Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  With broad browser support of ES6 (~over 96%), now is probably a good time to move away from jQuery. * AWS has Python support in Lambda Functions for a while now.  Python support for Azure Functions is now generally available and ready to host your production workloads across data science and machine learning, automated resource management, and more. You can now develop Python 3.6 apps to run on the cross-platform, open-source Functions 2.0 runtime. These can be published as code or Docker containers to a Linux-based serverless hosting platform in Azure. * Python functions can target Linux-based hosting options in Azure including both Consumption and Premium hosting plans. * The Azure Functions extension for Visual Studio Code simplifies the process of using Functions by automatically handling many configuration concerns. *  Azure Functions Core Tools will allow developers to code with the editor of their choice, and naturally Microso...

The 15-paged Migration Guide for Windows Server  [PDF] is a good read especially if you're using older versions of Windows Server & SQL Server & plan to migrate to Azure Excerpts - Microsoft helps protect 2008 workloads you move to Azure with free Extended Security Updates for 3 more years after end of support making it possible to counter sophisticated cyber threats with Azure’s secure cloud foundation and benefit from more than 70 compliance certifications. Two factors drive migration risk: business impact and complexity. • Score business impact by assessing how important the workload is to your business operations. • Score complexity by evaluating how complex the application is and how well your team understands it. A critical workload will score a higher risk even if it’s simple, whereas a more complex but less critical workload might end up with a lower risk score—and thus might be a better candidate for early migration. Many key Microsoft partners are...

This Week I Learned - *  What is the RPO and RTO with Geo-redundant storage (GRS)? In GRS and RA-GRS, the storage service asynchronously geo-replicates the data from the primary to the secondary location. In the event that the primary region becomes unavailable, you can perform an account failover (preview) to the secondary region. When you initiate a failover, recent changes that haven't yet been geo-replicated may be lost. The number of minutes of potential data that's lost is known as the RPO. The RPO indicates the point in time to which data can be recovered. Azure Storage typically has an RPO of less than 15 minutes, although there's currently no SLA on how long geo-replication takes. The RTO is a measure of how long it takes to perform the failover and get the storage account back online. *  To move Azure resources to either another Azure subscription or another resource group under the same subscription. You can use the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell (Move-Az...

A comparison of  App Hosting Options on Google Cloud from the official documentation - Service Compute Engine Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Cloud Run on GKE β Cloud Run β App Engine Flexible Environment App Engine Standard Environment Cloud Functions Suitable for On-premises and monolithic workloads Raw compute to meet existing infrastructure requirements Examples: Relational databases, SAP HANA CRM systems Legacy ERP systems Self-hosted, scalable infrastructure Self-managed hosting, with serverless scalability Examples: Containerized apps that need custom hardware and software (OS, GPUs) Existing containerized stateless apps Apps on Kubernetes Engine that can benefit from scaling to zero Container-based apps and services Industry standard packaging for multi-cloud infrastructure Examples: Custom runtime environments such as Rust, Kotlin, C++, an...

Content paraphrased from the following articles - *  App migration checklist: How to decide what to move to cloud first *  Choosing your cloud app migration order *  Best practices for migrating virtual machines to Compute Engine * CIO's Guide to Application Migration How do you decide the order in which you migrate applications into the public cloud? Consider following migration order for workloads by group: Tier 1: Opportunistic (especially to maximize ROI) Tier 2: Minimal risk Tier 3: Ease of migration Tier 4: Customizations To decide if apps qualify as Tier 1: Opportunistic - Is this application significantly more expensive to run on-prem than it would be to migrate and run in the public cloud? Will this application require an upcoming hardware refresh, making it more attractive to move to the public cloud sooner rather than later? Are there services (or regions/instances, etc.) in the cloud that would make this application perform significantly better? D...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Dedicated Host (Preview) provides a virtualized environment that’s architected to run Azure VMs, and it gives you control and visibility over the underlying physical server, but it’s not a bare metal as a service offering. * Choosing the correct authentication method is a crucial first decision in setting up an Azure AD hybrid identity solution . To choose an authentication method, you need to consider the time, existing infrastructure, complexity, and cost of implementing your choice. *  Decision tree for Azure integration services - Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps, Functions, and WebJobs *  These days, the average American’s career includes 15 job changes, according to a 2016 LinkedIn report. *  13 famous companies that started out as side hustles : - Apple - Steve Jobs was working at Atari, and Steve Wozniak was an engineer at HP while building the Apple I. - Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg turned his college passion pr...

I like using G Suite products and I'm now Google Cloud certified in G Suite Although I've been using the Google's office suite since a long time, there were some interesting features I learnt only while preparing for the exam Google's Applied Digital Skills free video lessons have great learning content for anyone interested in their office productivity tools

This Week I Learned - * Generation 2 VMs use the new UEFI-based boot architecture rather than the BIOS-based architecture used by generation 1 VMs. Compared to generation 1 VMs, generation 2 VMs might have improved boot and installation times.  Generation 2 VMs do not yet support some Azure platform features, including VM backup, Azure Site Recovery, or Azure Disk Encryption.  Generation 2 VMs support only VHD, not VHDX.  You can't change the generation of a VM after you create it. * If location data collection is turned on, your phone will send bits of anonymous data to Google. This shows your location and helps us pinpoint traffic jams. Maps uses this information to give you the best route and estimate travel times. Travel times, among other sources, are made by using location data from the past and present.  It is possible to report wrong directions in Google Maps *  On the social media platform Twitter, a ratio, or getting  ratioed , is when repli...

This Week I Learned - * The Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architecture ( https://aka.ms/MCRA ) describes Microsoft’s cybersecurity capabilities and how they integrate with existing security architectures and capabilities. *  Unlike RBAC, Azure Policy is a default allow and explicit deny system. *  Constrained vCPU capable VM sizes  allow customer workloads like like SQL Server or Oracle to use the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth while optimizing their software licensing cost. *  Windows and Oracle Linux are the only operating systems that are supported by Oracle and SAP on Azure . The widely used SLES and RHEL Linux distributions aren't supported for deploying Oracle components in Azure. * Amazon launched the first service Amazon S3 on Mar. 14, 2006 * Capital One was ensnared in one of the largest-ever hacks of a big financial institution -  the breach included 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers, culled f...