Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Azure AD B2B (Business-to-Business) & B2C are service features of Azure AD * Some database workloads like SQL Server or Oracle require high memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth, but not a high core count. Many database workloads are not CPU-intensive. Azure offers certain VM sizes where you can constrain the VM vCPU count to reduce the cost of software licensing, while maintaining the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth. Azure constrained core virtual machines  cost (including OS licensing) the same as the original size. For example, the current VM size Standard_GS5 comes with 32 vCPUs, 448 GB RAM, 64 disks (up to 256 TB), and 80,000 IOPs or 2 GB/s of I/O bandwidth. The new VM sizes Standard_GS5-16 and Standard_GS5-8 comes with 16 and 8 active vCPUs respectively, while maintaining the rest of the specs of the Standard_GS5 for memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth. *  OpenShift has stricter security policies than default Kubernet...

Having read about the fine drawings by Priya Kuriyan in the graphic novel " Indira ", I bought & finished the visual part of the book in an hour admiring the artistry of the illustrator - a modern day Mario Miranda (for the way she draws pan-India characters). The informal dialogue which go with the illustrations (printed on slick paper) is sprinkled with Hindi words making the narrative interesting. The book also serves as a very entertaining history lesson covering the period from 1920s to the 80s, though it is mostly sympathetic to Ms Gandhi. Critics have condemned Indira Gandhi's imposition of Emergency rule in 1975 during which she ruled without constitutional constraints and jailed Opposition leaders. How the first lady Prime Minister who was ridiculed as "goongi goodiya" (Hindi word for a dumb doll or puppet) by the Opposition, managed to rule for two more terms in the male-dominated Indian politics is proof of her will-power & tenacity. Surpr...

This Week I Learned - * Entity group transactions provide  Azure Table  with a  limited form of the atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) semantics   provided by relational databases . * Every Azure subscription has default CPU quotas: 1) Total virtual processors per region 2) Number of virtual processors per series in a region. You can see your usage versus the limits under Subscriptions > [Subscriptionb] > Usage + Quotas . *  Azure reservations helps you save money by pre-paying for one-year or three-years of virtual machine or SQL Database compute capacity .  Customers with active Software Assurance can save up to 55 percent (on region, instance size, and performance tier) using Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server with the new vCore-based purchasing model in SQL Database.  Azure reservations don't auto-renew. * Besides AWS EC2, Reserved Pricing applies to 6 other AWS Services - RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFront,...

I find comparison charts/summary tables a very useful tool for learning. They summarize key information & help structure complex & lengthy topics for better memory retention I have been annotating comparison charts derived from official or reliable online sources on my blog as part of my continuous learning, to review them for certification exams & refer back when needed. Note that as Azure offerings and practices are constantly evolving, always refer back to the attributed original source. I compiled the list below to track comparisons which are already covered in the official Azure documentation : Compute: Azure Basic Tier vs Standard Tier VMs   Criteria for choosing an Azure compute service    Compared: App Service, Cloud Services, Virtual Machines, and Service Fabric Azure Service Fabric & Azure Cloud Services   #  Comparison of Azure Functions hosting plans Azure Functions & Logic Apps Azure Container Registry Service Tiers ...

This Week I Learned - *  Chargeback and showback are terms used to describe ways in which technology costs are tracked. Chargebacks are internal charges assigned to various departments. Showback is an analysis of technology usage across the board. *  EC2Instances.info  offers Amazon EC2 Instance comparison similar to what AzurePrice.net does for Azure VM types.  AzurePrice.net offers cost optimization & auditing services *  Having end to end monitoring infrastructure in place helps you track : • Health • Performance • Security • SLA *  Forrester prediction for 2018: “Kubernetes will win the war for container orchestration dominance.” *  Developing a cloud strategy has been cited as the top issue every year since 2012, according to Gartner. * Site Reliability Workbook is the hands-on companion to the bestselling Site Reliability Engineering book. The 508 paged ebook from O'Reilly is available for free till Aug 23rd . * With HA th...

