Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

To determine if a cloud solution is cost effective, it helps to know the price of the components of the solution from an Azure billing point of view. Some Azure SQL Database Pricing examples from the official documentation - Pricing example for a single database with extra storage provisioned Suppose an S3 database has provisioned 1 TB. The amount of storage included for S3 is 250 GB, and so the extra storage amount is 1 TB – 250 GB = 774 GB.  The unit price for extra storage in the Standard tier is approximately $0.0851/GB/month during preview, and so the extra storage price is 774 GB * $0.0851/GB/month = $65.80/month .  Therefore, the total price for the S3 database is $148/month for DTUs + $65.80/month for extra storage = $213.38/month. Pricing example for an elastic pool with extra storage provisioned Suppose a 125 eDTU Premium pool has provisioned 1 TB.  The amount of storage included for a 125 eDTU Premium pool is 250 GB, and so the extra storage amou...

This Week I Learned - * Sovereign clouds (aka "national clouds") are instances of Azure restricted to a particular group of users. This group may consist of one geopolitical boundary (e.g. country) or legal boundary (e.g. public sector). * When you enroll in a Qwiklabs Quest you do NOT need a Google Cloud Platform account or project to run the self-paced labs. An account, project and associated resources are provided to you as part of this lab. A Quest is a series of related labs that form a learning path. * Google Translate switched from phrase-based translation to Google Neural Machine Translation , which means that the tool now translates whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece. It uses this broader context to figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar. Using this updated version of Google Translate, the English, Spanish and French translations of the song wer...

This Week I Learned - * Lambda runs a customer’s line of code in response to a request, like looking up a ZIP code when given an address. Customers never rent servers, but pay for the moments of computing. The per-millionth pricing began last November, in the A.W.S. product Lambda. At Amazon Web Services, which pioneered this method late last year, there is no charge for the first million times a customer runs code. Thereafter, A.W.S. charges by the million times, or for the hundreds of milliseconds the computer is used. Google charges pennies for search ads and spends $9.9 billion annually building out a global computing business. Good luck to any new entrant without the scale of these tech giants, however, as customers come to expect that sort of cheap metering. This economics of tiny things demonstrates the global power of the few companies, including Microsoft and Google, that can make fortunes counting this small and often - NY Times * A Cloud Guru website's Salesforce 1...

2 infographics in the Sunday edition of Times of India present a grim picture of Indian cities - Garbage generated in Bengaluru has increased by 1750% from 200 tonnes/day in 2000 to 3700 tonnes per day in 2015 The ranking of a majority of cities based varies drastically across quality of life indices

This Week I Learned - *  Nerdy Data & PublicWWW are search engines to search within the HTML source code/mark-up * Non-practicing entities (NPEs), commonly referred to as “patent trolls,” look to capitalize on vulnerabilities in the cloud. NPEs are stockpiling cloud technology patents. Microsoft Azure IP Advantage offers indemnification protection to customers using open source technologies that power many Azure products and services today - Azure Blog * Researchers at Microsoft Research Labs in Bengaluru are studying the unique ways in which Indians mix languages in everyday conversations - and an easy source of such conversations are Hindi movies. Insights like this would help companies like Microsoft build better, more socially-aware bots and enhance the quality of interactions...the researchers say they are hamstrung by the paucity of freely available scripts and have leaned on independent scriptwriters and filmmakers to source scripts - ET * Storage and m...

This Week I Learned - * It is good to see that the integration of related Azure Services is getting easier. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is now built into the virtual machine experience so that you can setup replication in one click (currently in preview) for your Azure virtual machines. Combined with ASR’s one-click failover capabilities, its simpler than ever before to setup replication and test a disaster recovery scenario.   Azure CDN is integrated with Azure Storage and Azure Web App . *  Hosting applications in the new Google Cloud Platform region in Mumbai can improve latency from 20-90% for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and of course Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the closest region, Singapore . * The GCPing website measures latency to GCP regions by having your browser makes HTTP requests to f1-micro instances in each region. The median time between request and response is shown. *  Google Fusion Tables can turn a table of locations ...

Update : I now have a more improved version of the map that I revise at intervals Having discovered how easy it's to build a custom map with Google Sheets & Google Maps , I revised an earlier map to better show a consolidated map of the approximate data center locations of the three big public cloud service providers - Azure, AWS, GCP click on images for enlarged view The map can answer visually questions like - "The current data center whose workloads are planned to be migrated to the public cloud is in Hamburg, Germany. What are closest cloud data centers I can choose?" The map's search function shows that Amsterdam, Madgeburg & Frankfurt are the closest Azure regions The locations shown are not exact. The official documentation of the top 3 cloud providers names the cities in which the data-centers are located. However in a few cases, the location is broadly specified with just the state, country or geographic region name.  In case of...