Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * There are a bunch of  Microsoft and third-party services and tools available to assist you with various database and data migration scenarios and specialty tasks . * The Contoso migration series includes information and scenarios that illustrate how to set up a migration of infrastructure, and run different types of migrations. * SSRS can be deployed using SQL Server on an Azure VM - Choosing Your Database Migration Path to Azure [PDF] * Microsoft uses Azure Compute Unit (ACU) to compare the performance across their virtual machine SKUs. The ACU/Core gives you an idea of what you can expect between different series of Azure virtual machines. * Azure SQL Databases are locally highly-available as standard, with three copies of your database used to keep the data online and accessible during patching and transient hard failures. SQL Server on Azure VMs would require HA technologies such as Always On Failover Clustering, Always On availability group...

This Week I Learned - * The Azure Monitor Status blog provides timely updates on the health of Azure Monitor products (Application Insights, Log Analytics, Service Map, Azure Alerts). This status blog is managed by their SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team. It provides detailed information on ongoing outages, planned maintenance events, or advisory notifications - Azure Updates *  Virtual Network (VNet) Service Endpoints for Azure SQL Database allow you to isolate connectivity to your logical server from only a given subnet or set of subnets within your virtual network . *  Microsoft watches GitHub Commits for Azure secrets like connection strings * "growth mindset" is basically the belief that you can improve your ability to learn--that it's not fixed. Thus instead of "I'm smart" or, "I'm dumb," (fixed states), it's, "When I'm challenged, I get stronger." - Inc *  The average life expectancy in Japan as of 2015...

Azure automatically sets some values for Services or their features - * Default VM disk type is SSD disk * By default, the OS disk has read/write caching applied. This type of caching typically isn’t ideal for application workloads that write log files or databases, for example. Data disks, by contrast, have a default cache policy of none. This is a good policy for workloads that perform a lot of writes. * Managed disks are also automatically encrypted at rest * Azure Linux VM uses SSH keys as the default authentication type * By default, Azure creates and assigns a public IP address for you * By default, VMs created in the portal are locked down and secured from the internet. Access to the virtual machine is restricted to sources in the same virtual network, and traffic from Azure load balancing solutions. * Network Security Groups lock down traffic by default and only allow the specific traffic that you define. * Default NSG security rules (AllowVnetInBound, Allow...

This Week I Learned - * HTTP/2 is the most significant upgrade to the HTTP protocol in 20 years. *  meSpeak.js (modulary enhanced speak.js) is a 100% client-side JavaScript text-to-speech library based on the speak.js project * For some combinations of  Azure SQL Database service tier and compute size changes , database files are detached and reattached during the switch. Regardless, the switch can result in a brief service interruption when the database is unavailable generally for less than 30 seconds and often for only a few seconds. If there are long running transactions running when connections are dropped, the duration of this step may take longer in order to recover aborted transactions. Accelerated Database Recovery can reduce the impact from aborting long running transactions. No data is lost during any step in the workflow. You are billed for each hour a database exists using the highest service tier + compute size that applied during that hour, regardle...

I found the 1hour 37min Pluralsight course Estimating One-time and Recurring Costs for Microsoft Azure (Released - 10 Dec 2018) useful & jotted down some notes adding some additional points I discovered while digging deeper into some of the areas covered - Azure Migrate makes it easy to assess on-premises workloads for migration to Azure. This includes the following functionality: Discovery - Appliance-based, frictionless, and non-intrusive discovery of virtual machines (VMs) - Ability to visualize VM dependencies to easily identify multi-tier applications - Support for vCenter Server 5.5, 6.0, and 6.5 Assessments - Azure readiness: Is a VM suitable for running in Azure? - Rightsizing: What's the best Azure VM size based on utilization history? - Cost estimates: How much would be the recurring cost of running the VM in Azure? Azure Migrate considers a buffer ( comfort factor ) during assessment. This buffer is applied on top of machine utilization data for VM...

I like  The Five Things series on MSDN Channel 9 . It  has informal answers by Microsoft experts to interesting questions on all things web, all in about 5 minutes along with some no holds barred, light banter. Here is the short version of Five Things About Azure Functions 1. Azure Functions is free as long as you're within its generous monthly limits 2. It supports JavaScript, both Node 8 and 10, Python 3.6, C#, F#, Java 3. Can you run functions locally or do you have to be in the Cloud all times? The run time.. the thing that runs your code & triggers it... that's completely open source and you can run it all locally, you can debug it all locally 4. Visual Studio Code has an extension using which you can create Functions, deploy your Functions & even stream logs 5. Bindings is this nice construct inside of functions where if you need to communicate with other services like, hey, at the end of this function, I need to send a text message or I...

This Week I Learned - * Azure is generally available in 44 regions around the world. Availability Zones, a high-availability solution for mission-critical applications, are supported in the following 8 regions - 1. Central US 2. East US 3. East US 2 4. France Central 5. North Europe 6. Southeast Asia 7. West Europe 8. West US 2 *  GitHub is a social network for code * Google has opened up " more than 20 million lines of code in more than 900 projects—including Chromium (the project behind the Chrome browser and operating system), TensorFlow (our open-source machine-learning library), and our popular container management system Kubernetes " *  Over 50 funds that manage retirement benefits of over 15 lakh employees have exposure to IL&FS *  Fabindia founded by American Mr John Bissell in 1960 has grown to have annual revenue of over Rs.1000 Crores and with stores across the country.  It was launched as an export business in 1960, contracting ...

What feature does Edge have natively that Chrome doesn't - Reading View . After opening any web page, click on the Reading View icon in the address bar & you'll see a distraction free page with just the main content - a great way to focus on the essentials What's more it also shows the time it may take to finish reading the content I just wish there was some progress indicator to show how many pages are left to read

This Week I Learned - * With Azure Lab Services, you can easily set up and provide on-demand access to preconfigured virtual machines (VMs) to teach a class, train professionals, run hackathons or hands-on labs, and more *  Blue-green deployments have been practiced at places like Amazon for 10+ years. * A/B testing is for measuring functionality in the app. Blue-green deployments are about releasing new software safely and rolling it back predictably. You can obviously combine them: use blue-green deployments to deploy new features in an app that can be used for A/B testing. Canary releases are a way of sending out a new version of your app into production that plays the role of a “canary” to get an idea of how it will perform (integrate with other apps, CPU, memory, disk usage, etc). * Blue/Green strategy (also referred to as Red/Black) deployment strategy temporarily requires up to twice the number of servers as you need for production, but it avoids service interru...