Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Karmayogi tells the awe-inspiring story of one of India’s greatest engineers & sons, the Metro Man, E Sreedharan . I loved his biography as it filled me with positivity & hope.  The biography was written originally in Malayalam by M.S. Ashokan & translated to English by Rajesh Rajamohan.  In a 50 year accomplished and illustrious career, Sreedharan undertook gigantic projects, battled cultural lethargy and cut through red tape to build facilities that millions of Indians benefit from everyday. Some of the most challenging projects he led include the rebuilding of the Pampan Bridge in record time, Konkan Railways & Delhi Metro. He has won numerous national & international awards including the prestigious Padma Shri & Padma Vibhushan. Such a towering role model also highly deserves the Bharat Ratna. In his long career spanning projects across India, he had numerous tussles with politicians & those in authority who sought to intervene for self...

This Week I Learned - *  Both Amazon Web Services and Azure now support bare-metal machines . *  Migrating to Microservice Databases: From Relational Monolith to Distributed Data [PDF]  by Edson Yanaga takes you through nine different strategies for integrating data from your monolithic application to a microservice architecture. *  NetGuard - no-root firewall  is one open source app that not only prevents apps from using cellular data, it also stops them from connecting over WiFi too   - no root required .  Cutting apps off from the Internet prevents them from tracking your usage and reporting back to a distant server. It also reduces bandwidth, saves battery life, and blocks ads.  Recent versions of Netguard include Google Ads as well as Firebase Analytics * " I have come to believe that cloud development requires a certain kind of DNA which is hard to find in traditional software developers " *  “Shipping beats perfection.” ...

* Google Chrome speech recognition engine - The built-in speech recognition engine within Google Chrome offers hands-free typing for free in not just English but a number of other Indian languages like Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam. You can try this service out on the  Web Speech API Demonstration page Say "New Paragraph" to begin a new paragraph, "Comma", "Full Stop", "Question Mark" for punctuation *  Google Docs Voice Typing (available in Google Chrome only)  - the voice typing feature in Google Docs can be activated from the toolbar (Tools > Voice Typing..) or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shft+S Upon activating it, a microphone appears on your document. There are more than 100 commands to do almost anything in Google Docs without using your hands. It may also work on your Android and iOS phones and tablets but that may depend on the type and model. * Gboard, Google's keyboard app can help y...

Since October, I've been tracking the datacenters of the public cloud providers - AWS, Azure & GCP . While learning about new Google Map customization tricks, I've been adding them too. The new change is that the datacenter locations of each cloud provider can be seen selectively. A summary count as of December 2017 - The AWS Cloud operates 49 Availability Zones within 18 geographic Regions around the world, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more Regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second AWS GovCloud Region in the US Azure is generally available in 36 regions around the world, with plans announced for 6 additional regions.  GCP has 13 regions, 39 zones Zoom in & out of the map to view details as required

This Week I Learned - * Load balancing between virtual machines that reside inside of a virtual network (internal load balancing) is free of charge. While the Basic Azure Load Balancer is free of charge, the Standard Azure Load Balancer (currently in Preview) has a charge associated with it. * The nice thing about Google Cloud Platform documentation is the use of  flowcharts & comparison tables * Google has scanned more than 80 billion of its Street View images for place and business information. In 2015, Apple deployed its own mysterious fleet of data collection vehicles in cities around the world * Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizing consultant who developed the KonMari Method, which consists of gathering everything one owns by category and keeping only those things that "spark joy." Kondo’s method transcends the typical “tidying how-to,” as it aims to cultivate a lifestyle that encourages one to cherish the things that bring true joy—a refreshing alternat...

Back in 2008, Scott McCloud created a comic book for Google explaining the inner workings of Google Chrome . As an aspiring cartoonist, I loved how well it was visualized & drawn. Scott has now created a comic visualization of how Kubernetes works and it is fascinating! It's light-hearted & very informative. The parts that i found especially appealing - " Treat your servers like cattle not pets " Putting apps in containers is a great first step - but now you need to orchestrate those puppies! Kubernetes is Greek for Helmsman Kubernetes is self-healing

I passed the MS Certification Exam 70-473: Designing and Implementing Cloud Data Platform Solutions  yesterday I found the comprehensive list of articles & learning resources compiled by Daniel Calbimonte , helpful. The  eBook Microsoft Azure Essentials: Migrating SQL Server Databases to Azure by Carl Rabeler  [link to PDF] which is not included in that compilation is also very useful As of June 2017, this exam was updated so in addition to the above notably the topic of implementing MySQL and PostgreSQL database solutions in Azure is also covered. It is great that the quality & volume of the Azure official documentation has improved significantly over the last few years. However as there are breaking changes constantly, it is possible that there may be contradictory information (in older Azure Blog posts & the frequently revised Azure documentation) that needs to be watched out for. For instance, Active Geo-replication is now available for all t...

