Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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.  Azure Redis Cache is a distributed, managed cache that helps you build highly scalable and responsive applications by providing you super-fast access to your data. Unlike traditional caches which deal only with key-value pairs, Redis is popular for its highly performant data types. The below comparison table is from the Azure Redis Cache Pricing chart  with additional notes gathered online - Basic Standard Premium Ideal for Development / testing Production ready Cache with master / slave replication Enterprise ready tier which can be used as a cache and persist data. Designed for maximum scale and enterprise integration Cache Yes Yes Yes Replication and Failover - Yes Yes SLA - 99.9% 99.9% Co...

WebSockets provide a mechanism for fast, secure two-way communication between a client and a server over the web using HTTP(S). WebSockets is a good choice over HTTP in usage scenarios where the following attributes are required - * Fast Reaction Time * Ongoing Updates * Ad-hoc or “fire and forget” Messaging * High-Frequency Messaging with Small Payloads Some typical usage scenarios are : * Location-based apps * Collaborative editing/coding * Financial tickers * Sports updates - Football scores from the previous week’s game are highly cacheable because they are stable and unlikely to change, so HTTP would be a good fit. Football scores from a game in progress, however, are likely to change frequently. In that case, the resource is not highly cacheable, so a WebSocket becomes the better fit. * Multimedia chat * Multiplayer games * Collaborative drawing on a digital communal chalkboard * Clickstream data - to track user interactions on a website A high level compari...

This Week I Learned - *  By using the long-term backup retention feature of Azure SQL Database, you can “store your SQL database backups in an Azure Recovery Services vault for up to 10 years”. *  Web Application Firewall (WAF) Application Gateway provides you with all the benefits of a Basic Application Gateway , as well as protection against malicious web requests. WAP is a feature of Application Gateway that provides centralized protection of your web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities. *  App(lication) Insights not only allows monitoring but also allows you to manage application performance. It works with live web applications that are developed using .Net, Java, Node.js and can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.  *  In order to monitor live desktop and mobile apps, Microsoft recommends the use of HockeyApp platform.  *  Azure Advisor blade integrates with Security Center to come up with recommendations around hi...

Update - Since writing this, I created my own Public Cloud Map covering Azure, AWS & GCP locations that I update at intervals Azure is generally available in 34 regions around the world, with plans announced for 6 additional regions - as of June 2017 The following links provide the most up to date info - Microsoft Azure Regions & locations of Data-Centers Products & Services hosted at Azure Data-Centers

This Week I Learned - * All newly created Azure SQL databases will automatically be protected with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). TDE is SQL’s proven encryption-at-rest technology that is required by many compliance standards to protect against theft of storage media. Customers can manage the TDE encryption keys and other secrets in a secure and compliant management using Azure Key Vault - Azure Blog * The Virtual Machines Readiness Assessment tool will automatically inspect your on-premises environment, whether it is physical or virtualized, and provide you with a check list and detailed report on steps you need to take to move your environment to the cloud. * The free Virtual Machine Optimization Tool automatically inspects SQL Server, Active Directory, and SharePoint deployments and provides a detailed set of prioritized recommendations and step-by-step instructions for improvement. Aimed especially at IT pros, this tool is a companion to the Virtual Machine Readiness As...

Interesting facts about Azure SQL Data Sync from blog posts & comments to articles - Azure SQL Data Sync has been in Preview mode since 2012.  Gmail which was launched on April 1,2004 as an invitation-only e-mail service officially exited its beta status on 7 July 2009 - after 5 years Azure SQL Data Sync can be used to implement the data distribution between on-premises SQL Server, Azure SQL VM and Azure SQL databases, in uni-direction or bi-direction. A Sync Database is a customer owned Azure SQL Database located in the same region as the Sync Group which stores metadata and logs. One Sync Database can be used for many sync groups in the same region. SQL Data Sync is only for SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. All versions after SQL Server 2008 are supported.  SQL Express is planned to be officially supported when the product becomes Generally Available (GA) SQL Data Sync supports an automatic scheduled Sync. 5 minutes is currently the smallest frequ...

