Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * The spoke virtual networks can be hosted in the same or a different Azure subscription with respect to the hub virtual network and they are used to isolate workloads from one another. The benefits of using a hub and spoke configuration include cost savings, overcoming subscription limits, and workload isolation.  *  Neat compilation of resources for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) * According to Gartner, the root cause of 90% of cloud-based availability issues will be the failure to fully use cloud service provider native redundancy capabilities. *  The general phases of the ML lifecycle are data preparation, train and tune, and deploy and monitor, with inference being when we actually serve the model up with new data for inference . * In the detailed preceding ML Lifecycle diagram, the red boxes represent comparatively newer concepts and tasks that are now deemed important to include in, and run in a scalable, operational, and production-orient...

Grocery accounts for two-thirds of India’s retail market. Small mom-and-pop stores control more than 88% of the grocery retail trade and online players account for very minuscule, close to 1% of the grocery market. Since the onset of Covid-19 and the launch of Reliance’s JioMart, competition in the online grocery market has increased ....and it is welcome According to a study by CapitalMind ,  DMart  and JioMart offer the highest discounts. The discounts offered by – Amazon, BigBasket , and Flipkart Grocery – are in a tight range of 11-12%. The lowest discount was offered by Grofers . In the comparison, I felt Amazon Fresh (available in a few cities) is a better equivalent to the other e-grocers compared than Amazon's Pantry brand.  These e-grocers have come as a blessing during this pandemic. Here's my experience from an year of active online shopping for my location in Hyderabad through their respective websites - BigBasket was the only e-grocer that catered to my ar...

I loved the following online resources which explain technical topics in a simplified, informal way through comic stories, sketch notes or illustrations - The Google Chrome Comic Smooth Sailing with Kubernetes  Learning Machine Learning   Learning Neural Networks   An Illustrated Guide to OAuth and OpenID Connect   A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS WebRender Julia Evans' sketch notes Denise Yu's sketch notes Common Craft Explainer videos W.I.P

To check up on what kind of  hobbies kids have in this partial-lockdown Covid period, I asked one in my apartment. This is how the conversation went - What are your current hobbies? I like reading books What kind of books? Geronimo Stilton. It is a comic book That's nice. Is Geronimo a superhero? No, it is a mouse Geronimo Stilton is an Italian children's book series written by Elisabetta Dami (born 1 January 1958) . On older novels, the copyright is issued to a pseudonym "Geronimo Stilton"; this was changed on newer books. The books are intended for readers in the 8–12 year-old age range. Geronimo Stilton is the publisher of The Rodent's Gazette, Mouse Island's most famouse newspaper. Geronimo lives in New Mouse City on Mouse Island.  A reason Geronimo Stilton books have become popular is because they are about adventures, about having fun while also highlighting the importance of good values, according to Elisabetta

While reading a comic strip on The Nib , I came across a funny  reference to a dosimeter - a device that detects and measures radiation. It was funny because being exposed to radiation is improbable unless you live in the neighborhood of a nuclear plant or any source of radioactive material. But then again, if a nano-virus can appear out of nowhere and hold the world to ransom, anything is possible! I realized I had a acquired a variety of gadgets over the years and especially during this continuing Covid scourge - non-contact infrared thermometer, oxymeter and what not; but I don't yet own a dosimeter. I naively assumed a dosimeter or a Geiger counter is a specialized gadget that will be expensive & irrelevant to the general population. I checked on Amazon nevertheless.  Not only are there numerous brands  for a dosimeter but they have numerous reviews too! I also found in the cross-selling search results a digital noise dosimeter , a tool for noise polluti...

This Week I Learned -  * To use an Azure file share with Windows, you must either mount it, which means assigning it a drive letter or mount point path, or access it via its UNC path. Unlike other SMB shares you may have interacted with, such as those hosted on a Windows Server, Linux Samba server, or NAS device, Azure file shares do not currently support Kerberos authentication with your Active Directory (AD) or Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity. Instead, you must access your Azure file share with the storage account key for the storage account containing your Azure file share. A storage account key is an administrator key for a storage account, including administrator permissions to all files and folders within the file share you're accessing, and for all file shares and other storage resources (blobs, queues, tables, etc) contained within your storage account. * While a blob is in archive storage, the blob data is offline and can't be read or modified. To read or downlo...

Enabling Data Residency and Data Protection in Microsoft Azure Regions  [PDF] describes how Microsoft helps customers to meet data residency and data protection requirements. Some interesting facts and takeaways from the 34 paged whitepaper: Selecting Azure datacenter regions for workload deployment should be based on technical and regulatory requirements.  An Availability Zone in an Azure region is a combination of a fault domain and an update domain.  A region can consist of several datacenters even if the region does not have multiple Availability Zones.  An Azure geography ensures that data residency, sovereignty, compliance, and resiliency requirements are honored within geographical boundaries.  A geo can be a country or a set of countries.  VMs in Availability Zones are synchronously replicated across the Availability Zones .  Managed Disks provide redundancy within an Availability Zone, with three replica instances spread across storage st...

 This Week I Learned - * For migration, Microsoft recommends that you use the Azure Migrate service to migrate VMs and servers to Azure, rather than the Azure Site Recovery service. Azure Site Recovery should be used for disaster recovery only . If you've already started your migration journey with Site Recovery, you can continue using it to complete your migration . * Data wrangling still takes the lion’s share of time in a typical data professional’s day. Data scientists spend 45% of their time on data preparation tasks like loading and cleaning data according to Anaconda’s annual survey * What is the difference between App Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization? App Virtualization leverages Remote Desktop Services (RDS) technology to publish and run applications in the data center, sharing those apps to multiple users who view the application remotely on their endpoint device. App virtualization focuses on delivering just an individual application or set of apps, while v...

Entire content and images are from VMware blog articles, paraphrased to capture essential points. Even if an organization never actually moves cloud workloads back on premises, a process known as cloud repatriation, an exit strategy can guide negotiations with providers and influence application design. It is a corporate plan developed to ensure that the cloud services that support business activities can be replaced or replicated efficiently and without significant disruption to the company. Having a well-planned cloud exit strategy alleviates the pressures of vendor lock-in.  This motivation, avoiding lock-in, is also present when it comes to considerations about where to build cloud native services based on containers, microservices and Kubernetes.  The term hybrid-cloud is generally used to describe the combination of private and public cloud infrastructure, where private is either on-premises or hosted in a colocation facility and public cloud infrastructure is...

This Week I Learned -  *  App containerization is a new (preview) feature of Azure Migrate that helps you containerize and migrate applications to Azure Kubernetes Service. The standalone App Containerization tool offers a no-code, point-and-containerize approach to help you package applications running on servers into a container image and helps you deploy the containerized application to Azure Kubernetes Service . The app servers hosting the app could be virtual machines or physical servers running in your on-premises datacenter, virtual machines running in Azure or any other cloud.  *  The App Service Migration Assessment Tool runs multiple readiness checks - IIS Server Site checks, Linux Container checks * Scenarios in which containerization may not be the best choice for your application. Generally, these fall into three buckets: Platform dependencies, e.g., if your application only runs on a mainframe. Other hardware dependencies, for example, if yo...