Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Since October 2017, I've been tracking the datacenters of the public cloud providers - AWS, Azure & GCP . The new change is that the datacenter locations of each cloud provider can be seen selectively. A summary count as of March 2018 - The AWS Cloud operates 54 Availability Zones within 18 geographic Regions and 1 Local Region 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 40 regions around the world, with plans announced for 10 additional regions GCP has 15 regions, 45 zones Zoom in & out of the map to view details as required

This Week I Learned - *  Now you can backup Azure VMs with disk sizes up to 4TB(4095GB), both managed and unmanaged. * The following two Linux distributions can be used to host the SAP HANA Platform on Azure: - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (SLES for SAP) releases 11 & 12 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA (based on RHEL7) * "Deepfake" refers to an ultrarealistic fake video made with artificial intelligence software. Deepfakes are one of the newest forms of digital media manipulation, and one of the most obviously mischief-prone. FakeApp makes it free and relatively easy to create realistic face swaps and leave few traces of manipulation. FakeApp is a program that was built by an anonymous developer using open-source software written by Google..called TensorFlow, which was developed by Google's A.I. division and released to the public in 2015 - NY Times * Roughly a third of American gun owners buy guns without a background check, whi...

The CloudEndure 2017 Cloud Migration Survey Report [PDF] presents benchmarks, trends, and best practices based on responses from 256 IT professionals from around the world, collected through an online survey during January 2017. Half (50%) of the companies surveyed estimate the cost of migration to be between $100-$500/machine, and 17% estimate it costs more than $500/machine. Among enterprise companies, 23% estimate the cost to be more than $500/machine. Top Considerations for Choosing Target Cloud Platform Top Migration Challenges “Downtime Window” Goal for Completing Migration Cutover Primary Drivers for Migration Migration Phases in “Man-Months” Top Workloads for Migration by Type

This Week I Learned - *  You may only tier your object storage data to hot, cool, or archive in Blob Storage or General Purpose v2 (GPv2) accounts. General Purpose v1 (GPv1) accounts do not support tiering.  * Microsoft has retired the certification exam 70-534: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions on December 31, 2017, and replaced it with Exam 70-535 that covers the new (but related) objective domain. *  Cloud Practice Development Playbooks have useful guidance on a range of areas *  The fundamental technology for AWS EC2 VMs is xen , while the fundamental technology for GCP GCE VMs is kvm *  Cloud Foundry  is an open source cloud computing platform originally developed in-house at VMware. It is now owned by Pivotal Software, which is a joint venture of VMware,  EMC, and General Electric. As the leading enterprise PAAS platform, Cloud Foundry enables you to build and operate cloud native applications that run anywhere . It is avai...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure SQL Database Managed Instance , a new deployment option in SQL Database that streamlines the migration of SQL Server workloads to a fully managed database service. This new Managed Instance deployment option provides full SQL Server engine compatibility and native virtual network (VNET) support. * Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is a benefit exclusive to Azure that enables you to use your SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance to pay a reduced rate on Managed Instance. * Microsoft recommends using general-purpose v2 storage accounts over Blob storage accounts for most scenarios. General-purpose v1 (GPv1) accounts provide access to all Azure Storage services, but may not have the latest features or the lowest per gigabyte pricing. For example, cool storage and archive storage are not supported in GPv1. Pricing is lower for GPv1 transactions, so workloads with high churn or high read rates may benefit from this account type. Blob storage ...

Options for running Containers in Azure: Azure Container Service: Scale and orchestrate containers using Kubernetes, DC/OS or Docker Swarm Azure Container Instances: Easily run containers on Azure with a single command Azure Service Fabric: Develop microservices and orchestrate containers on Windows or Linux Web Apps for Containers: Deploy web applications on Linux using containers Azure Batch: Run Linux container workloads -  samples on GitHub showing how to integrate Docker with Azure Batch Further reading: Which Azure Deployment Model Should You Use? 4 Ways To Deploy Dockerization of Azure PaaS (Beyond Azure Container Service) Difference between Azure Container Services (ACS), Azure Service Fabric (ASF) and Azure Functions (AF) and when to use what Service Fabric vs Azure Container Service - Part 1: Introduction Difference between Azure Container Service and Web App for Containers Github sample demonstrating how to create a multi-container application using...

This Week I Learned - *  Virtual network peering enables you to seamlessly connect two Azure virtual networks. Once peered, the virtual networks appear as one, for connectivity purposes. The traffic between virtual machines in the peered virtual networks is routed through the Microsoft backbone infrastructure, much like traffic is routed between virtual machines in the same virtual network, through private IP addresses only. *  ASM (Azure Service Management) aka classic VNets can be peered with ARM (Azure Resource Manager) VNets. However they must both be in the same subscription. ARM VNets within different subscriptions can be linked.  ASM (Azure Service Management) to ASM (Azure Service Management) VNets cannot be peered. Each VNet peer must reside within the same region.  VNet peering does not use a virtual network gateway  unlike a VNet-to-VNet VPN.  Virtual machines can communicate across the peering at the speed of their full NIC potential. ...

Head to this sample PowerShell script by Rob Sewell published in the PowerShell Gallery The code for the Get-SpeakerFace function to get the face attributes using the Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API is customized to get the face attributes of  images from a webpage whose URL is hard-coded. With minor tweaks, the same sample can be used to work scan images in any web page & analyze them Face API Some observations & findings from my experience running the script - If you're trying PowerShell ISE on a computer for the first time, use Run as Administrator option &   type this or variations of it into your PowerShell window before you execute the function - Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned You can choose to direct the output to a CSV file - Get-SpeakerFace | Export-csv -path  C:\PS\results.csv You can choose to specify the access key required to utilize the Face API as an environment variable as in the sample - $apiKey = $En...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Container Service (ACS) and Azure Service Fabric (ASF) sit on top of VM Scale Set (VMSS) . * Google's Machine Learning Crash Course  is a self-study guide for aspiring machine learning practitioners *  Microsoft Compliance Manager Preview is a dashboard that provides a summary of your data protection and compliance stature and recommendations to improve data protection and compliance . This is a recommendation, it is up to you to evaluate its effectiveness in your regulatory environment prior to implementation. Recommendations from Compliance Manager Preview should not be interpreted as a guarantee of compliance. * MSDN Subscription offers a 3 month subscription to DataCamp , 6 month subscription to Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning and also 1 year on-demand training on Opsgility * Microsoft is offering for free the ebook version of  Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook * Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure is a multi-tenant...