Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

 This Week I Learned -  * Using Azure Resource Mover service, you can currently move the following resources across regions: Azure VMs and associated disks NICs Availability sets Azure virtual networks Public IP addresses Network security groups (NSGs) Internal and public load balancers Azure SQL databases and elastic pools *  Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure enterprise-scale landing zones provides guidance on landing zone critical design areas to build and operationalize your Azure environment. From Google  Developer Advocate  Priyanka Vergadia's GCP sketch notes *  The Chaos Monkey Guide for Engineers is a full how-to of Chaos Monkey, including what it is, its origin story, its pros and cons, its relation to the broader topic of Chaos Engineering * Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared am...

I loved watching the  two-part Nat Geo series  India From Above on Hotstar with polished audio commentary in Telugu. It presents an amazing aerial view of places in incredible India. Shot beautifully with drone cameras mostly, it comes with subtitles in English & audio commentary in English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bangla  It tells engaging stories about life and people in diverse places across India.  The 69-year old priest of a temple inside the Gir forest, Bharatdas Darshandas, lives alone in the company of wildlife. The priest's solitude is broken once every five years - when he steps out to cast his vote in the Indian national election.   Episode 1 covers Prayagraj, Goa, Nandgaon, Sriharikota, Veraval, Kamuthi, Ladakh, Gir, Delhi, Jodhpur. Episode 2 covers Rann of Kutch, Khichan, Chand Baori stepwell in Abhaneri, Loktak lake, Keibul Lamjao National Park (the only floating national park in the world), Vizhinjam, Cherrapunji, Bhedaghat, The Dhuandhar ...

This Week I Learned -  * During Azure Site Recovery replication between source and target regions for Azure VM disaster recovery between Azure regions, if the source VM has a Hybrid User Benefit (HUB) license enabled, a test failover or failed over VM also uses the HUB license.  RBAC policies, Extensions, Virtual machine scale sets are not replicated to the failover VM in target region.   * Interesting to know that each node in a cluster can run a different container platform/runtime   *  Google unveiled Google Cloud Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP), which has six components meant to help customers adopt its cloud platform and services. Google is also offering prospects a migration assessment at no charge. The assessment includes an inventory of a company's virtual and physical servers, as well as a total cost of ownership report on moving to the cloud that is valued at $20,000, according to the company. Google partners StratoZone ...

Virtual machines and other compute resources require an agent to collect monitoring data required to measure the performance and availability of their guest operating system and workloads.  Azure Monitor currently has multiple agents because of recent consolidation of Azure Monitor and Log Analytics. While there may be overlap in their features, each has unique capabilities. Depending on your requirements, you may need one or more of the agents on your virtual machines.

This Week I Learned -  * Azure Sentinel is a consumer of logs and alerts generated by Azure Security Center *  Azure Container Instances enables a layered approach to orchestration , providing all of the scheduling and management capabilities required to run a single container, while allowing orchestrator platforms to manage multi-container tasks on top of it. *  Bicep is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for deploying Azure resources declaratively. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM and ARM templates, which means anything that can be done in an ARM Template can be done in bicep (outside of temporary known limitations).  * Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) and geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS/RA-GZRS) (preview) are available only for standard general-purpose V2, BlockBlobStorage, and FileStorage accounts in certain regions.  General-purpose v2 accounts deliver the lowest per-gigabyte capacity prices for Azure Storage . Microsoft recommends using a...

This Week I Learned -  * Azure Analysis Services is built on the analytics engine in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.  SQL Server Analysis Services, SSAS, is an online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining tool in Microsoft SQL Server.  *  Tags are metadata elements attached to resources. Tags consist of pairs of key/value strings. The values you include in these pairs is up to you, but the application of a consistent set of global tags, as part of a comprehensive naming and tagging policy, is a critical part of an overall governance policy. * Use the Azure Well-Architected Framework Cost Optimization checklist when designing a cost-effective workload. * High Scale VMs that leverage Azure Premium Storage have a multi-tier caching technology called BlobCache. BlobCache uses a combination of the host RAM and local SSD for caching . This cache is available for the Premium Storage persistent disks and the VM local disks. * Objects in the cool tier on...

Sarah Cooper is a former Google employee turned comedienne, comic writer and author. At 40, she quit her cozy Google job to pursue her passion for writing . She writes hilarious business satire on her website The Cooper Review .  Excerpts from her illustrated and “funny because it’s true” book , 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings  - One male reviewer of her book How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings  was only able to get through the table of contents as it hurt too much. Los Angeles Times has called her - "One of the hottest comics of the coronavirus era".