Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * One ExpressRoute contract can connect to all regions within a geopolitical region (e.g. All EU DCs) image *   Azure features such as Reserved VM Instances, Azure Hybrid Benefit, Constrained vCPU for SQL/Oracle database based SAP systems, and Azure Site Recovery for DR, offer better cost savings for hosting SAP workloads on Azure when compared to on-premises hardware . *  Mover supports migration from over a dozen cloud service providers – including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive – into OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling seamless file collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps and services, including the Office apps and Microsoft Teams. * Adjusted Compounded Annualized Growth Rate (CAGR) is known as Extended Internal Rate of Return (XIRR). Excel does this XIRR adjustment using an approximation technique called the Newton-Raphson method *  The full recitation of one of India´s most ancient Sanskrit texts, the Shukla Yajurve...

Note - Microsoft constantly updates its Azure services. Therefore information provided here & in the links may change Some limitations of Azure Services (IaaS & PaaS) - * While the top public cloud providers are considered enablers of hyperscale computing providing almost limitless resources on demand, there are limits that need to be reviewed to ensure they don't cause impediments for unique or unconventional use cases. While this constraint may not be an issue for most and there may be workarounds to address them, the  Subscription & service limits  have to be verified. * While a majority of Azure Services & their features are available across all regions, not all may be available in specific regions and in desired pricing tiers. This has to be verified prior to usage. * Some Azure Services & their features may be modified, removed or retired. Though Microsoft provides notice prior to the changes, the impact of the change has to be borne by the us...

AWS, Azure & GCP continue to be Leaders in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide The report offers a nice perspective of IaaS providers. The way some of the facts & observations were worded & presented was interesting - Applications that are potentially challenging to virtualize or run in a multitenant environment — including highly secure applications, strictly compliant or complex enterprise applications (such as SAP business applications) — require special attention to architecture. The default and most frequently provisioned storage for AWS’s compute service has not experienced a price reduction since 2014, despite falling prices in the market for the raw components. Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering program uses a shared-operations approach to teach customers to run operations the way that Google’s site reliability engineers do. This has the potential to tether Google more closely to enterprise customers. Google...

When you deploy dedicated Azure services in a virtual network , you can communicate with the service resources privately, through private IP addresses. ¹ 'Dedicated' implies that only service specific resources can be deployed in this subnet and cannot be combined with customer VM/VMSSs ² It is recommended as a best practice to have these services in a dedicated subnet, but not a mandatory requirement imposed by the service. Also see:  Azure services that support Availability Zones

This Week I Learned - * Azure Disk Encryption uses the industry-standard BitLocker feature of Windows and the dm-crypt feature of Linux to provide volume encryption for the OS and the data disks. The solution is integrated with Azure Key Vault to help you control and manage the disk encryption keys and secrets in your key vault subscription. It ensures that all data in the virtual machine disks are encrypted at rest in Azure Storage. *  Azure Security Center provides integrated security monitoring and policy management across your Azure subscriptions . * An NSG is a firewall, albeit a very basic one.  It’s a software defined solution that filters traffic at the Network layer.  However, Azure Firewall is more robust.  It’s a managed firewall service that can filter and analyze L3-L4 traffic, as well as L7 application traffic.  Azure Firewall provides the same capabilities as an NSG, plus more.  NSGs and Azure Firewall work very well together...

Paraphrased summary of a NY Times article - How To Be More Optimistic Optimism depends on genes and socioeconomic status. Optimism can be learned. * Visualize your best possible self in domains such as family, career, romance or health once a week, for six to eight minutes, for one or two months. * Accept the inevitability of disappointment and anticipate positive things anyway * Argue against yourself as soon as you recognize the voice making negative remarks that can start a pessimism spiral.Turning this type of self-argument into a habit requires a little practice. * Put things in perspective by intentionally counteracting your extremely negative predictions with extremely positive ones. This will enable you to find the middle of the road Image Courtesy: Open Doodles

Notes from the official documentation - Azure Availability Zones is one of the high-availability features that Azure provides. Using Availability Zones improves the overall availability of SAP workloads on Azure.  Consider the following when you use Availability Zones: * This feature is available only in some Azure regions. * There are no guarantees regarding the distances between various Availability Zones within an Azure region. * Availability Zones are not an ideal DR solution. Natural disasters can cause widespread damage in world regions, including heavy damage to power infrastructures. The distances between various zones might not be large enough to constitute a proper DR solution. * The network latency across Availability Zones is not the same in all Azure regions. In these cases, the deployment architecture needs to be different, with an active/active architecture for the application or an active/passive architecture where cross-zone network latency is t...

