Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

For the health-conscious in India, there are now expensive options that can also be purchased online - Raw Pressery Juice, Lean Epigamia Greek Yogurt   Organic Chia Seeds Organic Quinoa Cetaphil Cleansing & Moisturising Bar is a "non-soap syndet bar with a skin friendly pH of 5.5". Syndet is a blended word made by combining the words “synthetic” and “detergent” . The most famous and in fact first syndet soap bar was Dove® - launched in 1955.

This Week I Learned - *  Accelerated Networking feature for Azure VMs provides consistent ultra-low network latency via Azure's in-house programmable hardware and technologies such as single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV). * Accelerated Networking is supported on most general purpose and compute-optimized instance sizes with 2 or more vCPUs. These supported series are: D/DSv2 and F/Fs. On instances that support hyperthreading, Accelerated Networking is supported on VM instances with 4 or more vCPUs. Supported series are: D/DSv3, E/ESv3, Fsv2, and Ms/Mms. * Azure Site Recovery supports enabling Accelerated Networking for replicated virtual machines only if the source virtual machine has Accelerated Networking enabled. *  Azure Site Recovery & Azure Backup provide complementary but different functionality . Azure Backup handles data at a more granular level than Site Recovery. If you want to keep a VM configuration and data safe and accessible, you could use Site ...

Compiled from multiple online articles: * Configure your App Service to use HTTP/2 -  It brings features like header compression and binary formatting (which reduce payload sizes), request pipelineing and multiplexing. These features allow for more concurrent requests using fewer network sockets and help to avoid one slow request from blocking all subsequent requests , which is a frequent problem in HTTP 1.1. HTTP/2 might not benefit every application, so you will want to run performance tests and stress tests to document your improvements. * Turn Off the Application Request Routing Cookie - By default, Azure will make sure clients continue reaching the same app service instance during a session, because Azure can't guarantee your application isn't storing session state in server memory. To provide this behavior, the load balancer will inject a cookie into the first response to a client. This cookie is what Azure calls the Application Request Routing Cookie. If ...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Dedicated Host is a new Azure service (in preview) that enables you to run your organization’s Linux and Windows virtual machines on single-tenant physical servers. * You can use AWS Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated instances to launch Amazon EC2 instances on physical servers that are dedicated for your use. An important difference between a Dedicated Host and a Dedicated instance is that a Dedicated Host gives you additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on a physical server, and you can consistently deploy your instances to the same physical server over time. * Azure Blueprints helps you deploy and update cloud environments in a repeatable manner using composable artifacts such as policies, role-based access control, and Azure Resource Manager templates. * Role-based access control (RBAC) is an authorization system which provides fine-grained access for the management of Azure resources . RBAC can be used to limi...

The new avatar of Hotmail, Outlook on the web shows count of unread emails but what if you wanted to know the count of all emails in a folder under Inbox (say for instance, in the folder Dev in the screenshot below)? Select the folder and check the box next to the name of the folder. Click on the ellipsis in the top menu & select the "Mark as unread" option  All the read emails will be marked as unread & the count of  emails will be displayed. Mark it as read after you finish noting down the number if you wish.

This Week I Learned - * The secret behind Azure Ultra Disk performance is the direct connection between a VM and its storage. Unlike other storage solutions in Azure, Ultra Disk avoids the overhead of REST APIs and load balancers by allowing reads and writes to go directly from operating systems kernels into storage servers where data lives. * Not all SAP workloads support scale-out deployments. For example, to avoid complexity, management and performance considerations, many businesses prefer to use larger (and fewer) nodes for analytics workloads. Larger certified VM sizes mean larger scale-up environments. Google Cloud Platform now offers 6 and 12 TB VMs for SAP HANA instances. * When SREs talk about reliability, SLOs tend to come up a lot.  SLOs closer to 100% take greater effort to maintain, so choose your target wisely. * A blameless culture means team members assume coworkers act with good intentions and seek technical solutions to human fallibility instead of deman...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Dedicated hosts are the same physical servers used in Azure data centers, provided as a resource to run Azure virtual machines with either Windows or Linux. You don’t get access to the host operating system or management, just exclusive use of the resources. Primarily, this is intended for those who are worried about compromises such as a breakout attack. * Windows Virtual Desktop is a new cloud based  virtualized desktop service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience which is optimized to work with Office 365 Pro Plus. *  Automated tools like Azure Advisor & Security Center, specifically Recommendations and Security Score, that tell you how to best configure things would be useful … if the recommendations were correct . * AWS makes frequent proclamations about the number of price reductions it has made. Customers interpret these proclamations as being applicable to the company’s services broadly, but this is not th...