Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Testing between VM’s indirectly peered via the new gateway types (VPMGW1, 2 & 3) shows bandwidth up to 2.8Gbs a big step forward from the previous gateway types that returned a maximum of  980 Mbps when using the now depreciated ‘High Performance’ gateway * From  A Developer's Guide to Building AI Applications [PDF] : The following are examples of the questions that power the engines running AI applications - Classifications - Which category does it belong to? Regression - How much? How many? Anomaly - Is it weird? Clustering - How is it organized? * Azure Machine Learning Studio is a cloud-based, visual development environment for creating data experiments, training machine learning models, and publishing them as web services in Azure.  The maximum size of a training dataset is 10 GB. *  Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes have some functional overlap, but they serve two different purposes . Pivotal CloudFoundry is an "...

Scott Adams defines it in 2 panels of this Dilbert strip -

OLTP systems are designed to efficiently process and store transactions, as well as query transactional data. The following table summarizes the key differences in capabilities between OLTP options in Azure : Azure SQL Database SQL Server in an Azure virtual machine Azure Database for MySQL Azure Database for PostgreSQL Is Managed Service Yes No Yes Yes Runs on Platform N/A Windows, Linux, Docker N/A N/A Programmability T-SQL, .NET, R T-SQL, .NET, R, Python T-SQL, .NET, R, Python SQL Maximum database instance size 4 TB 256 TB 1 TB 1 TB Supports capacity pools Yes Yes No No Supports clusters scale out No Yes No No Dynamic scalability (scale up) Yes No Yes Yes Temporal tables Yes Yes No No In-memory (memory-optimized) tables Yes Yes No No Columnstore support Yes Yes No No Adaptive query processing Yes Yes No No Readable secondaries Yes Yes No No Geographic replication Yes Yes No No ...

The Forrester Wave report is Forrester's evaluation of vendors in a software, hardware, or services market. The report will include a Forrester Wave graphic that will position the vendor relative to the other vendors based on Forrester's knowledge of the product, market presence, and vendor strategy Below are some Cloud related Forrester Wave Reports published in Q2 2018 Full-Stack Public Cloud Development Platforms, North America, Q2 2018 Development-Only Public Cloud Platforms (PaaS), North America, Q2 2018 Public Cloud Platform Native Security, Q2 2018

Key points to note about the cheapest Azure B-Series VMs from various online hyper-linked sources: B-series burstable VMs are suitable for workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously or workloads typically having burstable performance requirements. Example use cases include development and test servers, low-traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers . B-Series VMs run on hosts with Intel Haswell 2.4 GHz E5-2673 v3 processors or better processors. The E5-2673 v3 is what is used on the D_v2- and F-Series hosts, so the B-Series is a throttled FS-Series machine .  B-Series uses a similar system to the AWS T2 Instance. A B-Series virtual machine has a per-core base performance level, which is a percentage of each core. If the virtual machine remains under this level, it will earn credits up to a certain level. These credits can be burned to allow the virtual machine to burst beyond this per-core bas...

This Week I Learned - *  If you use less than the given size, then Azure Unmanaged Disks will cost less than Azure Managed Disks. If you use more, then Managed Disks cost will be less than unmanaged disks. *  Data is Plenty, and Insights are Shallow : A RightScale post from November 2017 states that about $10 billion is wasted each year across AWS, Azure and Google . Another report by BusinessInsider from Dec 2017 proclaims that “ companies waste $62 billion on the cloud by paying for capacity they don’t need ”. *  GCPing.com can be used to measure your latency to GCP regions * Through ad personalization , Google makes your ads more useful on Google services (ex: Search, YouTube), and on websites & apps that partner with Google to show ads. *  Machines are constantly monitoring everything we do online and how we use hardware. There is no opt-out there . *  NtechLab 's facial recognition algorithms can recognize a person’s ethnicity *  Phr...

A comparison of Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Service & AWS Elastic Container Service by Tirumarai Selvan of Hasura

Gartner's Magic Quadrant graphic plots the vendors based on completeness of their vision and ability to execute. “a public cloud infrastructure managed service provider (MSP), in the context of this Magic Quadrant, is an MSP that offers managed services and professional services related to infrastructure and platform operations for one or more hyperscale integrated infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)+platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers”. Gartner's categorization of Managed Service Providers (MSP) for public clouds for 2018 : Leaders section contains the vendors that Gartner believes have a track record of successful delivery of high-quality managed services that utilize the capabilities of the cloud platform. Challengers section consists of vendors that have a strong track record but might not be able to evolve quickly enough to expand beyond their primary geography or use-case focus. Gartner sees Visionaries as vendors who are well positioned for the future. Howev...