This Week I Learned - * Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. * Azure Service Fabric (SF) came out of Microsoft as it's internal product . SF powers Microsoft Azure. Most of the Azure services in one way or another run on top of Service Fabric. This includes Cosmos DB, Event Hubs, Service Bus, SQL Server, Azure Functions just to name a few you definitely know. Even some parts of Kubernetes' Azure offering (AKS) run on top of Service Fabric. That's funny, considering AKS is supposed to be an alternative platform. Even Azure Container Instances which are lightweight ways to run containers in the cloud without the need of a heavy orchestrator, are powered by SF. * If you can’t draw it, you can’t build it . To come up with a “First Cut” of the Cloud Capability Model suitable for your organization, avoiding using named technologies to a...

This Week I Learned - * You can use VNets to provision and manage virtual private networks (VPNs) in Azure and, optionally, link the VNets with other VNets in Azure, or with your on-premises IT infrastructure to create hybrid or cross-premises solutions. Each VNet you create has its own CIDR block and can be linked to other VNets and on-premises networks as long as the CIDR blocks do not overlap. * In addition to the large IOPS capacity of the Premium Disks, Azure Blobcache is a huge value for mission critical OLTP workloads as it brings significant additional high-performance I/O capacity to Azure Virtual Machine for free. Blobcache is a multi-tier caching technology enabled by combining the VM RAM and local SSD. You can host SQL Server data files on premium SSD managed disks with read only Blobcache and leverage extremely high-performance read I/Os that exceed the underlying disk’s capabilities. High scale VMs comes with very large Blobcache sizes that can host the all the data ...

Highlights from an article on negativity bias - How to Overcome Your Brain’s Fixation on Bad Things Why can’t we pull our attention away from a traffic accident or stop watching news about the latest viral outbreak? Why are we waylaid by criticism or unable to get past a minor snub from our best friend? That’s our negativity bias . We humans have a propensity to give more weight in our minds to things that go wrong than to things that go right—so much so that just one negative event can hijack our minds in ways that can be detrimental to our work, relationships, health, and happiness. A mind is prone to overreact to negative things relative to positive things; so people can use this to manipulate us, or we can use this to manipulate other people. We’re very upset when someone doesn’t fulfill a promise, but if they do extra, we’re not grateful enough for it. People learn more and faster from punishment and reward. Negative feedback stimulates learning faster than the positiv...

There are several sites now that provide preparatory resources for Azure Certifications. Some of these even offer time-bound access to Azure portal to try out their step by step instructions for activities related to exam curriculum. *  OpenEdX Microsoft *  Azure Study Group Materials * Udemy AZ-300 AZ-301 AZ-500 * CloudAcademy AZ-300 AZ-301 AZ-500 * Pluralsight AZ-300 AZ-301 AZ-500 * Linux Academy AZ-300 AZ-301 AZ-500

RPO stands for recovery POINT objective, i.e., how much data is one potentially prepared and willing to lose, worse case. Tolerance for data loss (sec’s, hours, days); determines frequency of backups and replication approaches. RPO is measured in units of time, not volume: "30 minutes of data", "four hours of data", and so on. RPO <=  Data lost: How far back? -- {(Disaster strikes)} --  Downtime: How long to recover?  => RTO RTO stands for recovery TIME objective, i.e., if/when the ‘bad thing’ happens, how much time does it take to be back up and running again. For example, if the acceptable downtime duration is eight hours in the event of a disaster, then your RTO is eight hours. An RTO of 30 minutes means the service must be running again within half an hour and an RPO of 5 minutes means no more than 5 minutes’ worth of data can be lost. When selecting your DR strategy, you must weigh the benefits of lower RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (reco...

Paraphrased summary of multiple articles,  20 Things You Need to Know about Stress ,  To Handle Increased Stress, Build Your Resilience and Pressure Doesn’t Have to Turn into Stress Pressure is not stress . It becomes stress when you add one ingredient: rumination , the tendency to keep rethinking past or future events, while attaching negative emotion to those thoughts. Courtesy: The Oatmeal "Rumination is recycling old thoughts about what went wrong. Reflection is looking for new insights on how to do better." - Adam Grant The opposite of stress is not relaxation-it’s resilience. What provokes stress: NUTS. N is for Novelty : “This is something new you’ve not experienced before, like the first day of school or a new job.” U is for Unpredictability : “When you don’t know how something is going to [take shape, as is the case during] a trip to the dentist.” T is for Threat to the Ego : “When your competence is threatened, such as in front of colleagues. We’re ve...

This Week I Learned - * Resources deployed through some Azure PaaS services (such as Azure Storage and Azure SQL Database), can restrict network access to VNet through the use of virtual network service endpoints or Azure Private Link. * Updates rarely affect the hosted VMs. When updates do have an effect, Azure chooses the least impactful method for updates: - If the update doesn't require a reboot, the VM is paused (for 10-30 seconds) while the host is updated, or the VM is live-migrated to an already updated host. Live migration is an operation that doesn't require a reboot and that preserves memory for the VM. Memory-preserving maintenance works for more than 90 percent of Azure VMs. It doesn't work for G, M, N, and H series. Live migration can also be used to move VMs when Azure Machine Learning algorithms predict an impending hardware failure or when you want to optimize VM allocations. - If maintenance requires a reboot, you're notified of the planned mai...