Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Managed Disks provide persistent, secured disk storage for Azure virtual machines. What's NOT possible with Azure Managed Disks: *  You can only increase the size of managed disks.  You cannot decrease/shrink disk size if it's accidentally over-provisioned. You can create a new disk with correct size and then copy the data from old disk. After that delete the old disk. *  The maximum number of disks you can attach to your VM cannot exceed the pre-defined limit for each type of VM *  SQL Server VMs running with datafiles directly on blob cannot leverage or utilize the features of Managed Disks *  Managed disks can be created only for virtual machines deployed using the Resource manager deployment model (not ASM) * It is not possible to add both managed and unmanaged disks to a VM that is in an availability set * ASR Azure to Azure protection is not supported for VMs with Managed Disks. It is going to be supported by the end of Q1 CY2018. * Stor...

In the informal & entertaining Azure Friday Talks, the inimitable Scott Hanselman chats up with Azure product team members on a variety of Azure topics in roughly 10 minutes. Takeaways from the discussion on Azure Backup * Why do you have to backup if every byte on Azure is already stored 3 times? - To protect against ransomware, corruption of data, human error, accidental deletion * Backup is an option within the VM experience * Recovery Services Vault (and not a Azure Storage account) is the centralized location that stores the backup. * Recovery Services Vault holds data for both Backup & DR * Recovery Services Vault is still connected to Azure Storage account but it is abstracted for user * Backup can be retained up to 99 years * You pay for Backup of each VM (~$10) and the storage consumed * Security PIN constantly updated every 5 minutes in the Azure Portal is required before a Azure Backup copy can be deleted * Backup allows you to restore both VHD...

This Week I Learned - * The new Azure Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) (currently in public preview) is built over Availability Zones in Azure which provide resilience against failures through fault-isolated groups of datacenters within a single region. Zone Redundant Storage should be considered for applications where regional availability is critical and downtime is not acceptable, and both read and write access are required at all times. ZRS requires a general purpose v2 account. Effective immediately, the existing ZRS offering has been renamed to ZRS Classic and can continue to be accessed without any code change required - Azure Blog * Google introduced a cloud-computing service ( Cloud AutoML ) that it bills as a way to build a so-called computer vision system that suits your particular needs even if you have little or no experience with the concepts that drive it. If you are a radiologist, for example, you can use CT scans to automatically train a computer algorith...

Gmail automatically identifies spam and suspicious emails and marks those emails as spam . Wonder what made Gmail classify a genuine looking Google Panoramio retirement notification as spam?

Compared to Public Cloud Map in December 2017 , the count of datacenters only for GCP has changed from 13 to 15. GCP now has 15 regions &  44 zones, AWS Cloud spans 50 Availability Zones within 18 geographic Regions while Azure is generally available in 36 regions around the world. Zoom in & out of the map to view details as required

This Week I Learned - *  Even though Azure takes three copies of your virtual machines and stores them in Azure Storage, you still need to protect your data against ransomware, corruption, or accidental deletion. Azure Backup provides built-in security features that can protect your backup data from ransomware, and makes it easy to restore your data from Azure . *  Starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor on Google for mobile searches. *  Instead of including the API key (or placeholder) in the code that you might be sharing through CodePen, prompt the end-user of the pen for their API key at runtime. Then, store whatever key they supply into local HTML5 storage so they don’t have to enter it over and over again . *  Google rewards volunteers to its User Experience Research with a small thank-you gift like a gift card or a donation to their favorite charity . *  New channels on YouTube will need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,00...

To better track the resources available for Microsoft Cognitive Services , I'm compiling a list of key links for easy reference *  Cognitive Services Directory  *  API Reference *  Microsoft Virtual Academy video courses * List of all Microsoft Cognitive Services Vision Speech Language Knowledge Search Computer Vision API Translator Speech API Language Understanding (LUIS) Recommendations API Bing Autosuggest API Face API - API Bing Speech API Text Analytics API Academic Knowledge API Bing Image Search API Content Moderator Speaker Recognition API Bing Spell Check API Knowledge Exploration Service Bing News Search API Emotion API Custom Speech Service Translator Text API QnA Maker API Bing Video Search API Custom Vision Service Web Language Model API Entity Linking Intelligence Service API Bing Web Search API Video Indexer Linguistic Analysis API Custom Decision Service Bing Custom Search API ...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft Web Application Firewall (WAF ) is a feature of Azure Application Gateway (layer 7 load balancer) that protects web applications against common web exploits using OWASP core rule sets . Azure Security Center scans Azure resources for vulnerabilities and recommends mitigation steps for those issues. * Where there is sufficient will and resources, any information system can be compromised. * UIDAI is the Unique IDentification Authority of India and they run the Aadhaar project. Anyone can access the Aaadhaar services from anywhere so long as they can get themselves an Indian IP address. VPN based IP addresses are blacklisted. However, geo-blocking is a really weak, easily circumvented control that often does more harm than good - Is India's Aadhaar System Really "Hack-Proof"? Assessing a Publicly Observable Security Posture *  About two thirds of all browser traffic is now encrypted *  There's a lot more to HTTPS than simply ...

This Week I Learned - * Computer security experts have discovered  two major security flaws in the microprocessors  inside nearly all of the world’s computers. The two problems, called  Meltdown and Spectre , could allow hackers to steal the entire memory contents of computers, including mobile devices, personal computers, servers running in so-called cloud computer networks. By exploiting the Meltdown flaw, a hacker can just load some software onto a cloud service and then grab data from anyone else who has loaded software onto the same server. Phones and PCs are more difficult targets. Before they can exploit the chip flaws, hackers must find a way of getting their software onto your device. They could fool you into downloading an app from a smartphone app store. Or they could trick you into visiting a website that moves code onto your machine. The onus is now on consumers and businesses to install the fix on their machines. A popular ad blocker among security researc...

Source - Multiple articles by   Yevgeniy Brikman  & other online articles : Source Cloud Type Infrastructure Language Agent Master Community Maturity Initial Release Chef Open All Config Mgmt Mutable Procedural Yes Yes Large High 2005 Puppet Open All Config Mgmt Mutable Declarative Yes Yes Large High  2009 Ansible Open All Config Mgmt Mutable Procedural No No Large Medium  2011 SaltStack Open All Config Mgmt Mutable Declarative Yes Yes Medium Medium  2011 CloudFormation Closed AWS Provisioning Immutable Declarative No No Small Medium 2012 Heat Open All Provisioning Immutable Declarative No No Small Low  2012 Terraform Open All Provisioning Immutable Declarative No No Medium Low  2014 Deployment Manager GCP Config Mgmt Declarative   2015 Pulumi Open All Provisioning Immutable Declarative  2017 The...