Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I found the ebook " Migrate Your Virtual Machines to Microsoft Azure  [PDF]" from Microsoft very useful and informative. This guide presents an end-to-end solution for migrating workloads (especially VMWare based VMs) to Azure and a roadmap for the key stages - Discovery, Migration and Optimization. There are plenty of screenshots on how to use that tools that make it easy to follow along. For the discovery stage, the guide explains how Azure Migrate and partner solutions like Cloudamize and Movere solutions can be used to discover virtual machines and workloads in your environment and recommend virtual machine instances in Azure to inform decisions about reducing size and cost. For the migration stage, organizations can use Azure Site Recovery, as well as Microsoft Data Migration Assistant and Azure Database Migration Services, to simplify and automate the migration of on-premises virtual machines and databases to Azure. These services minimize disruption to business ope...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL are generally available with a 99.99 percent uptime SLA. * In 1988 there were 60,000 hosts on the internet, an intimate gathering compared to the approximately 4 billion hosts today. * Of the over 7 billion people in the world, fewer than half are connected to the Internet. * Vint Cerf admires "Alexander Graham Bell, partly because he was so fundamental to communication, and partly because his wife was deaf, and so is mine". Vint Cerf is hearing impaired—"I’ve worn a hearing aid since I was 13—and my wife (Sigrid Cerf) is deaf but uses two cochlear implants." - Google Blog * Issac Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. Asimov was afraid of flying, doing so only twice in his entire life. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle; however, he did learn to drive a car after he moved to Boston. *  Bottlenose dolphins and Asian elephants possess the rar...

Basic tier (A0-A4) Standard tier Load Balancing Not supported External and internal load balancing (Port-level load balancing, not application layer) Auto-scaling Not available Supports auto-scaling to handle unpredictable peak capacity IOPS 300 IOPS per disk 500 IOPS per disk Price Up to 27% lower prices than Standard Max NICs 2  8 The basic tier sizes are primarily for development workloads and other applications that don't require load balancing, auto-scaling, or memory-intensive virtual machines . It is possible to switch an existing Standard Virtual Machine to its equivalent Basic tier . Note that this will require a restart to your virtual machine. f you’ve already configured the Azure load balancer or Auto-Scale functionality, you won’t be able to downgrade to one of the Basic VM sizes until the configuration is removed.

This Week I Learned - * Microsoft has open sourced Service Fabric with the MIT license to increase opportunities for customers to participate in the development and direction of the product. The release of Service Fabric runtime v6.2 and corresponding SDK includes the general availability of Java and .NET Core Reliable Services and Actors on Linux. Reliable Services and Reliable Actors are programming models to help developers build stateless and stateful microservices for new applications and for adding new microservices to existing applications. * BrowserStack is a cross-browser and app testing platform started by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, both IIT Bombay graduates in 2011.  After six years, BrowserStack has four products being used by customers in 135 countries, including Walt Disney, Tesco, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter,  Airbnb and Virgin Pulse.  Their  App Automate  tool offers GPS location simulation * Huawei is the world's third-largest...

According to data sourced from analytics company Comscore, a ‘new’ digital audience was emerging in India, that was using only mobile, way ahead of markets with a bigger mobile user base like US, UK, and others This was mainly due to the increasing penetration of smartphones with decreasing costs as well as a collapse in data tariffs. India has 400% more mobile users than desktop Most of the Indians were using their time on the phone for multimedia (video & music streaming sites), instant messaging and social media The top five mobile apps on the phone were Whatsapp, Google Play, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Search. WhatsApp enjoyed the highest usage in India in 2017 while Amazon saw the largest user growth in India

This Week I Learned - * 100+ Azure Tips and Tricks *  Very Large Databases (VLDB) are now commonly moved to Azure . A fully optimized VLDB migration should achieve around 2TB per hour migration throughput per hour or possibly more. This means the data transfer component of a 20TB migration can be done in approximately 10 hours. * Azure Backup now supports disks that are larger than 1 TiB (1 TB is the marketing measure of 1000 GB, and 1 TiB is the computer science measure of 1024 GiB). * Gamification can shape behavior. It can guide you to do certain things in certain ways, and it can encourage certain behaviors. Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the creators of Reddit, were themselves inspired by a more primitive karma system, on Slashdot.  Union Square Ventures has been investing in companies that incorporated some kind of game play like FourSquare, Duolingo, StackOverflow (which will turn 10 this year). Stack Overflow  today has 250 employees and is p...

