Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Network security solutions can be delivered as appliances on premises, as network virtual appliances (NVAs) that run in the cloud or as a cloud native offering (known as firewall-as-a-service).  Azure Firewall is a cloud native network security service . * Google and Amazon pioneered the use of A/B testing to optimize the layout of a web page. *  The TypeScript language shares familiarity with Java, C# and other languages making it easier to learn. *  Data engineers provision and set up data platform technologies that are on-premises and in the cloud. Data scientists perform advanced analytics to extract value from data. Their work can vary from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics. AI engineers work with AI services * Snapchat has often been seen to represent a new direction in social media, with its users, particularly millennials, craving a more in-the-moment way of sharing and communicating via technology. With less...

In the following Azure CLI command, what is the significance of the single & double dashes? az storage account create -n <storage account name> -g first-serverless-app --kind StorageV2 -l westcentralus --https-only true --sku Standard_LRS Here's a well explained answer from ServerFault : A single hyphen can be followed by multiple single-character flags. A double hyphen prefixes a single, multicharacter option. Consider this example: tar -czf In this example, -czf specifies three single-character flags: c, z, and f. Now consider another example: tar --exclude In this case, --exclude specifies a single, multicharacter option named exclude. The double hyphen disambiguates the command-line argument, ensuring that tar interprets it as exclude rather than a combination of e, x, c, l, u, d, and e.

Comparison table & notes from the official Azure documentation : The following services can solve integration problems and automate business processes - Microsoft Flow Azure Logic Apps Azure Functions Azure App Service WebJobs They can all define input, actions, conditions, and output. You can run each of them on a schedule or trigger. Each service has unique advantages . Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps are both designer-first integration services that can create workflows. Both services integrate with various SaaS and enterprise applications. Microsoft Flow is built on top of Logic Apps . Azure Functions is built on the WebJobs SDK .  Both Azure Functions & Azure App Service WebJobs are built on Azure App Service and support features such as source control integration, authentication, and monitoring with Application Insights integration. Any console application can be converted to an HTTP web service in Azure Functions Durable Functions are an extension o...

The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon explains: Sheldon: "In chess, a stalemate refers to a situation in which there are no remaining moves. You have plenty of moves available. You could beat us up and steal the money, you could kill us … really, you’re only limited by your imagination." Dangerous liquid-helium dealer: “Huh. All these years I’ve been using ‘stalemate,’ when I really mean ‘impasse.’ I feel foolish” .... Sheldon: "The essence of a Mexican Standoff is that no one can walk away from a conflict without incurring harm..." Also see:  Metaphor, Simile, Analogy

This Week I Learned - *   Azure Custom Vision is a cognitive service that lets you build, deploy and improve your own image classifiers. An image classifier is an AI service that applies labels (which represent classes) to images, according to their visual characteristics. Custom Vision functionality can be divided into two features. Image classification applies one or more labels to an image. Object detection is similar, but it also returns the coordinates in the image where the applied label(s) can be found.  Image Classification tags whole images. Object Detection finds the location of content within an image . Custom Vision is only available to use with an Azure subscription. * In Azure Functions there is no way to check what “Memory consumption” per request was *  The HTML5 History API gives developers the ability to modify a website's URL without a full page refresh *  Google’s main income comes from its ads business . Advertising made up 91%...

Summary of a Business Insider article - Google uses a organizational system called Objectives and Key Results , or OKRs The OKR system came from Intel. First, you set up an Objective. Then you set up a number of "Key Results" that are quantifiable that will help you hit your objective. Your objectives should be definitive and measurable. Don't say, for instance, I want to make my website prettier. Say you want to make your website 30% faster. Or you want to increase engagement by 15%. Google has OKRs at a company level, at a team level, at a managerial level, and at a personal level. They all work together to keep the company on track. At Google, all OKRs are public from Larry Page on down. OKRs are not used by management to determine promotions. But they can be used by employees to keep an eye on what they've accomplished.