A useful comparison chart of DR options from a CloudAcademy AWS Architect (Associate) Certification course : click on image for enlarged view Options   Backup & Restore Pilot Light Warm Standby Multi Site  Description Like using AWS as a Virtual Tape Library Minimal version of environment running on AWS  Scaled down version of fully functional environment always running Fully operational version of fully functional environment always running off site or in another region Services Used  AWS Storage Gateway, Import/Export, Glacier, S3  AMIs, ELBs, CloudFormation, RDS replication AMIs, ELBs, CloudFormation, RDS replication  All RTO  High  (8-24 hours) Moderate  (4-8 hours) Minimal  < 4 hours  Lowest < 60 minutes  RPO Since the last backup; up to 24 hours Since the last snapshot. While core pieces of system are in place, some installation and preparation may be required. ...

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate examination is intended for individuals who perform a solutions architect role. Listed below are some resources for preparation Video Learning Courses: AWS Training Cloud Academy - 41 hours of content with videos, labs & quizzes. Quiz answers have explanations Pluralsight - 8+ hours, last updated - 3/2017 Udemy - 65+ hours of content with videos, labs, quizzes & 300+ Exam Practice Tutorial, last updated - 8/2018.  A Cloud Guru - 139 lessons, 22 hours, frequently updated LinkedIn Learning  - 5 tutorials, 15 hours Text: Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices   AWS Well-Architected webpage (various whitepapers linked) FAQs - Amazon EC2 || Amazon S3 || Amazon VPC || Amazon Route 53 || Amazon RDS || Amazon SQS

Last updated: 29-March-2020 While books can't keep up with the evolving developments, the way the content is structured and presented makes the following useful reading - Azure Compliance Maps, 38 pages, July 2020 Kubernetes Operators, 155 pages, March 2020 Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure Second Edition , 369 pages, March 2020 Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches -Second Edition, 370 pages, March 2020 White Paper: The scientist, the engineer and the warehouse , 27 pages, 2020 SAP on Azure Implementation Guide , 233 pages, November 2019 Cloud Analytics with Microsoft Azure , 243 pages, October 2019 Kubernetes: Up and Running - Second Edition , 277 pages, Aug 2019  Architecting Cloud Native .NET Applications for Azure The essential guide to data in the cloud: a handbook for DBAs , 19 pages, 2019 Migrating SQL Server to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance—A Step-by-Step Guide , 21 pages, July 2019 Professional Azure SQL Database Administration, Second Edition, 562 pages, J...

This Week I Learned - * You can provide image data to the Google Cloud Vision API or OCR.space API by sending the image data as base64-encoded text & extract text *  Azure Security and Compliance Blueprint provides guidance and automation scripts to deliver a Microsoft Azure platform as a service (PaaS) hosted web application architecture appropriate for handling workloads classified as UK OFFICIAL * With Docker containers, developers own what's within the container (application and service, and dependencies to frameworks and components) and how the containers and services behave together as an application composed by a collection of services. Meanwhile, IT operations teams (IT professionals and management) can focus on the management of production environments; infrastructure; scalability; monitoring; and, ultimately,ensuring that the applications are delivering properly for the end users, without having to know the contents of the various containers. Hence, the name...

This Week I Learned - *  PerfInsights is a self-help diagnostics tool that collects & analyzes the diagnostic data, and provides a report to help troubleshoot Windows virtual machine performance problems in Azure. PerfInsights can be run on virtual machines as a standalone tool, or directly from the portal by installing Azure Performance Diagnostics VM Extension . *  Ansible, an open-source, simple IT automation engine can be used for automating cloud provisioning, configuration management and application deployments on Azure. *  The major cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) are locked in an aggressive race to maintain parity on core capabilities while their products are differentiated only marginally. This is causing a few organizations to adopt a Polycloud strategy — rather than going ‘all-in’ with one provider, they are passing different types of workloads to different providers in a best-of-breed approach. This may involve, for example, putting s...

With a growing abundance of technologies in every category, choosing the right fit for a job gets challenging. The official documentation of a product may be biased. Below is a list of sources that can help in conducting an independent comparative analysis - *  Gartner's Magic Quadrant reports *  Forrester Wave Reports * IDC Trackers and Reports * Avasant Research Reports *  ThoughtWorks Technology Radar * InfoQ Architecture Trends *  Wikipedia Comparison tables * Competitor's official documentation website