I have known about the Google Find My Device  feature (which can remotely ring, lock, send a message to a lost phone to whoever locates it & also erase data on a registered mobile) but got a chance to try it out today after misplacing my Android phone

A nice take on patent litigation by the cartoonist, Scott Adams Image Courtesy: Dilbert 

Notes compiled from official Azure documentation - When you create an Azure virtual machine (VM), you must create a virtual network (VNet) or use an existing VNet When creating a virtual machine using the Azure portal, the portal creates a network interface with default settings for you.  A network interface enables an Azure Virtual Machine to communicate with internet, Azure, and on-premises resources. Before creating a network interface, you must have an existing virtual network in the same location and subscription you create a network interface in. You assign IP addresses to a VM using a network interface. Once a network interface is created, you cannot change the virtual network it is assigned to. You can change the subnet the network interface is assigned to after it's created. The virtual machine you add the network interface to must also exist in the same location and subscription as the network interface. The virtual machine you attach a network i...

This Week I Learned - * To plan for the storage account usage needs of Azure Backup, download the VM backup capacity planning Excel spreadsheet to see the impact of your disk and backup schedule choices. *  Premium Storage supports B-series, DS-series, DSv2-series, DSv3-series, GS-series, Ls-series, M-series, and Fs-series VMs. You can use standard and premium storage disks with these VM types . You cannot use premium storage disks with VM series that are not Premium Storage-compatible. *  Tab completion in PowerShell ISE makes long cmdlet names a lot easier to type, without the need for difficult-to-remember aliases. *  Hardening of the OS is the act of configuring an OS securely, updating it, creating rules and policies to help govern the system in a secure manner, and removing unnecessary applications and services. This is done to minimize a computer OS's exposure to threats and to mitigate possible risk . *  Google and Airbnb have two of the most p...

Available sizes and options for the Azure virtual machines you can use to run your Windows & Linux apps and workloads . Type Sizes Description General purpose B, Dsv3, Dv3, DSv2, Dv2, DS, D, Av2, A0-7 Balanced CPU-to-memory ratio. Ideal for testing and development, small to medium databases, and low to medium traffic web servers. Compute optimized Fsv2, Fs, F High CPU-to-memory ratio. Good for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processes, and application servers. Memory optimized Esv3, Ev3, M, GS, G, DSv2, DS, Dv2, D High memory-to-CPU ratio. Great for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics. Storage optimized Ls High disk throughput and IO. Ideal for Big Data, SQL, and NoSQL databases. GPU NV, NC, NCv2, NCv3, ND Specialized virtual machines targeted for heavy graphic rendering and video editing. Available with single or multiple GPUs. High performance compute H, A8-11 Our fastest and mos...

Before you prepare your environment for Azure Backup, be sure to understand these limitations : * Backing up virtual machines with more than 16 data disks is not supported. * Backing up virtual machines with a reserved IP address and no defined endpoint is not supported. * Backing up Linux VMs encrypted through Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) encryption is not supported. * Microsoft doesn't recommend backing up VMs that contain Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) or Scale-Out File Server configuration. They require involving all VMs included in the cluster configuration during a snapshot task. Azure Backup doesn't support multi-VM consistency. * Backup data doesn't include network mounted drives attached to a VM. * Replacing an existing virtual machine during restore is not supported. If you attempt to restore the VM when the VM exists, the restore operation fails. * Cross-region back up and restore are not supported. * Backing up and restoring virtual machines usin...

Paraphrased from the NY Times article How to Build Resilience in Midlife Practice Optimism - thinking positive thoughts and surrounding yourself with positive people really does help Rewrite Your Story -Observe what you are saying to yourself and question it. Reframe struggles as a growth opportunity Don’t Personalize It - even if you made a mistake, a number of factors most likely contributed to the problem and shift your focus to the next steps you should take. Telling yourself that a situation is not personal, pervasive or permanent can be extremely useful Remember Your Comebacks - reminding yourself of the challenges you personally have overcome. setbacks are part of the journey and not a career-ending failure Support Others - besides having a strong support networks of friends and family to help in coping with a crisis, you can get an even bigger resilience boost by giving support. Cultivate higher levels of gratitude, altruism and a sense of purpose to push you through al...