Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

“Cognitive technologies” include machine learning, deep learning neural networks, natural language processing, rule engines, robotic process automation, and combinations of these capabilities for higher-level applications. Benefits sought from Cognitive Technologies, by ranking according to a Deloitte “Cognitive Aware” survey - Enhance the features, functions, and/or performance of our products and services Make better decisions  Create new products Optimize internal business operations Free up workers to be more creative by automating tasks Pursue new markets Capture and apply scarce knowledge where needed Optimize external processes like marketing and sales Reduce headcount through automation

This Week I Learned - * With Azure, you can build, deploy, and run container-based applications in the cloud or onpremises with a choice of leading open source tools and technologies, including Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and DC/OS—all supported by Azure. Azure provides multiple options for your containerization strategy, including Azure Kubernetes Services (for containers as a service) and Web Application for Containers (for deploying containerized web apps). You also can directly deploy Azure Container Instances without having to provision any VMs - Expedition Cloud: inside Microsoft’s cloud migration and application development journey *  Site Recovery Deployment Planner is a command-line tool for both Hyper-V to Azure and VMware to Azure disaster recovery scenarios. You can remotely profile your VMware VMs by using this tool (with no production impact whatsoever) to understand the bandwidth and storage requirements for successful replication and test failover. * Red H...

Similarities and differences between Azure VNets and AWS VPC from a Premier Developer blog post - AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Azure Virtual Network (VNet) Subnet Both Azure VNet and AWS VPC segregate the networks with subnets An AWS VPC spans all the Availability Zones (AZs) in that region, hence, subnets in AWS VPC are mapped to Availability Zones (AZs). A subnet must only belong to one AZ and cannot span AZs. Communications between all subnets in the AWS VPC are through the AWS backbone and are allowed by default. AWS VPC subnets can either be private or public. A subnet is public if it has an internet gateway (IGW) attached. AWS allows only one IGW per VPC and the public subnet allow resources deployed in them access to the internet. AWS creates a default VPC and subnets for each region. This default VPC has subnets for each region where the VPC resides, and any image (EC2 instance) deployed to this VPC will be assigned a public IP address and hence ha...

The Five Things series on MSDN Channel 9 anchored by Burke Hollands has informal answers by Microsoft experts to interesting questions all in about 5 minutes along with some no holds barred, light banter. Giving it a funny spin in the mould of US sitcoms, the tech talk series is in Season 2 now. Along with 10-minute Azure Friday , these 2 talk shows make Azure topics informative & entertaining Here is the short version of Five Things about Azure DevOps  from the cleaned up subtitles file : # 1. What is Azure DevOps? Azure DevOps is the new product name for Visual Studio Team Services which is Microsoft's DevOps product. It's Microsoft's DevOps product and DevOps lifecycle from Source Control and Work Item planning, all the way through to your Builds and Releases, and monitoring...what's happening in production and everything about your application. DevOps itself is not really a tool. Microsoft's definition of DevOps is the union of people,process an...

This Week I Learned - * Tomcat and Java SE are generally available on Azure App Service on Linux *  IDC (a leading IT Analyst) estimates that AWS accounted for approximately 57.7% of total Windows instances in public cloud IaaS during 2017 – nearly 2x the nearest cloud provider. Did you know you can also bring your Microsoft licenses to VMware Cloud on AWS? VMware Cloud on AWS is a great solution when you need to execute a fast migration – whether that’s due to running out of data center space, an upcoming lease expiration, or a natural disaster such as the recent hurricanes. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started with a proof of concept (POC) and moved their initial 300 VMs in less than 96 hours, with just one employee. Over the next three months they migrated of all of their 2,800 production VMs to VMware Cloud on AWS - AWS Blog *  GCP Solution Gallery has a nice collection of articles * Much as Salesforce enables a company to manage its external...

The webcast Sticker Shock: Breaking down the real costs of cloud egress charges (sponsored by KeepItSafe which offers comprehensive cloud data availability solutions) makes a case against public cloud egress charges to support its products Highlights & arguments from that webcast & accompanying notes - Cloud data egress describes the movement of data originating within a cloud network and transferring to another geography, external cloud, or back to an on-premises environment. Ingress is usually free, and customers understand that they are buying the usage of a cloud providers’ infrastructure plus its data storage capabilities, data protection, and management functions. What is commonly overlooked are transactional fees and even more significant, egress fees. ..when customers egress 30TB of data from their cloud provider on a monthly basis, by the end of the year, they’ve spent at least $30K —to simply access their own data. The Best Decision is One You Can Always C...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Migrate helps you visualize dependencies of on-premises VMs and create move groups based on the dependencies.  * The whitepaper  Azure Virtual Datacenter: Lift and Shift Guide by the Azure Customer Advisory Team (AzureCAT) has useful guidance for identifying and planning the migration of applications and servers to the Microsoft Cloud. The Azure VDC home page has more learning resources * The Azure "Cloud Shell" is an embedded terminal in your browser. You can use vim, emacs and even a slimmed down VS Code experience in the Azure Cloud Shell. Your browser sends commands to an actual Unbuntu terminal instance in the background - InfoQ *  A lightning strike exposed a glaring hole in Azure cloud’s availability strategy & caused an outage affecting close to 40 Azure services hosted in the South Central US cloud availability region (which consists of multiple data centers), a few Azure services in other regions, as we...

