Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Pack will continue to evolve until 2022 (6 years from now) and will be supported until 2027 (11 years from now). * Azure in Germany is an isolated instance of Azure. It isn’t connected to other Azure regions.  Azure Portal URL is different . *  AWS market share = 3X Azure * The recent WannaCrypt malware exploits a Service Message Block (SMB) vulnerability (CVE-2017-0145). Utilize Windows Update to keep your machines up-to-date with the latest security updates. If you are running Azure Cloud Services (Platform as a Service Web Roles and Worker Roles or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)) automatic updates (including MS17-010 update to resolve this vulnerability) are enabled by default, so there is no further action required. Confirm that anti-malware is deployed and updated. If you are using Microsoft anti-malware for Azure or Windows Defender, Microsoft released an update last week which detects this threat as Ransom:Win32/WannaCrypt. You can also

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Partner Quickstarts  are Azure Resource Manager templates created by trusted Microsoft partners and designed to help you get started with integrated, multi-artifact solutions rather than single applications or services on Azure. *  Microsoft IT migrated more than 120 TB of data to Azure and reduced server footprint from 175 to 110 physical servers—with no downtime for all 54 onboarded applications * Beginning March 1, 2017, Microsoft is changing how new Azure ExpressRoute circuits are deployed in Azure; you’ll need to use Azure Resource Manager to deploy and manage your ExpressRoute circuits. * The free ebook, .NET Microservices: Architecture for Containerized .NET Applications , is an introduction to developing microservices-based applications and managing them using containers using .NET Core and Docker containers. * Any firm that has or uses European personal data anywhere in theh world, comes under the purview of the European Union's Gen

While an image shared over Whatsapp or one taken with your camera app can be expanded, viewing an enlarged view of an image within an app may not be possible. I recently faced a situation where I needed a magnified view of an image within the Ola (cab aggregator) app & discovered that all the popular mobile operating systems (iOS, Android & Windows Phone) offer a way to magnify through the Accessibility option under Settings . After enabling this feature, triple tapping on an image provides an enlarged view. Ola Cabs verifies the background of the cab drivers but I wonder if they have any checks to ensure the driver who actually turns up to take you around is in fact the same driver whose tiny photo appears in the app or in the bill they send at the end of the trip. On my 5.5 inch screen phone, I could therefore not make out if the person driving the cab matched the picture provided in the app. The cab driver assigned by Ola had a 4.6 rating but the impersonator had troub

This Week I Learned - * Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL services which were announced at Build 2017 event, extend similar managed services benefits, global Azure region reach, and innovations that currently power Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse services to the MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines - Azure Blog * Facebook makes you miserable. Google offers digital truth serum. The words we type there are more honest than the pictures we present on Facebook or Instagram. Don’t compare your Google searches with other people’s Facebook posts. Any time you are feeling down about your life after lurking on Facebook, go to Google and start typing stuff into the search box. Google’s autocomplete will tell you the searches other people are making. Type in “I always …” and you may see the suggestion, based on other people’s searches, “I always feel tired” or “I always have diarrhea.” This can offer a stark contrast to social media, where everybody “

I have grown to rely on a few sites that always deliver relevant results so I've adapted Google Custom Search engine to fetch results only from those sites. I ran into QnA Maker (currently in preview), part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, that takes FAQ URLs on the web as input & lets you build a simple question and answer bot. After watching this 8 min video , I figured I could create a simple consolidated interface for all the FAQs on Azure Services  to extend my custom search engine. With a few lines of jQuery, I was able to configure this friendly tool and build a web interface. The interesting part about this service is that you can train the bot to refine responses. After testing it some more, I plan to share it soon. Building a FAQ Bot is easy with QnA Maker

This Week I Learned - * Q. Does Azure Backup deduplicate data across VMs? A. No. Azure Backup does not deduplicate across VMs in the Azure Backup vault. Azure Backup works by only sending and storing the modified blocks of protected data which means only the delta change is stored for each backup optimizing space used. *  The Azure SQL Database has a DNS name which by default is blocked for access through its firewall and access has to be enabled for IP addresses utilizing (from the Internet) and/or from all services in Azure itself. * When an Azure SQL Database instance is accessed from an Azure service the access is through the internal Azure network and not via the Internet. * All new Azure SQL databases will be encrypted with transparent data encryption by default, thereby having encryption at rest. * Amazon is releasing new software updates every 11 seconds * Whatsapp has a billion active users and 57 engineers to keep it running *  LinkedIn to auto-suggest conten

ExpressRoute supports three routing domains for various types of services. Private peering Public peering Microsoft peering Purpose This is the same as the site-to-site VPN option and connects your on-premises network to Virtual Networks in Azure This expands connectivity to most other Azure services such as storage, Azure Websites but note exceptions This expands the connectivity to the Office 365 services Concerns Should be enabled after considering that traffic to Azure now bypasses the normal route to the Internet and instead goes via the dedicated ExpressRoute path. This is an issue if certain monitoring and data leakage prevention solutions are in-place to monitor traffic leaving the on-premises network via the Internet which would now be bypassed for Azure/Office 365. Not available with all carriers and locations Supported services

The Ignite 2016 session Microsoft Azure networking: new network services, features and scenarios(slides 50-54) has a nice case study of Manulife's Azure Journey from 2013 to 2016. Manulife Financial (operating as John Hancock in the United States) is an international financial services group with 34,000 employees and 63,000 agents worldwide in operating divisions in Asia, Canada, and the United States. Manulife choose to Modify and/or Modernize, not Lift and Shift to enable solutions which leverage key characteristics of the cloud i.e. On Demand Resources Key numbers: 2013 2016 Subscriptions 2 46 Virtual Networks 2 55 Azure Regions 1 10 VPNs 2 0 ExpressRoutes 0 8 Virtual Machines 20+ 2000+