Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Site Recovery enabled Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) now supports : - Azure VMs in availability zones - Encrypted VMs - VMs using accelerated networking - VMs using Storage Spaces Direct - VMs using Standard Solid State Drive (SSD) disks - Unmanaged VMs using firewall-enabled storage accounts - New Linux versions * A 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 . * GDPR forbids geofencing inside the 26-member European Union. The rationale is that geoblocking prevents member citizens from purchasing goods outside of their countries at fair prices - IT Pro Today *  Data Journalism Handbook explores new and innovative ways in which data is analysed, created and used in the context of journalism. * Flatiron Health is the third...

This Week I Learned - *  You can use Azure Site Recovery to move your single instance VM or VMs in an Availability Set into an Availability Zone, thereby achieving 99.99 percent uptime SLA . *  Azure continuously monitors for hardware that shows signs of degradation or potential failure. When these conditions are detected, Azure will attempt to live migrate your virtual machines (VMs). If live migration isn’t possible, Azure will automatically redeploy VMs to a healthy machine. *  There are cases where live migration isn’t possible, like on specialized computer hardware such as M-Series, G-Series, etc. or on legacy hardware, in which case the VMs would be redeployed to a new instance.  *  When Azure detects imminent hardware failure, VMs are proactively live migrated when possible. This should have minimal impact on your workloads and the customer experience is typically a freeze of a few seconds during the final phase. Subscribing to Scheduled Events allo...

What I liked about  Naveen Patnaik's biography by Ruben Banerjee is that it is well written & takes a balanced view - praising him without glossing over his shortcomings. It is engaging with interesting facts & trivia about the longest serving Chief Minister of Odisha who prefers to read out Odia speeches written in the Roman script When Naveen entered politics in Odisha, he was trying to reach out to the people of his native land whose rusticity he did not share. Yet, as the son of Odisha’s legendary politician, he had been anointed by fate and destiny as the desperate state’s only possible saviour. Fed up with the games played by discredited politicians, many Odias welcomed Naveen despite his lack of Odia. According to a 1994 law, written and spoken knowledge of Odia is a must for contesting Gram Panchayat elections. It was Naveen's luck that the knowledge of the local language wasn't mandatory for the state's highest elected position He has been c...

* Azure Firewall  is a managed, fully stateful firewall-as-a-service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. * You can deploy Azure Firewall on any virtual network, but customers typically deploy it on a central virtual network and peer other virtual networks to it in a hub-and-spoke model. * Azure Firewall supports inbound and outbound filtering. Inbound protection is for non-HTTP/S protocols. For example RDP, SSH, and FTP protocols. *  The firewall, subnet, VNet, and the public IP address all must be in the same resource group . *  Azure Firewall needs a dedicated subnet like the Azure Application Gateway . * Azure Firewall is integrated with Azure Monitor for viewing and analyzing firewall logs. * The Azure Firewall service which provides network- and application-level protection across different subscriptions and virtual networks complements network security group fun...

I bought " Notes of a Dream: The Authorized Biography of A.R. Rahman " by Krishna Trilok despite reading this crisp, accurate & unflattering review by a discerning reader on Amazon - More a chronicle than a biography! One of my favourite biographies is 'Snowball' by Alice Shroeder. She worked with a towering personality and yet, held her own and wrote one of the most comprehensive books on a mostly one-dimensionally-thought-of person - Warren Buffett. This book is the exact opposite of Snowball. All the author does is worship and list down facts and opinions without any real interpretation of his own. The one-dimensional-interpretation of super-gifted Rahman continues. I longed for a book that talked about his failures and struggles with a bit more depth, making Rahman a bit more identifiable and such. Those chapters are rushed through and voiced through his sister rather than the man himself. The other side never gets looked into. He's as opaque a...

This Week I Learned - *  Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud to offer native disaster recovery (DR) solution for applications running on IaaS virtual machines (VMs). * With Google Cloud Endpoints , a truly distributed API gateway, you can develop, deploy, protect, monitor and manage APIs on any Google Cloud backend.  Gain insight into your users and usage with Stackdriver Monitoring, Trace (to dive into performance), Logging (to review logs) and Google BigQuery (for analysis) *  Apigee API Platform  offers full lifecycle API management   for hybrid and multi-cloud worlds  for Enterprise customers * "Devops is about finding ways to adapt and innovate social structure, culture, and technology together in order to work more effectively" -  Effective DevOps  [PDF] * In the free ebook " Thinking Architecturally ", solution architect Nathaniel Schutta guides tech leads, senior developers, junior developers, and practicing arch...

Google Cloud Load Balancer is a fully distributed, software defined, managed service that can respond to over 1 million queries per second. Consider the following aspects of Cloud Load Balancing for choosing the appropriate option: * Global versus regional load balancing * External versus internal load balancing * Traffic type Load balancer Traffic type Global/Regional External/Internal External Ports for Load Balancing HTTP(S) HTTP or HTTPS Global External HTTP on 80 or 8080; HTTPS on 443 SSL Proxy TCP with SSL offload Global External 25, 43, 110, 143, 195, 443, 465, 587, 700, 993, 995, 1883, and 5222 TCP Proxy TCP without SSL offload. Does not preserve client IP addresses Global External 25, 43, 110, 143, 195, 443, 465, 587, 700, 993, 995, 1883, 5222 Network TCP/UDP TCP/UDP without SSL of...

This Week I Learned - * Windows 7, Windows Server 2008/R2, and SQL Server 2008/R2 all have end-of-support dates in the next 12 months. That means no more security fixes unless you pony up some large piles of money for extended security fix support. Microsoft has promised that customers that move Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2 to Azure (or Azure Stack) will continue to get free security fixes for up to 3 years. * Back up of virtual machines is done at the fabric level. These backup jobs that protect the entire machine are unaffected by what we do with firewalls, such as Azure Firewall - Petri * DevOps is a loose set of practices, guidelines, and culture designed to break down silos in IT development, operations, networking, and security.  CA(L)MS—which stands for Culture, Automation, Lean (as in Lean management; also see continuous delivery), Measurement, and Sharing—is a useful acronym for remembering the key points of DevOps philosophy -  How SRE...