Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The naming of Pricing Tiers is not consistent across Services. The number of Tiers and their resource cost can vary. The Basic Tier of Load Balancer is free but the Basic Tier for App Service is not; there is Free tier for App Service. AAD has 3 Tiers - Free, Premium 1, Premium 2 This table (WIP) shows the Tiers for different Azure Services -

This Week I Learned - * For your Azure deployments, you already use Azure portal, Azure Cloud shell, Azure API to manage your resources. With Azure Arc , you can extend these capabilities to manage resources in hybrid environments such as datacenters, private, public clouds and the edge. Azure Arc can help with management and governance of servers and Kubernetes clusters across environments with a unified view in Azure Portal and API. Azure Arc also enables you to enforce compliance by centrally managing access and security policies with standardized Role Based Access Control. * Azure Service Health is a free service that provides personalized guidance and support when you're affected by an Azure service problem. Advisor identifies subscriptions that don't have alerts configured and recommends configuring them. * Embedded within the Azure Service Health suite of services you’ll find Azure Resource Health Alerts. This service provides a near real-time availability signal r...

This Week I Learned - * In case of Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS), data is synchronously replicated 3 times across 3 availability zones in the primary region, then asynchronously replicated to the secondary paired region (3 more copies) = can sustain node failure within the storage cluster, entire datacenter or availability zone going down or a region-wide outage (only region failure would require account failover to restore read and write availability. Typically has an RTO of less 1 hour (no SLA). * Microsoft Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) is an open-source, event-driven framework aimed to build resilient and portable microservices for Cloud and Edge applications. * By connecting Azure Boards with GitHub repositories, you enable linking between GitHub commits, pull requests, and issues to work items. * With deployment scripts, you can add PowerShell or Bash scripts to your templates. The deployment scripts extend your ability to set up resources during de...

Paraphrased summary from Field Notes: Choosing a Rehost Migration Tool – CloudEndure or AWS SMS Both CloudEndure Migration and AWS SMS are good options for a lift-and-shift migration. CloudEndure Migration is a better option when you migrate physical servers to AWS, when you want to deploy a block-level replication solution, or when you have near real-time replication requirements. In contrast, AWS SMS is a better option when you want to leverage an agentless solution , when you can tolerate one hour between replication jobs, or when you want a solution that’s managed from one place in the AWS Management Console .

AI Superpowers (2018) is the most educative and insightful book I've read this year. It has filled me with hope and inspiration. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the 250+ paged book as it contains amazing facts spiced with the author's real life experiences. It is written by AI guru, Dr Kai-Fu Lee who has held important and senior positions in Apple, Microsoft, Google. He is a Stage 4 cancer survivor. He has dedicated the book to his Carnegie Mellon professor, the now 82 year old, Turing and Padma Bhushan awardee, Raj Reddy , whom he calls his "mentor in AI and in life". I have compiled paraphrased summaries of some of the chapters I especially liked, on how Silicon Valley & Chinese startups compare and the Four Waves of AI , to keep re-reading them. In the chapter "The Wisdom of Cancer", he poignantly articulates what life means to him - " My sense of self-worth was derived from my achievements at work, from my ability to create economi...

Paraphrased summary of the chapter "The Four Waves of AI" from book AI Superpowers by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee The complete AI revolution will take a little time and will ultimately wash over us in a series of four waves:  Internet AI Business AI Perception AI Autonomous AI The first two waves—internet AI and business AI—are already all around us. Perception AI is now digitizing our physical world, learning to recognize our faces, understand our requests, and “see” the world around us. Autonomous AI will come last but will have the deepest impact on our lives. This first wave of Internet AI began almost fifteen years ago but finally went mainstream around 2012. Internet AI is largely about using AI algorithms as recommendation engines: systems that learn our personal preferences and then serve up content hand-picked for us. The horsepower of these AI engines depends on the digital data they have access to, and there’s currently no greater storehouse of this data than ...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Service Health helps you assess the health of Azure, while Azure Monitor helps you determine if there are any issues on your end. Both services use the same alerting platform to keep you notified and informed of the availability and performance of your Azure workloads. This means that you can set up an action group once and use it multiple times for different scenarios.  Azure Monitor and Azure Service Health are complementary services that you will often use together when troubleshooting issues. The Azure Status page only reports on major, widespread outages and doesn’t include any information about planned maintenance or other health advisories. * The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment -- including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a virtual machine * PowerShell is available for .NET Core, which also runs on Lin...

Currently Reservations apply to specific components of the following Resources : Virtual machine SQL Database Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly SQL Data Warehouse) Azure Cosmos DB Azure Blob Storage Azure Dedicated Host Azure Database for MySQL Azure Database for MariaDB Azure Database for PostgreSQL Azure Managed Disks Azure Databricks Azure Cache for Redis Azure Data Explorer SUSE Linux Red Hat Plans Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple Azure Red Hat OpenShift App Services Key points: Purchase reservations based on your long-term usage pattern. You can purchase reservations using API, PowerShell, or CLI.  Reservation can be applied to a single resource group, a single subscription, or all subscriptions in the billing context. A resource group can have a single resource. Reservation benefits are “use-it-or-lose-it” at hourly grain, except for Databricks reserved capacity. . Unused reserved hours don't carry over. You can pay for a reserva...

According to an  Azure documentation update in April , Azure services are grouped into three categories: Foundational, Mainstream, and Specialized services. Azure's general policy on deploying services into any given region is primarily driven by region type, service categories, and customer demand: Foundational – Available in all recommended and alternate regions when the region is generally available, or within 12 months of a new foundational service becoming generally available. Mainstream – Available in all recommended regions within 12 months of the region/service general availability; demand-driven in alternate regions (many are already deployed into a large subset of alternate regions). Specialized – Targeted service offerings, often industry-focused or backed by customized/specialized hardware. Demand-driven availability across regions (many are already deployed into a large subset of recommended regions). Service categories are assigned at general availability. ...

This Week I Learned - * When you migrate applications to Azure, you can continue to use your security information and event management (SIEM) software, combining cloud and on-premises security information into your existing system of monitoring and control. You can also take advantage of Azure SEIM and other security capabilities, including Azure Sentinel, an  artificial intelligence-based SEIM, Azure Advanced Threat Protection for network security and Azure Key Vault for secure storage of application credentials and data. *  Microsoft's partnership with internet service providers (ISPs), internet exchange providers (IXPs), and software-defined cloud interconnect (SDCI) providers worldwide enables Azure Peering Service to extend the optimized path to the customer network and the last mile. Default routing of traffic for best performance in Azure Traffic routed with the new network service tier in Azure *  Operations Management Suite (OMS) was a bundling of...

The ebook " Migrating  SQL Server to  Azure SQL Database Managed Instance " [PDF] provides a quick summary of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance features & steps to migrate to it. Key points from the ebook - Data Migration Assistant reviews the target migration environment and surfaces new features that will benefit your data post-migration. It checks for database compatibility and feature parity The Azure Database Migration Guide can help you plan your migrations  and provide information about migration tools that are available. Input your source and target platform choices into the guide, and it will create a customized playbook to suit your individual scenario Azure Database Migration Service is a fully managed migration service designed to enable seamless migrations from multiple database sources to Azure data platforms with minimal downtime Figure 2: How Azure Database Migration Service works Restore of system databases is not supported. To mig...

Key similarities  and differences between Splunk and Azure Monitor from the official Azure documentation :