Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Azure DevOps offers 99.9 percent SLA and new features every three weeks. * When you're migrating from an On-premises world, you use the physical cores which have hyper threading. In GCP we call these vCPUs or virtual CPUs. A vCPU is equivalent to one hyper threaded core. Therefore, if you have a single core hyper threaded CPU On-premises that would essentially be two virtual CPUs to one physical core. So, always keep that in mind as oftentimes, people will immediately do a test. They'll say, "I have a four core physical machine and I'm going to run four cores in the Cloud." And ask why their performance isn't the same - Essential Cloud Infrastructure: Foundation, Coursera * Created at Netflix, Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity. * Use Google Cloud Memorystore to build application caches that provides sub-millisecond data access. Cloud Memory...

Comparison of  App Engine Standard & Flexible environments from the Google Cloud documentation - Feature Flexible environment Standard environment Instance startup time Minutes Seconds Maximum request timeout 60 minutes 60 seconds Background threads Yes Yes, with restrictions Background processes Yes No SSH debugging Yes No Scaling Manual, Automatic Manual, Basic, Automatic Scale to zero No, minimum 1 instance Yes Writing to local disk Yes, ephemeral (disk initialized on each VM startup) No Modifying the runtime Yes (through Dockerfile) No Automatic in-place security patches Yes (excludes container image runtime) Yes Network access Yes Node.js, Python 3, PHP 7.2, Go 1.11: Yes. Python, Go, and PHP (billing-enabled): Only via App Engine services (in...

This Week I Learned - *  innerText, innerHTML and textContent properties of document object  appear to do the same thing but are different * The new Azure cross-platform PowerShell module “Az” is a replacement for AzureRM and AzureRM.Netcore. - Az runs on PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell Core. - Az is always up to date with the latest tooling for Azure services. - Az ships in Cloud Shell. - Az shortens and normalizes cmdlet names. - All cmdlets use "Az" as their noun prefix. - Az is Open Source * Kudu is now integrated with the Azure Portal *  Mint is the genus of the herb, peppermint and spearmint are two subsets. Spearmint is milder and more classically European, peppermint is rather more aggressive, and much more popular in the US (where it's usually labelled as just 'mint'). *  As smartphone adoption surges (India has 700 million phone users), along with the networks capable of transmitting high-quality videos, the nascent Indian market i...

November 11-17th is International Fraud Awareness Week . International Fraud, some of it due to digital activities is on such a significant scale that its prevention now warrants promotion! While the Government encourages citizens to go digital & Indian banks provide a slew of  dubious smartphone apps possibly built by contractors, it is the customer's responsibility to be aware of online banking fraud scams like SIM Swap, Phishing, Vishing, Smishing, Spear Phishing & a host of other baits   as India has lax data protection laws and banks require you to waive off their liability if you become a victim That a fraudster planning a  SIM Swap hack  can  make  mobile service providers grant a new SIM card based on  fake identity of genuine customer shows that it is one of  many weak links in an overall system that should be fixed before  campaigns  encouraging  customers to go digital  are floated.

This Week I Learned - * The X-Frame-Options header is a security feature enforced at the browser level. Sites can use this to avoid clickjacking attacks, by ensuring that their content is not embedded into other sites. X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN causes the browser to refuse to render the content in a frame. * Some pages are currently not transcoded by Google Web Light, including video sites, pages that require cookies (such as personalized sites), and other websites that are technically challenging to transcode. In these cases, you will see a "not transcoded" notification. Site owners who don't want to have their pages to be transcoded should set the HTTP header "Cache-Control: no-transform" in the page response. *  Device Mode is the name for the loose collection of features in Chrome DevTools that help you simulate mobile devices.  Think of Device Mode as a first-order approximation of how your page looks and feels on a mobile device. *  Light ...

Docker is just a containerization platform. Docker Swarm is a container orchestration platform, the same as Kubernetes. What’s the difference between Docker and Kubernetes? Docker and Kubernetes are complementary. Docker provides an open standard for packaging and distributing containerized applications, while Kubernetes provides for the orchestration and management of distributed, containerized applications created with Docker. In other words, Kubernetes provides the infrastructure needed to deploy and run applications built with Docker. Container orchestration is the process that can typically deploy multiple containers to implement an application through automation. Platforms like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are the container management and container orchestration engines that enable users to guide container deployment and automate updates, health monitoring, and failover procedures. A feature summary compiled from multiple online articles - Docker Swarm ...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Reservations helps you save money by pre-paying for one-year or three-years of virtual machine, SQL Database compute capacity, Azure Cosmos DB throughput , or other Azure resources. * As with other managed disks, Standard SSD is stored in triplicate on Locally-Redundant Storage (LRS). The disks are designed to have 99.999% availability * Containers are designed to be stateless and changes made to the container are sandboxed and they do not affect the container host. Unlike VMs, containers do not provide hardware virtualization. Instead, they provide virtualization at the operating systems level. Containers share portions of the host operating system kernel which is why Windows containers are limited to Windows hosts and Linux containers can only run on Linux hosts. However, recent changes in Windows Server container support include using a small specialized Linux VM to enable the running of Linux containers on Windows hosts. A contain...