This Week I Learned - * Organizations can now reduce their storage costs even further than using Cool Blob Storage by storing their rarely accessed data in the Archive tier. * Blob-Level Tiering enables customers to optimize storage costs by easily managing the lifecycle of their data across these tiers at the object level. * Customers can easily change the access tier of a single object among the Hot, Cool, or Archive tiers as usage patterns change, without having to move data between accounts. Blobs in all three access tiers can co-exist within the same account - Azure Blog * For SAN workloads, Azure provides integration with StorSimple, Microsoft's proprietary SAN appliance. Architecturally, StorSimple comprises an on-premises StorSimple SAN and a virtual cloud-based appliance that replicates the behavior of the on-premises SAN. On Cloud Platform, you can use persistent disks to support workloads that expect SANs. Used in a SAN context, persistent disks are analogous to...

Paraphrased from Azure SQL Databases Disaster Recovery 101 Azure SQL DB Geo-Restore Azure SQL DB Geo Replication Purpose Geo Restore allows you to recover the database to a different region from backup. The automated backup of all Azure databases is replicated to a secondary region in background. Geo Restore always restores the database from the copy of backup files stored in the secondary region. Geo Replication will create a continuous copy of your database in one or more secondary region(s) (up to 4 secondary replicas). In event of disaster, you can simply failover to one of the secondary region and bring you database back online. You can also configure failover group to recover the databases automatically. Data Loss RPO of geo restore (Recovery Point Objective, not SLA) - 1 hour 5 seconds Recovery Time ~12 hours or more less than 30 seconds Cost & Availability Automatically enabled for all service tiers at no extra cost Active geo-replication (opt-in ...

This Week I Learned - *  Migrate Your Virtual Machines to Microsoft Azure - Proof of Concept guide provides guidance for data migration using Azure Migrate *  When does it really make sense to use Azure Reserved Instances ? * Jeff Bezos has said that the purpose of Amazon Web Services (AWS) was to remove the burden of “undifferentiated heavy lifting” that companies needed to constantly perform to operate their IT infrastructure. The market has validated this value proposition: AWS reported this year that their revenue grew 42% to $4.1B for the second quarter while Microsoft’s cloud business, Microsoft Azure, grew an astonishing 93% - HBR *  MS AI School has learning material on pre-trained AI services like Cognitive Services and Bot Framework, as well as deep learning tools like Azure Machine Learning, Visual Studio Code Tools for AI, and Cognitive Toolkit. * SQL Server Operations Studio is being called the next step towards modernizing the dated SQL Serv...

This Week I Learned - *  The second edition of The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure is out now * Azure SQLDB is already architected to have a primary instance and two secondary instances (replicas), all participating into synchronous database replication with quorum voting, zero data loss and automatic failover. * Azure already has ZRS (Zone Replicated Storage), but is limited to block blob and does not fit in the actual AZ design and implementation. For this reason, it is going under redesign, and once available, will support page Blobs, Tables, Queues and Files . * SQL Server 2012 is licensed per core, which is considered the equivalent to virtual cores in Azure virtual machine instances. The minimum number of cores that can be assigned to a virtual machine instance is four. This means that Extra Small (A0), Small (A1), Medium (A2), Large (A3) and A6 instances must all be assigned four SQL Server core licences. Extra Large (A4) and A7 instances would need to be assign...

In  a recent Google Security Blog post titled " Tizi: Detecting and blocking socially engineered spyware on Android ", chilling details of how a spyware on Android phones was identified and contained, were candidly disclosed. While the Security team's efforts are to be appreciated, to me it highlighted how constantly vulnerable the info on our phones is. Excerpts from that article (emphasis mine) - Tizi is a fully featured backdoor that installs spyware to steal sensitive data from popular social media applications . The Google Play Protect security team discovered this family in September 2017 when device scans found an app with rooting capabilities that exploited old vulnerabilities . The team used this app to find more applications in the Tizi family, the oldest of which is from October 2015 . The Tizi app developer also created a website and used social media to encourage more app installs from Google Play and third-party websites. After gaining root, Tizi steals...

Notes from various Microsoft sources - Availability Zones (AZ) are fault-isolated locations, within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. AZs allow your customers to run mission critical applications with high availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures. The goal of AZ is to serve and support applications that need to use synchronous data replication (the latency could be around 1.5 - 2.0 ms, official numbers may come after general availability release of AZ). Azure Virtual Networks (VNETs) and Subnets, are and will remain "regional" entities. Once you will define in a region, they will be visible and usable across all the AZ since Network Resource Manager in Azure is region-wide. There is no AZ specification for these objects, VNETs and Subnets can cross AZ. You can synchronously replicate your applications and data using Availability Zones within an Azure region for high-availability and asynchronously replicate across Azu...