This Week I Learned - * GPv1 or Blob storage accounts can easily be upgraded to GPv2 in the portal, or using PowerShell or CLI. Downgrades from GPv2 are not supported . 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. * Outbound data transfer (bandwidth) between Azure services located in two regions is charged whereas inbound data transfer is free . However, note that following Availability Zone data transfer is charged: - Data transfer, ingress and egress, from a VNet resource deployed in an Availability Zone to another resource in different Availability Zone in the same VNET. Availability Zone data transfer pricing is only applicable to VNet resources which are deploy...

Info here is paraphrased from official documentation on Managed Disks - Pricing * The total cost of Premium SSD Managed Disks depends on the size and number of the disks and will be affected by the number of outbound data transfers. There are no transaction costs for Premium Disks. *  The total cost of Standard SSD Managed Disk storage depends on the size and number of disks, the number of transactions and the number of outbound data transfers. *  The total cost of Standard HDD Managed Disk storage depends on the size and number of disks, the number of transactions and the number of outbound data transfers. Microsoft currently charges $0.001 (preview price) per 10,000 transactions for Standard SSD Managed Disks & $0.0005 per 10,000 transactions for Standard HDD Managed Disks. Any type of operation against the storage is counted as a transaction, including reads, writes and deletes. If you use Managed Disks for less than a month, the charges will be pro-rated...

Info paraphrased from official documentation.. The size of the backed-up data determines the pricing for Azure Backup in each protected instance before compression and encryption - * For virtual machines, the size of the allocated disk determines the data size. * When backing up files and folders, the size of the files and folders configured for backup determine the data size. * When backing up SQL Server, the size of the databases configured for backup determine the data size. The new pricing model for Azure Backup has two components : * Protected instances : This is the primary billing unit for Azure Backup. Customers pay for the number of instances that are protected with the Azure backup service. The price per protected instance depends on the categorisation of the instance in the pricing table Size of each instance Azure Backup price per month Instance < or = 50 GB $5 + storage consumed Instance is > 50 but ...

Azure produces extensive logging for every Azure service.   Logs provide data to ensure that your application stays up and running in a healthy state. It also helps you to stave off potential problems or troubleshoot past ones. In addition, you can use logging data to gain deep insights about your application. That knowledge can help you to improve application performance or maintainability, or automate actions that would otherwise require manual intervention. Microsoft Azure log data can be exported to Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) systems for analysis and integration with third-party auditing solutions Log Category Log Type Usages Integration Activity Logs Control-plane events on Azure Resource Manager resources Provide insight into the operations that were performed on resources in your subscription. Rest API & Azure Monitor Azure Diagnostic Logs frequent data about the operation of Azure Resource Manager resources in subscription...

GCP Compute: a decision tree click on image for enlarged view Deciding between compute options boils down to the following three criteria: Level of abstraction (what you want to think about). Technical requirements and constraints. Where your team and organization are going. Another view from the Google Cloud docs - Product Your needs Product features Typical use cases Google App Engine A flexible, zero ops platform for building highly available apps You want to focus on writing code , and never want to touch a server, cluster, or infrastructure. You want to build a highly reliable and scalable serving app or component without doing it all yourself. You value developer velocity over infrastructure control. You want to minimize operational overhead . A range of curated serving stacks with smart defaults and deep customizability. Support for Java, Python,...

Info here is compiled & paraphrased from various sources that are hyperlinked. Please refer back to the official sources for the latest information as this topic is constantly evolving Image from the Azure Developer Guide Containers are a relatively new kind of virtualization called operating system virtualization . Machine virtualization takes a single machine and simulates lots of machines. Containers take a single operating system installation (physical or virtual machine) and simulate lots of operating system installations. Containers offer near-instant deployment and are a great way of moving legacy code into a DevOps lifecycle. Deployment times are shortened, maintenance is easier, and scale-out/in is possible in seconds Containers in Azure : Azure Service Features Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Scale and orchestrate containers using Kubernetes, DC/OS or Docker Best for Linux-based containers Multiple containers per VM As a free service, AKS does...

