public IP. *  Q. How many virtual networks can be peered in Azure? A. Each virtual network can be peered to up to 10 virtual networks. Q. If I have an IaaS VM talking to a PaaS SQL database does the traffic flow through the Microsoft network? A. Yes. *  The goal of the Availabi...

Some of these trackers even come with APIs that can be customized for your own use - Ships/Vessels Flights Satellites Wind Weather - IMD , Skymet , AccuWeather Traffic - Google Maps , Bing Maps , MapMyIndia Trains in India -  National Train Enquiry System , RailYatri.in Buses in India - for tickets purchased through Redbus W.I.P

This Week I Learned - * Windows 10 includes Internet Explorer 11 alongside Microsoft Edge, to provide a consistent and predictable level of compatibility with existing legacy applications. Internet Explorer 11 supports Document modes and Enterprise Mode, which are essential tools for maintaining this backward compatibility. With the F12 developer tools in Internet Explorer 11, you can emulate any site with different Document modes and Enterprise Modes. - IE Blog * The Economic Policy Institute estimated there were about 460,000 people working on H-1B visas in 2013. About half of the visas sought last year were for computer-related positions. Computer programmers made up about 12 percent of all H-1B applications certified by the Department of Labor in 2015 - NDTV * Some of the most addictive games ever made, like the 1980s and ’90s hit Tetris, rely on a feeling of progress toward a goal that is always just beyond the player’s grasp. As the psychologist Adam Alter writes in his book “Ir...

As I'm more heavily involved in Azure now, I thought I'll post about my learnings from online resources under a dedicated tag - TWILIA - This Week I Learnt in Azure. It will feature annotated bookmarks and paraphrased content I run through each week. 1.  Is my data encrypted in transit when I use ExpressRoute? No 2. Can you have both ASM (classic) and ARM VNets connected to a single ER circuit? Yes 3. Can I use a single ExpressRoute circuit with multiple subscriptions? Yes, you can leverage a single ER circuit with as many subscriptions as VNets supported by the ER circuit. The standard ER circuit allows for a maximum of 10 VNets so if you have 1 VNet per subscription you can support 10 subscriptions. 4. Can I use the new VNet peering with ExpressRoute? Yes. This is very useful feature since it can help to provide support for more than the default 10 VNet limit placed on the standard ExpressRoute circuit by leveraging true meshed VNets via VNet peering. 5. Can I ...

Usage Scenarios for Azure Site Recovery - paraphrased from various online articles: * Disaster recovery in the cloud—You can replicate workloads running on running on supported on-premises Hyper-V VMs, VMware VMs, and physical servers to Azure, rather than to a secondary site. This eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary datacenter. ASR provides orchestrated disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created based on the replicated data. You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero-data loss, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. You can easily fail back to your primary site when it's available again. Advanced network management in Site Recovery and Azure simplifies application network requirements, including reserving IP addresses, configuring load-balancers, and integrating Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switc...

This Week I Learned - * The following became generally available - - Azure Network Watcher - to monitor, diagnose, and gain insights into network performance and health. -  Azure Monitor - the central source and pipeline for monitoring data from Azure Azure Resource Health - helps you diagnose and get support when an Azure issue impacts your resources. -  Azure Advisor - personalized recommendation guide that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure resources. -  Web Application Firewall (WAF) , part of the Azure Application Gateway WAF SKU - helps protect web applications from common web-based attacks like SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks, and protocol anomalies. * A centralized web application firewall (WAF) protects against web attacks and simplifies security management without requiring any application changes. Application and compliance administrators get better assurance against threats and intrusions. * Azure Application Gatewa...

While Azure documentation has significantly improved over the last year, it is not easy to find limitations or scenarios that may not work. In my experience, it is good to not just know the typical usage scenarios of Azure services but also where they don't fit - the anti-patterns. Microsoft seeks product feedback through the web-based UserVoice product feedback management tool for its various products including Azure Users can upvote feedback ideas. It is possible to filter by the submitted top ideas. All of the feedback shared in these forums is monitored and reviewed by the Microsoft engineering teams responsible for building Azure. Suggestion and feature requests with most votes have a higher probability of being taken up for implementation by the product teams. This crowd-sourced way of prioritizing product features can give a clue about the limitations of Azure Services. For instance, the second highest voted feature request now for Azure Site Recovery is to increase t...