Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I recently ran into an article ( Azure Site Recovery deployment planner ) in the Azure official documentation that showed its estimated reading time as 40 minutes! Generally, for their other articles the suggest reading time mentioned doesn't work for me due to my reading habits - I may go down some rabbit hole through a link in the article or take time to ponder on some points or illustration. Nevertheless, I love this feature as it gives a rough idea of the length of the article and I feel such a time estimator should be a native browser feature. Till that time, I guess a bookmarklet would be a good way to show estimated time to complete a web pages that doesn't have this indicator. How do web pages that provide this estimated time to complete reading accomplish this feature ? Apparently, there are quite a few plugins which work differently that publishers can add to their pages like  ReadRemaining.js

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Notebooks is a free service that provides Jupyter notebooks along with supporting packages for R, Python and F# as a service. Jupyter (formerly IPython), is a multi-lingual REPL on steroids. This means you can just login and get going since no installation/setup is necessary. Azure Notebooks provides execution environments for Python 2, Python 3, F#, and R. * ...cloud storage options like Amazon’s S3 allow users to open their storage to the internet at large. It should be stressed here that S3 buckets are private by default. This means that every cloud leak involving an S3 storage instance has had those permissions altered at some point by an admin handling the data. When these anonymous public permissions are allowed, the boundary between “the cloud” and the internet dissolves. This data then becomes accessible to anyone. Unlike an Attack, Breach or Hack, a Leak does not require an external actor, but is caused by some action or i...

Hit Refresh  written by Satya Nadella along with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols, takes us through the highs & lows of Microsoft's third CEO's life & Satya's vision for Microsoft and computing in the future. Having used Microsoft products for nearly two decades & their cloud platform, Azure for about six years now, it was interesting to read about the business & people-side of the organization. This is a thought provoking book full of candid observations, ideas & insights Excerpts: Fear of the unknown can send you in a million directions, and sometimes it just dead-ends with inertia. A leader has to have an idea what to do—to innovate in the face of fear and inertia. We need to be willing to lean into uncertainty, to take risks, and to move quickly when we make mistakes, recognizing failure happens along the way to mastery. When I learn about a shortcoming, it’s a thrilling moment. The person who points it out has given me the gift of insight. I...

Update :  I now have a more improved version of the map that I revise at intervals -0- Rather than a tabular summary, a  visual map of the global location of data centers of the three popular cloud providers - Amazon Web Services, Azure & Google Cloud Platform   provides a better view of how they are distributed. Having this information is helpful when you have to locate the nearest cloud region to deploy a solution & handle latency As newer data centers keep getting added, I wanted to have a easy way to view a dynamic map. I learnt from a smart geek that it is easy to hook location details in a Google Spreadsheet to a custom Google Map. To get the latitude and longitude from the location name, I used the following formula in Google Sheets - =IMPORTXML("http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=" &D32, "/GeocodeResponse//location") where D32 is a reference to the cell containing the name of a datacenter location pr...

This Week I Learned - * The Azure Building Blocks project is a command line tool and set of Azure Resource Manager templates designed to simplify deployment of Azure resources. * The licensing cost charged for SQL Server or Oracle is based on processors on the server they are deployed to. The latest versions of the most popular VM sizes (DS, ES, GS, and MS) constrain the vCPU count to one half or one quarter of the original VM size, while maintaining the same memory, storage and I/O bandwidth. These new VM sizes are marked with a suffix that specifies the number of active vCPUs to make them easier for you to identify. For example, the current VM size Standard_GS5 comes with 32 vCPUs, 448GB mem, 64 disks (up to 256 TB), and 80,000 IOPs or 2 GB/s of I/O bandwidth. The new VM sizes Standard_GS5-16 and Standard_GS5-8 comes with 16 and 8 active vCPUs respectively, while maintaining the rest of the specs of the Standard_GS5 in regards to memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth. These new...

It is great that Microsoft employees answer questions on forums like StackOverflow and in response to comments in blog posts. I wanted to collate interesting Q&A that I run into as part of my learning & research. Some content has been edited for clarity & to provide context. Is WebJobs available in the Windows version of Web Apps but not in the Linux version of Web Apps? apurva.joshi@MSFT : WebJobs are not supported on Linux offering. Moving forward, In general, our recommendation is to use Azure Functions for generic WebJob workload. We understand this might not be viable option for all scenarios and we are exploring options to address those as well. Can we migrate current Azure App Service apps to Linux ones? Not that I'd know how exactly it would work, but I have an ASP.NET Core Azure App Service app that I'd like to see run on Linux. Would we have to create another one, deploy to it, kill the other one and copy settings over? apurva.joshi@MSFT : Yes, you w...

As per Statista , there are 167 startup companies valued at one billion U.S. dollars or more by venture-capital firms worldwide, as of September 2017. The following ten Indian startups are on that list: Flipkart - 11.6B Patym (One97 Communications) - 7B Snapdeal - 6.5B Ola Cabs (ANI Technologies) - 3.5B InMobi - 2.5B Mu Sigma - 1.5B Hike - 1.4B Shopclues.com - 1.1B Quikr - 1B Zomato Media - 1B Also see - Beware of the sneaky things Indian e-commerce sites do Indian comparison shopping sites

* Active Directory expert & Microsoft MVP, John Craddock has made available online a shorter version of his identity masterclass - 1: Introductions all round 2: It’s all about protocols 3: Creating and managing an Azure Active Directory 4: Synchronising Azure and on-premises AD 5: Working with SaaS applications 6: Managing your applications 7: The Azure AD Application Proxy 8: Integrating with on-premises AD and AD FS 9: Creating a B2C directory 10: Enabling partners with B2B invitations * Channel 9 has a good list of video based content on Azure AD .. WIP