My notes on Hypervisors paraphrased from TechTarget articles - A hypervisor , also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM), creates and manages guest virtual machines (VMs) on a physical host system by allowing multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a single physical machine.  Hypervisors enable efficient use of resources, isolation, and easier management of virtualised environments in the underlying hardware. A hypervisor makes the underlying hardware details irrelevant to the VMs. A VM is essentially little more than code operating in a server's memory space. Snapshot tools can quickly capture the content of that VM's memory space and save it to disk in moments. There are two types of hypervisors: Type 1, or "bare-metal" runs directly on the hardware, while Type 2 runs on a host operating system.  "Bare metal" hypervisors are the most common and popular type of hypervisor for the enterprise data center. They are deployed directly atop...

Microsoft is bringing together all former MVPs and help them stay in touch with the Microsoft community through the MVP Reconnect program As a ASP.NET MVP for 5 years starting from 2005, I had the good fortune of interacting and collaborating with many folks in the development community who are passionate about Microsoft technologies.  I'm happy now to be part of the rMVP club  and about what lies ahead

I'll update these tables as I keep learning more about AWS, Azure, GCP. The following info is derived from the official documentation of the public cloud providers - Marketplace Area AWS  Azure  Google Cloud Platform Marketplace AWS Marketplace Azure Marketplace Cloud Launcher Compute Area AWS Azure GCP  Virtual servers Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) VMs Azure Virtual Machines Google Compute Engine Amazon Lightsail Azure Virtual Machines & Images Container management EC2 Container Service (ECS) Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (formerly  Azure Container Service ) Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE; formerly Google Container Engine ) EC2 Container Registry Azure Container Registry (Preview) Google Container Registry Microservice-based applications None Service Fabric Backend process logic Lambda Functions Google Cloud Functions Lambda @ Edge None Job orchestration AWS Batch Azure Bat...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Resource RateCard API gets price and metadata information for resources used in an Azure subscription * While AWS is an absolute killer in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), its Platform as a Service (PaaS) business is in its early stages, and it doesn’t play in the cloud-applications (SaaS) space. Microsoft has become a powerhouse in all three layers -  Forbes *  ASP.NET Core and .NET Core lend themselves perfectly to cross platform development, and the use of Linux based Docker containers makes sharing the back end components with our front end team a breeze. *  Docker for Windows  supports both Linux Containers and Windows Containers. Docker for Windows requires 64bit Windows 10 Pro and Microsoft Hyper-V. *  Image2Docker maintained by Docker, helps migrate (.NET Framework apps running in) VMs to Containers.  *  Microsoft 2017 Partner of the Year Awards are announced. Cognizant Technology Solut...

Mike McKeown has a nice summary of the Azure VM types - A series – Normal generic VMs F series – Eventually replace generic A-series D/DS series  – “DISK” with faster caching G/GS series – “GODZILLA” with very large RAM N series – “NVIDIA” (Graphics units) H series – “HPC” Compute Intensive with fast Infiniband RDMA L/LS series -“LOW LATENCY” storage optimized The official documentation has another view of Azure sizes - Type Sizes Description General purpose DSv2, Dv2, DS, D, Av2, A0-7 Balanced CPU-to-memory ratio. Ideal for testing and development, small to medium databases, and low to medium traffic web servers. Compute optimized Fs, F High CPU-to-memory ratio. Good for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processes, and application servers. Memory optimized GS, G, DSv2, DS High memory-to-core ratio. Great for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics. Storage optimized Ls High disk through...

This Week I Learned - *  Site Recovery provides a simple way to replicate Azure VMs between regions. Site Recovery replication for Azure virtual machines is currently in preview . * Treat servers as cattle, not as pets - An ARM template is a powerful modeling tool in support of a “no pets” policy, which is interesting to consider as your cloud environments grow more complex while also wanting to make environments easier to manage. Another benefit stems from keeping the ARM template itself as an “infrastructure as code” artifact that can be used to document – and, more to the point, as executable documentation – for stamping out environments predictably. And still another feature: the ARM runtime handles a lot of the complex parts that could come by trying to script one resource at a time via imperative PowerShell scripts – for example, error recovery and retries -  Bill Wilder, When NOT to use PowerShell with Azure * Google Alphabet generates 88% of its revenue...