Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Gartner's rating of Access Management providers: LEADERS Okta Microsoft Ping Identity IBM  Oracle CHALLENGERS Auth0 Idaptive ForgeRock OneLogin Micro Focus Broadcom (CA Technologies) NICHE PLAYERS Atos(Evidian) SecureAuth Optimal MM 

According to the Forrester Wave evaluation of 8 Multicloud Container Development Platforms (MCDP) ,  Red Hat-IBM, Google, and Rancher are Leaders; VMware, D2iQ, and Platform9 Systems are Strong Performers;  Mirantis and Canonical are Contenders. Dev experience, distributed operations & ecosystem integrations are the key differentiators that set apart the  platform providers

*  Azure Firewall vs NSG - The Azure Firewall service complements network security group functionality. Together, they provide better "defense-in-depth" network security. Network security groups provide distributed network layer traffic filtering to limit traffic to resources within virtual networks in each subscription. Azure Firewall is a fully stateful, centralized network firewall as-a-service, which provides network- and application-level protection across different subscriptions and virtual networks. * Unlike role-based access control, you use management locks to apply a restriction across all users and roles. When you apply a lock at a parent scope, all resources within that scope inherit the same lock. Even resources you add later inherit the lock from the parent. The most restrictive lock in the inheritance takes precedence. Applying locks can lead to unexpected results because some operations that don't seem to modify the resource actually require actions that...

Key takeaways from the HBR article " How to Improve Your Sales Skills, Even If You’re Not a Salesperson " Very few parents say they want their kids to grow up to be a salesperson. And yet Sales is the most fundamental skill. Selling is persuading, inspiring, and leading. Your goal is to work in collaboration with a client or colleague to drive change. Figure out what’s important to your client and what business problems they’re trying to solve. Figure out your customer’s motivations - what do they need to accomplish and how do they measure success? Do your research by talking with the people you’re trying to win over, and others in the know, well in advance of making your proposal.  Enlist a trusted peer or manager to role-play so you can see what works and what doesn’t while crafting your sales pitch Your goal is to understand how the flow of these conversations feels and sounds so that you know how you come across and how to improve your delivery.  Even w...

The official Google Cloud documentation has a great service model comparison categorized by  high-level overview , Compute , Networking and  Storage . I compiled my own paraphrased notes along with content from tables from their articles.

This Week I Learned -  * You can attach and configure Kubernetes clusters inside or outside of Azure by using Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes Preview * Azure Red Hat OpenShift service enables you to deploy fully managed OpenShift clusters. Azure Red Hat OpenShift extends Kubernetes. Running containers in production with Kubernetes requires additional tools and resources. This often includes needing to juggle image registries, storage management, networking solutions, and logging and monitoring tools - all of which must be versioned and tested together. Building container-based applications requires even more integration work with middleware, frameworks, databases, and CI/CD tools. Azure Red Hat OpenShift combines all this into a single platform, bringing ease of operations to IT teams while giving application teams what they need to execute. *  Scaling a cluster to zero still leaves the system pool running (and running up a bill); the new az aks stop and az aks start commands (i...

This Week I Learned -  *  20+ best practices to set up networking for workloads migrated to Azure *  Advisor Score measures how well you’re adopting Azure best practices, comparing and quantifying the impact of the Advisor recommendations you’re already following, and the ones you haven’t implemented yet. Think of it as a gap analysis for your deployed Azure workloads. Advisor Score provides customers with a prioritized list of recommendations specifying the exact impact an individual recommendation will have on their overall score. This helps customers overcome “recommendation fatigue” with a unifying system to compare and prioritize recommendations and gives customers the ability to track their progress over time. * Both load balancer & reverse proxy sit between clients and servers, accepting requests from the former and delivering responses from the latter. Whereas deploying a load balancer makes sense only when you have multiple servers, it often makes ...

Interesting facts from the 14 paged Migrate to the Cloud with Azure Migrate e-book : Azure Migrate is a first party service—built by Microsoft that brings 16 migration tools together in a single service. 35k servers can be discovered and assessed at once through the unified migration platform. Server assessment of XEN and KVM systems can be done with first-party Movere or partner tools. Movere is now part of Microsoft As the official Microsoft migration service, Azure Migrate provides a wealth of guidance, tools, reporting, and integrated partner options to assist with even large-scale migrations Azure Migrate:Server Assessment's Dependency analysis feature identifies dependencies between discovered on-premises machines. Both agentless visualization and agent-based visualization is possible. Azure Migrate helps you find out whether Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) can be used to run your VDI environments such as: Microsoft VDI environments. Citrix VDI environments VMware VDI environme...

Let's say you wanted to display a custom set of images within tweets from your Twitter feed or someone else's, Twitter provides a feature  called  Twitter Moment to create a curated list on Twitter.com. You have to scroll vertically to view the collection. If you need a slide show kind of view, try the code I put together in a Github Gist after deriving inspiration from code samples on StackOverflow.com & W3Schools The code for Responsive Iframed Tweets Carousel doesn't have much styling in order to just focus on the essentials.

 This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Advisor reports new features and security issues related to AKS *  Resource groups are optional groupings of resources in AWS. In Azure, all resources must exist in a resource group. * Pods within a K8s node can have startup and runtime errors * The Kubernetes community releases minor versions roughly every three months. Recently the Kubernetes community has increased the window of support for each version from 9 months to 12 months, starting with version 1.19. Kubernetes follows this numbering scheme: [major].[minor].[patch]. The supported window of Kubernetes versions on AKS is known as "N-2": (N (Latest release) - 2 (minor versions)). Older versions will be removed and will be out of support in 30 days. Clusters running unsupported Kubernetes releases are not covered by the AKS support policies.  If a cluster has been out of support for more than three (3) minor versions and has been found to carry security risks, Az...