Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

 This Week I Learned -  * Azure’s AI-powered SQL optimization enables automatic tuning and adaptive query optimization. * Seven editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 were released: Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, HPC Server and Itanium, as well as Windows Storage Server 2008 R2.  * The term NoSQL refers to a family of databases designed to hold non-relational data. The term isn't quite accurate, because many non-relational data stores support SQL compatible queries. The term NoSQL stands for "Not only SQL". * Google Cloud acquired AppSheet, an intelligent no-code application development platform. * Go is in the process of adding generics, which could potentially reduce the lines of code in a popular application such as Kubernetes by the thousands. * Many organizations are now running multiple versions of Kubernetes spanning various Kubernetes distributions. Regardless of what version of Kubernetes an organization is running, managing Kubernetes on a ...

Excerpts, paraphrased notes and timeline of Covid-19 pandemic from 25 Days That Changed the World: How Covid-19 Slipped China’s Grasp  & The Plague Year : January 3, 2020 - George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, when pressed, assured Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.  At the time, the theory was that each case had arisen from animals in a “wet” market where exotic game was sold. The Chinese hid the news of the 2003 SARS outbreak, and, when rumors arose, authorities minimized the severity of the disease, though the fatality rate was approximately ten per cent.  It ultimately reached some thirty countries and was contained eight months after it emerged.  January 5, 2020 - Professor Zhang Yongzhena, leading virologist at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center,  and his team had cracked the virus’s gene...

 This Week I Learned - * The Azure Knowledge Center has a good collection of common questions and answers like this one - " What charges do I incur while using Azure Site Recovery? ". When you use Site Recovery, you incur charges for the Site Recovery licence, Azure storage, storage transactions and outbound data transfer. The Azure Pricing calculator estimate covers only the fixed price of  Site Recovery licence and there is no option to input numbers for the other variable factors. * The Azure PowerShell modules expose over 4,000 cmdlets and, on average, ten parameters per cmdlet. Az Predictor is an intelligent command completion module for Azure Powershell. With Az Predictor ’s context-aware suggestions users will be guided through the discovery of cmdlets and will not need to go to the online help as often.  It use an AI model to make those suggestions. It makes  suggestions of what is likely the next command you will use based on what you have done bef...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Stack and Outposts are not multi-cloud products but extend many common public cloud services from their respective platforms unlike Google Anthos. Because Anthos is essentially a Kubernetes distribution that can run on a mixture of different cloud infrastructures at once -- and is not tied to GCP specifically -- it fully supports multi-cloud architectures and offers the most flexibility. Outposts is a managed service that will only work on a hardware device designed, sold and installed directly by AWS. Azure Stack works only with servers that are certified by Microsoft to support the platform.  * Hybrid clouds always involve both private and public solutions. On the other hand, a multi-cloud always involves more than one public cloud, but it can also include virtual and physical infrastructure. * AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive)  is a UNIX operating system sold by IBM.  AIX is based on the RISC processors (that...

Azure AD Domain Services enables you to deploy your workloads in Azure Infrastructure Services, without having to worry about maintaining your identity infrastructure. Comparison of Azure AD Domain Services to DIY AD domain in Azure : Feature Azure AD Domain Services Self-managed AD DS Managed service ✓ ✕ Secure deployments ✓ Administrator needs to secure the deployment. DNS server ✓ (managed service) ✓ Domain or Enterprise administrator privileges ✕ ✓ Domain join ✓ ✓ Domain authentication using NTLM and Kerberos ✓ ✓ Custom OU structure ✓ ✓ Schema extensions ✕ ✓ AD domain/forest trusts ✓  (one-way outbound forest trusts only) ✓ LDAP read ✓ ✓ Secure LDAP (LDAPS) ✓ ✓ LDAP write ✓ (within the managed domain) ✓ Group Policy ✓ Full Geo-distributed deployments ✕ ✓

This Week I Learned -  * You can move billing and/or a Azure subscription to another tenant. This has various implications . Objects that exist outside of the subscription (for example, RBAC and Azure AD objects including groups, apps, policies, etc.) do not move. Also, some services (Azure Key Vault, Data Bricks, etc.) move in a non-functional state. * Transparent Data Encryption encrypts all data at rest in Azure SQL. Use Always Encrypted to encrypt sensitive data while in use without revealing encryption keys to the service.  * Azure Disk Encryption for Windows VMs uses the BitLocker feature of Windows to provide full disk encryption of the OS disk and data disks. Additionally, it provides encryption of the temporary disk when the VolumeType parameter is All. *  Alex Shteynberg's article " To identity and beyond " & the Microsoft Cloud Identity for Enterprise Architects poster in the Microsoft 365 solution and architecture center provide a simple & concise ove...

This Week I Learned -  * App Service (using azurewebsites.net domain) provides SSL connections for all URLs under the 'azurewebsites.net' domain at no additional charge. Standard and Premium service plans include the right to use one IP SSL at no additional charge per App Service Plan. Free and shared service plans do not support SSL. * App Service offerings include access to a free 20mb SQL database for 12 months. After 12 months, the free SQL Database converts to a paid basic SQL subscription. *  You are charged for Azure App Service apps while they are in stopped state. Delete apps that are not in use or update tier to Free to avoid charges. * Running workloads in the cloud gives an organization access to unlimited resources. That's a good thing, but only if the IT team adopts good capacity management practices . * Trehalose (from Turkish 'trehala' – a sugar derived from insect cocoons + -ose) is a naturally occurring glucose found in mushrooms, some seaweed, lob...