Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

If necessity is the mother of invention, then maybe laziness is the mother of innovation  - Danny Brian, Vice President and Fellow, Gartner At Gartner Catalyst 2018, Brian named laziness, impatience and hubris as the three secret virtues of a great IT practitioner -- borrowing them from acclaimed Perl programmer Larry Wall . In Wall's book, laziness is defined as "the quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure." Brian lists specific examples of what true laziness requires of an IT practitioner: not repeating yourself; not reinventing the wheel -- utilizing the best frameworks and tools to save time and effort; focusing on the most important problems; knowledge and recognition of design patterns, which avoid solving the same or similar problems multiple times; ensuring test-driven development in order to avoid hours spent later in panic mode trying to figure out what broke; developing processes and procedures that actual...

This Week I Learned - * A Basic SKU Load balancer is restricted to a single availability set, virtual machine scale set, or a single machine. The Standard tier can span any virtual machine in a single virtual network, including blends of scale sets, availability sets, and machines - Petri *  Containers are not isolated from OS so the OS of the container must match the OS of the container host. * By feeding audio from friends, family or vids of your favourite celebrity to Azure Cognitive Services, training a customised voice that sounds just like them, you can make them say whatever you want! *  Web2py is an open-source web application framework written in the Python programming language for rapid development of fast, scalable, secure and portable database-driven web-based applications * Netflix's FAST.com speed test gives you an estimate of your current Internet speed.  It also shows download, upload speed and latency * "So, let's say you want to chang...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Firewall, now generally available, is a cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. With Azure Firewall you can centrally create, enforce, and log application and network connectivity policies across subscriptions and virtual networks. * Az is a new cross-platform Azure PowerShell module intended as a replacement for the AzureRM.Netcore and AzureRM modules. Az currently ships in Cloud Shell *  Google’s engineers exist in a Great Chain of Being that begins at Level 1. At the bottom are the I.T. support staff. Level 2s are fresh out of college; Level 3s often have master’s degrees. Getting to Level 4 takes several years, or a Ph.D. Most progression stops at Level 5. Level 6 engineers—the top ten per cent—are so capable that they could be said to be the reason a project succeeds; Level 7s are L...

Charts & images from the official documentation - click on images for enlarged view

Google Cloud official documentation has a nice table to decide when to use offline or online service that could be considered even while using other public cloud platforms: click on image for enlarged view It offers the following Data Transfer Services to choose from based on the scenario: Online Transfer - drag-n-drop, gsutil and JSON API ingest tools. Cloud Storage Transfer Service - Transfer your data from one cloud to another. BigQuery Data Transfer Service - Schedule and automate data transfers from your SaaS applications to Google BigQuery Transfer Appliance - Securely capture, ship, and upload your data to Google Cloud Storage using the Transfer Appliance 100 TB or 480 TB models. Some points related to data transfer - Cloud Storage is a highly-available and durable object store service with no limitations on the number of files stored in a bucket, however each file has a maximum size limit of 5 TB. Storage Transfer Service currently does not provide guarantees ...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Database Migration Service, the fully managed service designed for both operational database and data warehouse migrations, now supports offline and online migrations using the premium tier. * CloudEndure, a provider of AWS backup solutions, cloud disaster recovery and migration, has been acquired by Amazon. * The Aadhaar project in India is providing a unique identifier for every resident of India - 1.2 billion residents. The project uses MapR and Hadoop to create and maintain the world's largest biometric database, which can verify a person's identity within 200 milliseconds. * ...extreme “knock-down”—the industry term for disassembly of products to make them easier and cheaper to ship to customers—is a big reason why that Ikea wardrobe is so affordable. Ikea’s flat-packaging engineers are included alongside product designers in the initial briefings for any new Ikea offering....global package designs are tested in Japan and South Korea ...

The Azure documentation provides an excellent Quickstart example  to extract printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) from an image by using Computer Vision's REST API which is part of Cognitive Services. Unlike in the Computer Vision API home page demo , the code sample just shows the raw JSON & not the extracted text in a readable format in the Preview tab I adapted the code sample from Computer Vision API documentation to show extracted text - The OCR results are more accurate in the Computer Vision API home page demo than that returned using v2.0 of the Computer Vision's REST API  as the former uses the  Recognize Text interface while latter uses OCR operation

I found the Pluralsight course on  Architecting Google Cloud Storage Configurations  by Janani Ravi, a former Google engineer, useful & informative. Key points, slides from the video course & official GCP documentation with my annotations - Cloud Storage pricing is based on the following components : Data storage: storing data in buckets. Network usage: accessing and moving data in buckets. Operations usage: performing actions within Cloud Storage. Retrieval and early deletion fees: applicable only for data stored in the Nearline Storage or Coldline Storage classes. Bucket names are globally unique. Operation charges apply when you perform operations within Cloud Storage. An operation is an action that makes changes to or retrieves information about buckets and objects in Cloud Storage. Operations are divided into three categories: Class A, Class B, and free. A minimum storage duration applies to data stored as Nearline Storage (30 day...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure VNet is a Layer 3 network *  Azure Load Balancer works only with VMs that are in the same region whereas Traffic Manager can work across regions *  Palo Alto's VM-Series 54 paged reference architecture guide for Azure (Aug 2018) is a good refresher of key Azure concepts & services * Relying solely on  Layer 4 security through services like Azure Network Security Groups makes security of cloud deployment inadequate. More specialized products like Palo Alto's VM-Series and the recently introduced Azure Firewall complement Azure Network Security Groups port-based controls to protect your SAP deployment by reducing your attack surface. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series on Azure allows you to embrace a prevention-based approach while providing Automation and centralized management features *  Some key sizing and implementation considerations for the VM-Series on Azure are that  it must be deployed in the Azure Resource Man...