This Week I Learned - Week #47 2020

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 private endpoint to access your services, AWS PrivateLink ensures your traffic is not exposed to the public internet.

* The Anthos Developer Sandbox is available at no cost, to anyone with a Google account.

* Use Buildpacks on Anthos to simplify your application image creation without needing Dockerfiles

* One of the specialties of the Google Cloud documentation is the decision tree -

* Krishna V's Azure quizzes compiled using Survey Monkey and linked on his Cloud school website are a great way to test your Azure skills.

* Go language is 11-years old this month

* The Brave browser is built on the open-source Chromium code by Google. It is focused on protecting users’ privacy and debuted in January 2016. 

* Headphones and Earbuds are not just about delivering quality sound. Following are some differentiating attributes with various models:

• designed to limit sound to a doctor-approved 85 decibels
• flat cable rarely gets tangled 
• mitigates those distracting sounds when the cord rubs against your shirt
• foam ear tips
• sweatproof 

* Resolver is a free online tool which assists consumers in raising and resolving issues. James Walker started Resolver in the UK in 2012, after an energy company ignored his complaint and he realized that complaining was complex, hard work and that there was no service that proactively helped consumers resolve their issues.

* Sperm whale is the largest toothed whale with a brain that is considered the largest on the planet when it comes to weight and volume. They are louder than just about anything else in the ocean. Some of their clicks and calls have been measured at 230 decibels. But we can't hear any of those noises because they are being emitted at a frequency that we cannot hear. Sperm Whales hunt using echolocation, a method used by whales, bats and dolphins to determine locations of objects using reflected sound. It allows the animals to navigate and hunt in darkness, recognize friends and foes, and avoid obstacles.

* Christian Heilmann's dog picture browser comes with an article explaining what goes into ~200 lines of code making it. It uses the Dog.ceo API of free dog images.

* Michael Curran and James Teh are fully blind men who founded the not-for-profit organisation NV Access to support the development of the NVDA screen reader, an open source software. 

* Use the tenet “All of your assumed constraints are debatable” as a forcing function so that people looked at each perceived problem as an opportunity.

* Saudi Arabia’s is driven in large part by economic necessity.

* 80 percent of Saudi Arabia's government revenues come from selling crude oil.

* Significant number of trips in Indian cities is made by foot (16% - 58%), but pedestrian infrastructure, amenities and services are neglected and not given adequate focus. Walkability index is a function of availability of footpath and pedestrian facility rating. The national average Walkability Index is 0.52 [link to PDF] which is embarrassingly low when compared with cities in developed countries.  One rough estimate indicates that the index for London is between 1.5 to 1.7. 

* A study puts nine Indian cities among the worst 100 worldwide in terms of street-network connectivity of roads built between 2000 and 2013, with Pune leading the list from India. Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Jaipur also feature among them. India had the second-largest urban population in the world in 2018 after China, at 461 million urban dwellers. 

* Maravanthe is a uniquely positioned beach in Coastal Karnataka with Arabian Sea on one side and Souparnika river on the other. 

 * “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” — Dwight D. Eisenhower