This Week I Learned - Week #257

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. Global Peering, like VNET Peering, is billed based on ingress and egress data transfer. However, the pricing differs based on the zone the region is in.

Traffic Analytics (currently in public preview) analyzes NSG Flow Logs across Azure regions and equips you with actionable information to optimize workload performance, secure applications and data, audit your organization’s network activity and stay compliant.

You can now run containerized applications on Service Fabric for both Windows Server and Linux (currently Ubuntu 16.04 for the Linux clusters is supported)

Azure Data Architecture Guide intends to help readers select the right data architecture or data pipeline for your scenario, and then select the Azure services and technologies that best fit your requirements.

Azure security best practices and patterns, all at one place

* Google provides its TensorFlow application programming interfaces, or APIs, to a pilot project with the Department of Defense to help automatically identify objects in unclassified data. The feature is part of a recent Pentagon contract involving Google’s cloud unit, which is trying to wrest more government spending from cloud-computing leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. - Bloomberg

* Investors and analysts say China's unabashed fervor for collecting such data, combined with its huge population, could eventually give its artificial intelligence companies an edge over American ones - NY Times

With the flick of a switch, a handful of tech giants can change the nature and extent of mankind’s ingestion of information.

Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson published in 2003 whose central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data.

* The crude oil industry that had suffered through $54 per barrel oil on average in 2017. But with oil producers in North America expanding output, prices are likely to remain volatile. U.S., one of the world’s largest net importers for decades, could become the world’s largest oil producer in 2018, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. Transportation accounts for the majority of the world’s oil demand, and as long as oil prices stay way below their 2008 peak crude oil price of $145 per barrel, there’s less economic urgency to switch to electric vehicles and hybrids, even in China and Europe where there has been governmental support to move away from internal combustion cars - HBR

* The I-T department had till February 10 issued refunds to the tune of Rs 1.42 trillion. Over 41.9 million I-T returns were processed and refunds were issued to 16.2 million taxpayers till February 10. Typically, the I-T department gives priority to small taxpayers who claim refunds below Rs 50,000. Official data suggest of all the refunds issued so far in this fiscal year, 90 per cent were to small taxpayers and the salaried class.

* Tax fraud - The first information report (FIR), registered by the CBI in Bengaluru on February 27, suspects the role of sections of I-T officials posted at  Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) and Infosys executives at CPC in the refund fraud. According to an investigation between April 2017 and March 2018, as many as 447 companies had failed to deposit the TDS collected from their respective employees with the taxman. Sources told The Times of India that these firms had instead diverted the money to further their own business interests, often as working capital. For instance, a leading politically-connected builder had thus diverted Rs 100 crore while an MNC providing IT solutions had failed to deposit Rs 11 crore... the I-T department has unearthed a giant fraud in multiple cities, where government employees allegedly claimed huge tax refunds forging documents, inflating expenses and not revealing complete information. Since the I-T department is still investigating the matter, the loss to the department could not be ascertained, but it could go up to over Rs 10 billion, sources said.

* Initially, three states namely Assam, Nagaland and Jammu & Kashmir were accorded Special Category Status [PDF link] and later on eight other states were also given special category status namely: Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Uttarakhand, Tripura, Himachal Pradesh, and Sikkim and thus the list is now increased to 11. Article 370 of the Indian Constitution is a 'temporary provision' which grants special autonomous status to Jammu & Kashmir due to which no law enacted by the Parliament of India, except for those in the field of defence, communication and foreign policy, will be extendable in Jammu and Kashmir.

* All India Pincode Directory, maintained by Ministry of Communications, Department of Posts, contains all the Postal Index Number (PIN) codes across India

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