"If you help a criminal before the crime, you're an accomplice. If you help afterwards, you're a lawyer" - from a cartoon punchline Ram Jethmalani has been India's best known & highest paid lawyer. Besides having a career spanning the entire history of independent India, he has a long list of other accomplishments & idiosyncrasies  - obtained LL.B.degree at the age of 17. At that time, the minimum age for becoming a lawyer was 21, but a special resolution allowed him to become a lawyer at 18.  90% of the cases he takes up are said to be pro bono  "smugglers once constituted ninety per cent of Ram's practice" has taught at several colleges in India and in the US has been an outspoken Parliamentarian since 1980, serving for more than 35 years co-founded the prestigious National School of Law in Bangalore has 2 wives which is permissible in India due to a legal quirk believes in numerology and astrology though he has "never rea...

This Week I Learned - * When turned on, soft delete enables you to save and recover your data when Azure Storage blobs or blob snapshots are deleted. This protection extends to blob data that is erased as the result of an overwrite. All soft deleted data is billed at the same rate as active data. *  With the addition of Standard SSD, Azure now offers three types of persistent Disks for use with Azure Virtual machines, optimized for different workload requirements: Premium SSD Disks, Standard SSD Disks, and Standard HDD Disks . * GitLab, a remote-only company (with 270 people in 270 locations in 40 countries) and a competitor to Github was prepared for a deluge when Microsoft's acquisition of its competitor GitHub pushed more than 100,000 repositories to migrate to GitLab within 24 hours.  Until recently, it all lived on a single cloud, Azure [irony noted], but the Microsoft/GitHub brouhaha caught GitLab in the middle of its own migration, away from Az...

The Azure Marketplace lists third party solutions, services and tools certified and optimized to run on Azure. Following are some ASR alternative apps for workload migration - CloudEndure Live Migration Velostrata Cloud Migration PlateSpin Migrate Zerto Virtual Replication   ZeroNines Migration Tool Cirrus Data's Data Migration Solution for Legacy to Cloud

Azure provides native tools for monitoring cloud applications - Azure Monitor - Highly granular and real-time monitoring data for any Azure resource Application Insights - Detect, triage and diagnose issues in your web apps and services Log Analytics - Collect, search and visualise machine data from on-premises and cloud Network Watcher - Network performance monitoring and diagnostics solution Azure Service Health - Get personalised guidance and support for when issues in Azure services affect you System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) - Manage and monitor large cloud installations

After getting irritated with Facebook enforcing videos in a feed to autoplay by default, I had to dig into Settings to disable the autoplay setting. I noticed that LinkedIn has also started auto playing videos in my feed as part of its front-end refresh which I find very intrusive and annoying. In case you find the video autoplay feature bothersome, here's how you can disable that feature - Facebook - Settings | Video settings > Auto-Play Videos - Off Twitter - Settings | Account > Content > uncheck Video autoplay checkbox in case it is checked. LinkedIn - Settings | Site Preferences >  Autoplay videos Internet data plans are cheaper these days but it doesn't mean these websites have to hog our bandwidth without consent

This Week I Learned - * AWS supports Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008 , 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2 and 2016 on a variety of Amazon EC2 instance types. You can use your own licensed software on dedicated infrastructure, even without Software Assurance (SA). The use of Microsoft software is subject to Microsoft's terms. * Users are responsible for complying with Microsoft licensing.AWS provides updated, fully patched Windows AMIs within 5 business days of Microsoft’s patch Tuesday (second Tuesday of each month). *  AWS lets you choose between multiple editions of SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2016. *  AWS supports Microsoft software running on AWS. Issues with Microsoft applications running on an AWS instance should be submitted to Microsoft support. *  All Microsoft software covered by the Microsoft Product Terms can be deployed on AWS using Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts . Examples include: Microsoft Windows Server Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft R...

Estimating the cost you will incur for a solution deployed to Azure needs work as there are a variety of factors (availability of Azure Services in a desired region, compliance, price plan etc) & possibilities (hardware spec, VNET peering or Site-to-Site VPN etc) involved. There are multiple ways to check prices - Azure Pricing Calculator Azure Product Pricing page - example: Azure VM Pricing Azure Portal Azure APIs AzurePrice.net As the prices change dynamically and new Services may be introduced, one or more of the above resources have to be consulted as all the required info may not be conveniently available at one place My grouse with Azure Pricing Calculator - It may not have the most up to date info ( that other official sources provide ) For scenarios involving multiple Azure Services (like Azure Site Recovery), the Pricing Calculator doesn't consolidate all costs involved & help in understanding true cost Some fields may not be validated for appli...