Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Azure Cost Management + Billing aids in increasing organizational accountability by implementing governance policies for effective enterprise cloud cost management, and increase accountability with budgets, cost allocation, and chargebacks. Chargebacks are internal charges assigned to various departments. Showback is an analysis of technology usage across the board. Microsoft offers a  Cloud Adoption Framework Governance Benchmark Tool to assess and aid in designing a governance strategy. It also offers governance guides based on the complexity of the enterprise *  Every tenant is linked to a single Azure AD instance, which is shared with all tenant's subscriptions . Resources from one subscription are isolated from resources in other subscriptions. An owner of a tenant can decide to have multiple subscriptions: when Subscriptions limits are reached to use different payment methods to isolate resources between different departments, projec...

Key points from a YouTube demo by Google engineers - There are 3 options to modernize Java apps with Anthos: Option 1: Modernize with containerization • Lift & Migrate apps to containers using Migrate for Anthos • Ideal for: When you do not have source code Option 2: Brownfield apps with proprietary framework • GSI tools to remove proprietary and replace with OSS and then containerize • Ideal for: Brownfield apps with proprietary pieces Option 3: Refactor and replatform

This Week I Learned -   * If you want to have full control of the management and scheduling of your clusters of VMs rather than using the services provided through Azure Batch, consider using  HPC Pack which offers a series of installers for Windows that allows you to configure your own control and management plane, and highly flexible deployments of on-premises and cloud nodes. By contrast with the exclusively cloud-based Batch, HPC Pack has the flexibility to deploy to on-premises and the cloud. It uses a hybrid of both to expand to the cloud when your on-premises reserves are insufficient. *  Kubernetes has also become the universal control plane for orchestrating , not just containers but also a variety of resources, including virtual machines, databases, and even SAP Hana instances. *  AKS is " cheaper than running your own kubernetes distribution in Azure ! If you know that the kubernetes code base has changed for about 97% in the last three years, you ca...

Short notes from various hyperlinked articles including primarily  Kubernetes 101: Pods, Nodes, Containers, and Clusters by Daniel Sanche Kubernetes - Highlights Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. As a container orchestration platform, Kubernetes can help automate application deployment, scaling, and management. Image source: Microsoft documentation Nodes A node is the smallest unit of computing hardware in Kubernetes.  A node can be either a physical machine in a datacenter, or virtual machine. It is a representation of a single machine in your cluster. Containerization uses clusters of nodes (either real or virtual machines) that function like one robust server.  Nodes share compute, network, and storage resources. Cluster In Kubernetes, nodes pool together their resources to form a more powerful machine.  When you deploy programs onto the cluster...

Azure Container Registry is a managed Docker registry service based on the open-source Docker Registry 2.0.  Azure Container Registry is a registry of Docker and Open Container Initiative (OCI) images as well as related content formats, such as Helm charts, OCI artifacts, and images built to the OCI image format specification. Container Registry is private and hosted in Azure.  Like Docker Hub, Container Registry is organized around repositories that contain one or more images.  Container Registry lets you automate tasks such as redeploying an app when an image is rebuilt. All images stored in a container registry are encrypted at rest. Container Registry is highly scalable, providing enhanced throughput for Docker pulls that can span many nodes concurrently. The Premium SKU of Container Registry includes 500 GiB of storage. In addition to storing and hosting images, you can also use Container Registry to build images.  Instead of building an image yourself and pus...

Condensed noes from the official documentation - Azure Batch is a platform service for running large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) applications efficiently in the cloud.  Azure Batch schedules compute-intensive work to run on a managed pool of virtual machines, and can automatically scale compute resources to meet the needs of your jobs. It is suitable for scenarios requiring  large-scale parallel processing & massive computational power like financial risk modeling, 3D image rendering, media transcoding, and genetic sequence analysis. At a high level, Azure Batch involves a number of components working together.  Azure Batch account, which acts as a container for all Batch resources. The Batch workflow begins by uploading these data and application files to an Azure storage account associated with the Azure Batch account.  You then create a Batch pool with as many Windows or Linux virtual compute nodes as needed. They can also be au...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure automation state configuration  is the service you use to make sure that your DSC configurations are managed properly and deployed across your nodes (virtual machines).  *  Configuration Management implements the policies, procedures, techniques, and tools that manage, evaluate proposed changes, track the status of changes, and maintain an inventory of system .  * The previously named Service Bus Relay service is now called Azure Relay. The  Azure Relay  service enables you to securely expose services that run in your corporate network to the public cloud. * Terraform uses plugins called providers that each define and manage a set of resource types . Most providers are associated with a particular cloud or on-premises infrastructure service, allowing Terraform to manage infrastructure objects within that service. *  Because Terraform is managed separately from Azure, you might find that you can't provision...

Condensed notes from a Gartner report  (July 2020) and official documentation - In 2016, Oracle launched an integrated IaaS and PaaS (IaaS+PaaS) offering, replacing the previous-generation offering, which was called “Oracle Compute Cloud” and is now branded as “OCI Classic.”  The “Gen 2” offering, originally known as “Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services,” is now branded “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” (OCI).  Oracle in early stages focused primarily on a platform designed for and dedicated to Oracle solutions.  Oracle has prioritized OCI’s strategic roadmap and the features most important to its customers, rather than directly pursuing its competition. As a result, Oracle is now starting to position itself as a viable option when supporting non-Oracle workloads. Besides OCI, currently AWS and Azure are the only two external public cloud providers allowed to host Oracle solutions Oracle remains the only option for accessing Oracle solutions via a SaaS model, as AWS and Azu...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Arc extends Azure Resource Manager capabilities to Linux and Windows servers, as well as Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge. To request a resource quota increase, go to the Azure portal and file a support issue from the Subscriptions > Usage + quotas section. For resource groups, the quota is for each individual region, not for the entire subscription. * Using the JMESPath query language it is possible to filter and constrain the JSON results * Use Zipdeploy manually push your code to Azure. Use az webapp deployment source config-zip to send a ZIP of your application files to App Service. Zipdeploy can also be accessed via basic HTTP utilities such as curl. *  Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) is a tool that takes care of all backup and recovery needs for the Oracle database and also offers a simple and efficient approach for Database migration to the Oracle Cloud.  *  Missing Ma...

I like summary comparison tables as a way to look at the big picture and I found this Oracle blog post which compares public cloud VMware offerings , (Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution Preview, Google Cloud VMware Engine ) useful -  I've added additional notes from official sources and will continue to update this as I find new info. Related -  Frequently asked questions about Azure VMware Solution (AVS) preview Comparing VMware solutions on AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI

Condensed transcript of Ahmed Sabbour’s talk on Designing a Secure Cloud-Native Architecture using Kubernetes on Azure : Let’s say you want to create an application and to deploy this to the Cloud and you decided to adopt container technology. So how do we actually get started? As a developer, you have your code your developing on your local machine. Then you push this source code to some source control repository for good measure, whether that’s GitHub or somewhere else, you just do that. GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate & kick off workflows with GitHub events like push, issue creation, or a new release. Actions are individual tasks that you can combine to create jobs and customize your workflow. You can set up some CI/CD process, a continuous integration and continuous deployment process on top of that to actually build, take that code, and build this using the CI/CD process into a container image, which then gets pushed into a container registry or a non-image repo...