Gartner evaluated 19 service providers in its Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, Worldwide, 2019 . A public Cloud infrastructure MSP, in the context of this Magic Quadrant, is a provider that offers both professional and managed services related to infrastructure and platform operations for one or more hyperscale integrated IaaS and PaaS providers. These providers include Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. Leaders Accenture Rackspace Deloitte Infosys Wipro Smartronix Challengers Cloudreach Cognizant 2nd Watch Bespin Global Logicworks Visionaries Tata Consultancy Services Capgemini HCL Technologies Niche Players Atos DXC Technologies Nordcloud Samsung SDS Unisys On a different note, the outsourcing market grew nearly 9 percent over the previous year. Following are the top outsourcers on Everest Group’s 2019 annual ranking of the top IT servi...

This Week I Learned - *  With Microsoft identity platform, you can write code once and reach any user. You can build an app once and have it work across many platforms, or build an app that functions as a client as well as a resource application (API). *  There are more Microsoft Azure certification exams now compared to last year *  With Azure Boards, you can quickly and easily start tracking user stories, backlog items, task, features, and bugs associated with your project . *  AWS has released new stencils . * Amazon Elastic Load Balancers situated at different application tiers ensure that even if an entire zone goes offline, traffic will be directed to the appropriate one. It’s worth pointing out that the ELBs “live” outside the zones and are therefore not impacted by the failure of any particular one. ELB is one of many AWS services that have a regional scope and can span across zones in a given region. Other services like Route 53 is global in scope...

The author of the book Beyond the Twelve-Factor App , Kevin Hoffman is an Advisory Solutions Architect for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Pivotal has made available the ebook version of this excellent resource as a free download. I have compiled key points from the book as a summary for future reference - The Twelve-Factor App (a collection of patterns that are closely related to microservices approaches) is considered a requirement for cloud-native application architectures : 1. Codebase - One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys 2. Dependencies - Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies 3. Configuration - Store configuration in the environment 4. Backing Services - Treat backing services as attached resources 5. Build, release, run - Strictly separate build and run stages 6. Processes - Execute the app as one or more stateless processes 7. Port binding - Export services via port binding 8. Concurrency - Scale out via the process model 9. Disposability - Maximize r...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a self-service deployment of fully managed OpenShift clusters. Run your apps on Red Hat’s OpenShift security hardened Kubernetes platform built on Azure infrastructure. Azure Red Hat OpenShift offers industry-leading SLA of 99.9% availability. * Azure API Management simplifies publishing of APIs as well as their consumption by clients. It allows for abstraction of APIs from their implementation. APIs are governed through policies, managed from a unified plane, optimized through caching, and published for frictionless consumption through a developer portal. *  Comicgen is a library built with JavaScript to create comics . * Pass certification exam AI-100 to become a Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate * The second edition of Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook [PDF] is free to download * Satya Nadella, had been recruited from Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1992, in part because his team’s manager wanted a...

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the birth anniversary of scientist  Lucy Wills who discovered Folic acid. The discovery has an India connection - the candidates for her research were mill workers in Bombay. I remembered reading about her in the very excellent book " The Emperor of All Maladies " by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee . That book had also helped me know about India's science hero, Yellapragada Subbarao—or Yella . Hope Google commemorates his birthday too on 12th January Aminopterin, a brainchild of SubbaRow .... reverses the vitamin action of folic acid and is called an anti-folic or folic acid antagonist. It provided for the first time some semblance of treatment for leukaemias. It initiated the chemotherapeutic approach to treat widespread cancers or cancers not amenable to surgery. Methotrexate, the modified aminopterin, has singly improved the survival of young women suffering from choriocarcinoma, the cancer of the after-birth mimicking preg...

This Week I Learned - * There are no guarantees regarding the distances between various Availability Zones within an Azure region. * Availability Zones are not an ideal DR solution. *  When you deploy Azure VMs across Availability Zones and establish failover solutions within the same Azure region, some restrictions apply *  Difference between Site-to-Site & VNet-to-VNet connection - Connecting a virtual network to another virtual network using the VNet-to-VNet connection type (VNet2VNet) is similar to creating a Site-to-Site IPsec connection to an on-premises location. Both connectivity types use a VPN gateway to provide a secure tunnel using IPsec/IKE, and both function the same way when communicating. The difference between the connection types is the way the local network gateway is configured. When you create a VNet-to-VNet connection, you do not see the local network gateway address space. It is automatically created and populated. If you update the address ...