This Week I Learned - * With the native integration between Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions, you can simply add a trigger function directly from your Azure Cosmos DB account. The benefit of a trigger function is that it only executes when an event happens, which triggers a function call. Using Functions and Azure Cosmos DB, you can create and deploy event-driven, planet-scale serverless apps with extremely low-latency access against very rich data for a large number of customers across the globe. * SQL Server Developer offers free images for development/testing (not production). You only pay to run the operating system (OS) in the virtual machine. SQL Server Express’ images are free-licensed for lightweight production workloads. If you want to run a lightweight workload in production (GB/database), then use the free-licensed SQL Server Express edition. A SQL Express VM will only charge for the cost of the VM, not SQL licensing. * Alexa, Amazon’s voice-assistant, is the cl...

MSDN subscriptions are now called Visual Studio Subscriptions. One of the benefits you get with the annual  Visual Studio Subscriptions is access to the Opsgility Azure training website. With the free  Visual Studio Dev Essentials program, you get access for a shorter duration. I found their course catalog impressive. I especially found their Labs feature interesting and finished one today - Lab: Implementing Azure Site Recovery – Azure to Azure In this lab, you will configure Azure Site Recovery to protect a sample n-tier application by configuring replication from the source Azure region to a target Azure region. Once the initial replication has completed and the application is protected, you will perform a test fail over and validate application functionality. Finally, you will accomplish the cleanup of the test failover resources. A lab is no fun if it goes smoothly. I encountered the following error after I chose South India as the location for deploying the ...

This Week I Learned - * Since Azure Web Apps do not support using the same host name across more than one subscription, it is not possible to use Web Apps from more than one subscription in a single Traffic Manager profile. *  Accenture, Microsoft, and SAP undertook a move of Accenture’s entire 7 TB SAP Business Warehouse (BW) landscape and architecture from an on-premise data center to Azure * JIRA Software Data Center is now supported to run in Azure. JIRA Software Data Center is Atlassian's purpose-built solution for organizations scaling JIRA Software that need high availability, disaster recovery, and performance at scale. *  Google Clips camera is trained to capture soundless video of faces and pets that it recognizes using AI. By only capturing soundless video, Google Clips dodges any laws against wiretaps. * Pixel Buds aren't just wireless headphones, they're also wireless translators - for 40 languages! *  Stanford University’s Machine ...

Tabular summary of the article Azure Blob Storage: Hot, cool, and archive (preview) storage tiers To manage costs for your expanding storage needs, it's helpful to organize your data based on attributes like frequency-of-access and planned retention period. With hot, cool, and archive storage tiers, Azure Blob storage addresses this need for differentiated storage tiers with separate pricing models. Blob Storage Accounts are specialized storage accounts for storing your unstructured data as blobs (objects) in Azure Storage distinct from General Purpose Storage Account. You cannot convert an existing storage account to a Blob storage account Blob storage accounts cannot be used to store virtual machine disks or page blobs. Going forward, Blob storage accounts are the recommended way for storing blobs Hot storage tier Cool storage tier Archive storage tier Purpose for storing data that is accessed frequently for storing data that is infrequently accessed a...

Tabular summary paraphrased from the article  Deciding when to use Azure Blobs, Azure Files, or Azure Disks Attribute Azure Blobs Azure Files Azure Disk Description Provides an SMB interface, client libraries, and a REST interface that allows access from anywhere to stored files. Provides client libraries and a REST interface that allows unstructured data to be stored and accessed at a massive scale in block blobs. Provides client libraries and a REST interface that allows data to be persistently stored and accessed from an attached virtual hard disk. When to use You want to "lift and shift" an application to the cloud which already uses the native file system APIs to share data between it and other applications running in Azure. You want to store development and debugging tools that need to be accessed from many virtual machines. You want your application to support streaming and random access scenarios.  You want to be able to access application data ...

I completed the Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure course on Coursera which offers a broad introduction to GCP.  The course is aimed Systems Operations professionals and Cloud Architects using Google Cloud Platform to design, create, or migrate application environments and infrastructure and is taught by Google Cloud Training . It covered the following topics: Module 1: Introduction to Google Cloud Platform Module 2: Getting Started with Google Cloud Platform Module 3: Google App Engine and Google Cloud Datastore Module 4: Google Cloud Platform Storage Options Module 5: Google Container Engine Module 6: Google Compute Engine and Networking Module 7: Big Data and Machine Learning I loved the well designed course material. I'll keep referring to the very informative slides & video transcripts that came with it. A sampling of the notes - Container separates operating system from application code and dependencies. Virtualization at the opera...

As a web developer, if you see a need to  prevent AJAX requests in Chrome after initial load for a single website, here are the steps  - 1. Use the Ctrl+Shift+I or F12 function key keyboard shortcut in Chrome to invoke Developer Tools 2. Within Dev tools, click on the three vertical dots icon on the right side of the menu, slide down to "More Tools" & select "Network conditions" from the sub menu 3. In the "Network conditions" tab, choose "Offline" in the dropdown against the "Network Throttling" option This way you can conditionally control AJAX requests for a single website without having to use the other blunt alternative of unplugging the network cable to remove all internet access. Also see: HOW TO disable CSS of a web page after it loads in a browser HOW TO disable JavaScript in a browser after the page loads