Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Windows Server container support in the Azure Kubernetes Service makes it possible to: - Lift and shift Windows applications to run on AKS - Seamlessly manage Windows and Linux applications through a single unified API - Mix Windows and Linux applications in the same Kubernetes cluster – with consistent monitoring experience and deployment pipelines *  Helm Charts helps you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. The latest version of Helm is maintained by the CNCF – in collaboration with Microsoft, Google, Bitnami and the Helm contributor community. * Azure disk encryption (ADE) that leverages the BitLocker feature of Windows and the DM-Crypt feature of Linux to encrypt Managed Disks with customer managed keys within the guest virtual machine * Temporary disks are not managed disks and are not encrypted by SSE   * Cloud Native Computing Foundation ( CNCF ) runs the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program. Ther...

While trying out Azure CLI 2 commands, I liked the rich details that were shown as the command output. I learnt that the history command gets the list of commands typed by me in the bash mode of Azure Cloud Shell but I couldn't figure how to capture the output of all Azure CLI commands that I typed. I was looking for a way that the command output could be logged so that I can download the entire interactive session as a text file for review later. I asked on Microsoft Q&A forum and got a wonderfully detailed answer The trick is to use the script command to record your session. This will capture all your commands and output to a file you specify. However, you need to ensure you run the script command to start recording and exit once you want to end. If you want to append the commands to the same file use script -a filename to the same file name you specify. To download the session recording file, use the Download file option from the Azure Cloud Shell menu - Altern...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure VM SLA -  Single Instance VM using Standard HDD Managed Disks for Operating System Disks and Data Disks: 95% Single Instance VM using Standard SSD Managed Disks: 99.5% Single Instance VM using Premium SSD or Ultra Disk: 99.9% VMs that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set: 99.95% VMs that have two or more instances deployed across two or more Availability Zones in the same Azure region: 99.99% *  The App Service Migration Assessment Tool runs multiple readiness checks including IIS Server Site Checks and Linux Container Checks * Netflix created a tool called Chaos Monkey that randomly terminates virtual machines and containers. This way they can make sure that the system is able to handle outages in a production environment. *  When running microservices in a Kubernetes cluster, complexity further increases . While Kubernetes enable capabilities such as auto-scaling, it is not an...

Compiled from SAP blog articles - SAP HANA and S/4HANA – a simple guide &  SAP HANA Cheat Sheet SAP (Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung) is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. SAP was founded by a number of ex-IBM employees in the early 1970s. SAP has a large portfolio of applications. There have been six key versions of its main enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, roughly a major iteration each decade. During the 2000s the number of processes covered by the R/3 or ERP was continuously increased, in addition to that, a number of additional applications were launched to provide more advanced capabilities in certain areas. SAP started to package a number of these together under the name, “Business Suite”.  The main components of Business Suite are: * ERP (enterprise resource planning), basically the evolution of R/3 * CRM (customer relationship management) * SCM (supply chain management) * PLM (product lifecycl...

From the official Azure documentation - To move data in one or more Azure Storage tables to Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft provides two tools to complete this task: - Azure Cosmos DB Data Migration Tool - AzCopy

This Week I Learned - * The Azure platform starts live migration in the following scenarios: - Planned maintenance - Hardware failure - Allocation optimizations Live migration is an operation that doesn't require a reboot and that preserves memory for the VM. It causes a pause or freeze, typically lasting no more than 5 seconds. Except for G, M, N, and H series, all infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs, are eligible for live migration. Eligible VMs represent more than 90 percent of the IaaS VMs that are deployed to the Azure fleet. * Kubernetes has become the defacto standard container orchestrator, and the release of Kubernetes 1.14 includes production support for scheduling Windows containers on Windows nodes in a Kubernetes cluster , enabling a vast ecosystem of Windows applications to leverage the power of Kubernetes. In order to run Windows containers, your Kubernetes cluster must include multiple operating systems, with control plane nodes running Linux and workers r...

This Week I Learned - * The  Computer Vision API  response holds the insight the REST API has about your image, as a JSON payload. The Azure CLI 2.0 uses the --query argument to execute a JMESPath (JSON Matching Expression paths) query on the results of commands. JMESPath is a query language for JSON, giving you the ability to select and present data from CLI output. These queries are executed on the JSON output before any display formatting. The --query argument is supported by all commands in the Azure CLI. * AWS CLI & Azure CLI 2.0 support JMESPath *  Azure & Cloud Icon Collection * Tsundoku is a Japanese word for a stack of books that you have purchased but not yet read. * China has been collecting DNA samples from its men and school-age boys, with the aim to generate genetic profiles of nearly 70 million from the country’s overall male population. The genetic data gleaned from this pool, Nature reports, can be used to construct genetic links t...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that you can use to distribute traffic optimally to services across Azure regions globally. Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct clients to a specific service endpoint IP address based on the rules of the traffic routing method that's used. Clients connect directly to the selected endpoint. Traffic Manager isn't a proxy or gateway. Traffic Manager doesn't see the traffic that passes between the clients and the service; it just gives clients the IP address of where they need to go. * When Traffic Manager receives a DNS request, it chooses an available endpoint to return in the DNS response. There are three types of endpoint  or destination locations supported by Traffic Manager - Azure endpoints, External endpoints, Nested endpoints *  SQL elastic pools are used to manage the budget and performance of multiple SQL databases. SQL elastic pools are a resource allocation service use...

In this season of cleaning up your smartphone & removing shady Chinese apps , also review other apps to see if they are still relevant. Delete especially apps whose function can be accomplished by a website. Following are some advantages of using equivalent websites - As many apps "mine" personal data, there is a lower chance of your personal information getting misused when you choose reliable websites instead.  No need to fetch updated versions. This can result in a lower bandwidth bill Improved performance of your smartphone due to reduced dependence on phone's hardware resources Image created with AutoDraw Also see - -  5 ways in which native apps can harm you & your device -  Beware of Mobile Apps which misuse access requirements