As I prepare for the  GCP Professional Cloud Architect , I wanted to compile all the learning resources I know about so that I can use it a  checklist - On demand: Architecting with Google Cloud Platform Specialization with Coursera : Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Core Services Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: Scaling and Automation Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: Containers and Services Reliable Cloud Infrastructure: Design and Process Hands-on Labs: Google Developers Codelabs Qwiklabs GCP Essentials Qwiklabs GCP Architecture quest Reference: Cloud Solutions Architecture Reference Google Cloud solutions Study Notes of a certified GCP architect Practice exam WIP...

Highlights with additional notes from online sources - Adrian Hornsby started his very engaging & insightful talk on Chaos Engineering with a XKCD cartoon & I was hooked In the Principles of Chaos Engineering , Netflix defines the discipline as follows: Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. Chaos Monkey was developed in 2010 at Netflix and released into wild in 2012 is part of the Simian Army. Built on principles of chaos engineering, the army increases resiliency to failure by injecting constant failure to the system . Firefighters spend 80% of their time practicing. "Chaos doesn't cause problems, it reveals them" - Nora Jones, Senior Chaos Engineer @netflix Resilience is the art of lying to customers (mentioned in a lighter note) Keep Calm and Think Big, Act Small Intel has its own distribution fo...

Since October 2017, I've been tracking the datacenters of the public cloud providers - AWS, Azure & GCP . A summary count as of October 2018 - The AWS Cloud spans 55 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 42 regions around the world, with plans announced for 12 additional regions GCP has 17 regions, 42 zones Zoom in & out of the map to view details as required

In the past few days, I've come across anti-pollution products that I never thought I would need -  Anti Pollution HEPA Face Mask  &  Earplugs I find it disturbing that not only do clean water , air & pollution-free environment now come at a cost, they come at a premium if you need the best quality!

The Microsoft Ignite 2018 event (held in Orlando, Florida) session catalog shows that there are some 524 on-demand videos on Azure . Many of the titles look interesting & I plan to at least go through the slide decks if not the whole recorded videos and post later about my learnings - BRK2215 - Real World architecture considerations for Azure: how to succeed and what to avoid BRK2216 - Proven Azure Infrastructure Architecture principles for migrating to cloud. BRK3304 - Architecting mission-critical, high-performance SAP workloads on Azure BRK2208 - Automate your cloud infrastructure with Azure Functions, Azure Automation, and more BRK2196 - Architect your app modernization journey with containers on Microsoft Azure BRK2034 - Migration to Azure – Why now is the best time to move all your apps, data and infra to Azure BRK3337 - Azure migration customer experiences and best practices BRK3055 - Azure migration deep dive: Accelerate your migration with the right to...

This Week I Learned - *  Docker for Windows requires 64bit Windows 10 Pro and Microsoft Hyper-V.    Image2Docker (also called “I2D2”) is a PowerShell module which extracts applications from a Windows Virtual Machine image into a Dockerfile .  Image2Docker first inspects the artifacts in a Windows Server VM image. This original VM could be a Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2012 or 2016 and its VM format could be WIM, VHD or VHDX . It looks at the disk for known artifacts, compiles a list of all the artifacts installed on the VM and generates a Dockerfile to package the artifacts. *  Docker for Windows install includes: The installation provides Docker Engine, Docker CLI client, Docker Compose, Docker Machine, and Kitematic . *  Linux containers can run only on Linux hosts. However, in recent versions of Windows Server and Hyper-V containers, a Linux container also can run natively on Windows Server by using the Hyper-V isolation technology that curren...

The Twelve-Factor App (a collection of patterns that are closely related to microservices approaches) is considered a requirement for cloud-native application architectures : Codebase - One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys Dependencies - Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies Configuration - Store configuration in the environment Backing Services - Treat backing services as attached resources Build, release, run - Strictly separate build and run stages Processes - Execute the app as one or more stateless processes Port binding - Export services via port binding Concurrency - Scale out via the process model Disposability - Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown Dev/prod parity - Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible Logs - Treat logs as event streams Admin processes - Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes A number of commentators have argued that the relevance of the Twelve-Factor app concep...