Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft identity platform implements the OpenID Connect protocol for handling authentication and OAuth 2.0 protocol for handling authorization. OpenID Connect is built on top of OAuth 2.0, so the terminology and flow are similar between the two.  * OAuth is used for authorization and SAML is used for authentication. * Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a centralized identity provider in the cloud. Delegating authentication and authorization to it enables scenarios such as Conditional Access policies that require a user to be in a specific location, the use of multi-factor authentication (sometimes referred to as two-factor authentication or 2FA), as well as enabling a user to sign in once and then be automatically signed in to all of the web apps that share the same centralized directory. This capability is referred to as Single Sign On (SSO). * Both the Microsoft Speech SDK and REST APIs support Text-to-speech voices, each of which suppo...

*  Tanzu is the Japanese word for containers * With  "the biggest rearchitecture of vSphere in a decade", VMware is making vSphere capable of managing both virtual machines and Kubernetes (K8s) clusters in version 7 of vSphere.  *  Tanzu is a portfolio of products centered on K8s . Following VMware's acquisition of Pivotal in December 2019, Pivotal's PKS (Pivotal Container Service) K8s distribution is now known as VMware Enterprise PKS and is now part of Tanzu.  * In 2019, VMWare also acquired Bitnami, a specialist in packaging open-source applications for easy deployment to targets including K8s. This technology is now behind the Tanzu Application Catalog, which allows users to deploy commonly used applications and runtimes (such as node.js, Wordpess, MySQL or TensorFlow.) * Tanzu portfolio has ability to work across multiple K8s distributions and public clouds * VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition [ link to PDF datasheet ] builds on Kuber...

This Week I Learned -  * While previous Bring-Your-Own-Subscription cloud migration options available to Red Hat and SUSE customers allowed them to use their pre-existing RHEL and SLES subscriptions in the cloud, Azure Hybrid Benefit improves upon this with additional capabilities .  It lowers your ongoing operational costs with automatic image maintenance, updates, and patches—Microsoft maintains the converted RHEL and SLES images for you. You get co-located technical support from Azure, Red Hat, and SUSE with just one ticket. * AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) can be used to migrate your Apache Cassandra NoSQL databases to Amazon DynamoDB. * Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service. * AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and services hosted on AWS or on-premises, securely on the Amazon network. By providing a...

I received the formal notification about passing the Google Cloud Certified - Associate Cloud Engineer exam after the customary review, today.  Although I received the provisional Pass result at the end of the exam, it seems odd that a company whose premier product is synonymous with speed takes up to a week to review & provide formal confirmation. I like these certification exams as: they provide a structure for learning new topics highlight key areas in a subject  lets us validate our learning through simulated scenarios  the virtual badges are fun to collect  For my preparation, I used Qwiklabs, Udemy and the official Google Cloud documentation.  Some of the Google Cloud documentation gems I found during the journey are the Google concept mapping with Azure & AWS articles. Besides the labs feature, Qwiklabs now includes video tutorials. The decks are a treat & useful for future reference  Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure Esse...

 This Week I Learned -  *  AWS’s initial offering EC2-classic platform allowed customers to run ec2 instances on a flat global network shared by all the customers...In 2013, Azure turned its focus from being just a PaaS provider into a Full-fledged IaaS provider * A AWS VPC subnet must only belong to one AZ and cannot span AZs. A subnet is public if it has an internet gateway (IGW) attached. AWS allows only one IGW per VPC and the public subnet allow resources deployed in them access to the internet.  * Azure VNet does not provide a default VNet and does not have private or public subnet as in AWS VPC. Resources connected to a VNet have access to the Internet, by default. * In Azure VNet, the smallest subnet supported is /29 and the largest is a /8. For the subnet, AWS recommends a minimum address block of /28 and maximum of /16. * Azure VNet provides Network Security Groups (NSGs) and it combines the functions of the AWS SGs and NACLs. NSGs are stateful an...

Dhruva Jaishankar, Director of the US Initiative at ORF (son of S Jaishankar,  Padma Shri, former Indian diplomat and the current Minister of External Affairs  and grandson of K Subrahmanyam, the doyen of India's strategic affairs community) posted a tweet comparing U.S. states to administrative areas in India with similar populations .  It has generated a lot of interest mainly among fellow Indians & evoked insightful & funny reactions - In terms of population, New York State has been compared with Mumbai metro region while California is similar to Orissa.  "California (CA) by itself is the 6th largest economy in the world. So, on one hand you see the absurdity of this comparison but on the other hand you can see the potential of India, if people get their act together." "Odisha and Assam never seem to matter" "Odisha matters only when people need coal and iron ores" "Population of India is approximately equivalent to the population ...

This Week I Learned -  *  Microsoft OpenHack is a developer-focused engagement that connects development teams (Open) with experts to tackle a series of real-world challenges through hands-on experimentation (Hack) in person or online (Virtual). *  A data pipeline has five stages grouped into three heads : Data Engineering: collection, ingestion, preparation (~50% effort) Analytics / Machine Learning: computation (~25% effort) Delivery: presentation (~25% effort) * AWS is adding a second AWS Region in India which is expected to be operational in the second-half of 2022. The Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will be located in the state of Telangana. AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region was launched in 2016.  * The BBC website, the sixth most popular in the UK, has mostly migrated from the broadcaster's bit barns to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with around half the site now rendered using AWS Lambda, a serverless platform. * Oracle hosts Tiktok and Zoom *  Anthos 1...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Backup uses Geo-redundant storage (GRS) by default. * Azure Backup can install a  workload backup extension  on a SQL Server instance on Windows to support Full, Differential,  Transaction log backup options. SQL Server on Linux does  not  currently integrate with Azure Backup. * Only Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) or System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) support app-aware backups. * A snapshot is a point-in-time backup of all disks on the virtual machine. For Azure virtual machines on Windows, Azure Backup uses VMSnapshot extension while VMSnapshotLinux extension is used on Linux * The Azure Backup pricing for VMs is based on the size of the backed-up data, because the cost is based on the size of the allocated disk space. For SQL Server backups, cost is based on the size of the database backup file. *  Azure Backup offers the ability to back up virtual machines encrypted with Azure Disk Encry...