This Week I Learned - Week #44 2020
* Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms. Microsoft enables manufacturing companies to build and manage their own IoT solutions with Microsoft Azure platform services such as Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, or Microsoft Azure Time Series Insights, or purchase solutions directly from Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
* Blockchain owes its existence to bitcoin. However, the two are not the same. Bitcoin is just one use-case of a blockchain ledger. Thanks to the negativity around cryptocurrencies, which mainly stem from the volatility of their value in the marketplaces, most people have an opinion that it is a shady, illegal affair to deal with them. Unfortunately, those sentiments creep into the underlying technology of blockchain as well. So...Don’t call it blockchain. Call it Distributed Ledger Technology – a truly de-centralized, distributed system of record that is immutable and trustworthy....it is an architectural pattern. It is a datastore that is distributed and everyone who is privy to a transaction on the ledger has an identical copy of the transaction. So, if you modify that price of your product from 100 dollars to 1000 dollars because you can, the others on the network have a copy that says it is 100 dollars. Before you ask, the hash does not match now. Hence your update is rejected. Any process that crosses organizational trust boundaries, where there is an element of distrust between the organizations, and the presence of low value manual verifications steps at each step of the way is an ideal candidate for a DLT based overhauling.
* Anthos includes the popular GKE service, automated cluster lifecycle operations, control plane management, policy-driven security features, cloud-based configuration management, logging, and monitoring, and a cloud-native developer environment combining Cloud Run for serverless development and Anthos Service Mesh.
* In 2018 and 2019, VMware acquired Pivotal, Heptio, and Bitnami and has integrated products and expertise from all three with its existing container technologies to yield the Tanzu portfolio.
* Tanzu Application Service (TAS) is Pivotal Cloud Foundry ported to Kubernetes plus an app catalog and data services.
* Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Mission Control, a Kubernetes multicloud runtime and control plane, is embedded in VMware vSphere 7 and can be extended to additional public clouds.
* Tanzu management services include service mesh, observability, and training services.
* VMware aims to embed Kubernetes deeply from the hypervisor to the public cloud. This offers cloud-native developers the powerful and popular one-touch continuous deployment experience of TAS and gives operators a consistent container and virtual machine lifecycle management experience from a vSphere-based data center to the public cloud and edge.
* Interesting scenario about developers paying their own cloud bills in a GCP ACE Practice test: Your company has a centralized billing account for all development, test and production GCP projects. Your company has recently acquired another company that lets its developers pay for their projects using their company credit cards. You want to consolidate the billing of all GCP projects into a new billing account.
* On Monday, November 2, 2020 at 9am Pacific Standard Time, Docker will begin enforcing rate limits on container pulls for Anonymous and Free users. Anonymous (unauthenticated) users will be limited to 100 container image pulls every six hours, and Free (authenticated) users will be limited to 200 container image pulls every six hours, when enforcement is fully implemented.
* NetApp CEO George Kurian and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian are twin brothers
* IIT (Kharagpur) postgraduate & Tirupur native, S Yuvarajaa, who created faster versions of IRCTC's rail ticket booking system through the 'Super Tatkal' and 'Super Tatkal Pro' railway ticket booking Android apps has been arrested. He is accused of bypassing the IRCTC's ticket booking system by creating an online platform for customers to book tickets in exchange for payments through a 'coin' based system - ToI
* More than 48% of Indian equity large cap funds, 59% of ELSS funds and 82% of Indian composite bond funds underperformed their respective indices, in the one year through June 2020. - BloombergQuint
* Tequila is made from blue agave, a particular variety of spiny succulent native to Mesoamerica which can be found on Mexico’s dusty plains. Mezcal, its country cousin, can be made from a number of different agaves. Like many other regional foodstuffs – parmesan and champagne among them – there are tight restrictions over what products can be called tequila or mezcal. According to World Trade Organisation regulations, no spirit with these names can be made anywhere else in the world. Desmond Nazareth, a 62-year-old from Mumbai, is hoping his Indian agave could someday become to India what tequila is to Mexico or whisky is to Scotland - The Economist
* The left lung is typically smaller than the right in order to make room for the heart
* Angkor Wat ("City of Temples") is a temple complex in Cambodia and the largest religious monument in the world by land area, on a site measuring 162.6 hectares (1.626 km2; 402 acres). Originally constructed as a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Vishnu, it was gradually transformed into a Buddhist temple towards the end of the 12th century, and as such it is also described as a "Hindu-Buddhist" temple. It was built by the Khmer King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century in Yaśodharapura (present-day Angkor), the capital of the Khmer Empire, as his state temple and eventual mausoleum. The inner walls of the outer gallery bear a series of large-scale scenes mainly depicting episodes from the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. On the southern gallery follow the only historical scene, a procession of Suryavarman II, then the 32 hells and 37 heavens of Hinduism. The shrine itself, originally occupied by a statue of Vishnu and open on each side, was walled in when the temple was converted to Theravada Buddhism, the new walls featuring standing Buddhas. The temple has become a symbol of Cambodia, appearing on its national flag. The splendid artistic legacy of Angkor Wat and other Khmer monuments in the Angkor region led directly to France adopting Cambodia as a protectorate on 11 August 1863 and invading Siam to take control of the ruins. Cambodia gained independence from France on 9 November 1953 and has controlled Angkor Wat since that time. The entire city of Angkor used up far greater amounts of stone than all the Egyptian pyramids combined, and occupied an area significantly greater than modern-day Paris. Most of the visible areas are of sandstone blocks (5 to 10 million sandstone blocks with a maximum weight of 1.5 tons each), while laterite was used for the outer wall and for hidden structural parts. The binding agent used to join the blocks is yet to be identified, although natural resins or slaked lime has been suggested. The stones, as smooth as polished marble, were laid without mortar with very tight joints that are sometimes hard to find.
* "I am not against songs in films. We come from an oral tradition of storytelling. I have grown up listening to epics in oral rendition and oral rendition always had music. When you have two-and-a-half hours of story-telling, there is this beautiful abstract break which takes you to the mood of the story. I am not saying it is a must, but it is something we don't have to be ashamed of." - Mani Ratnam
* Nike founder Phil Knight sold shoes out of the back of his car. An art student designed the signature swoosh. And the first waffle tread shoes were actually made with a waffle iron.
* Scientists often wait decades to be recognised with the prestigious prize
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