Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform web platform from the .NET team. It has similar concepts as previous versions of ASP.NET but it is not binary compatible - David Fowler's presentation deck * More options to host containerized apps on Azure: *  Azure Subscription design strategies : Workload separation strategy Application category strategy Functional strategy - organizes subscriptions and accounts along functional lines like finance, sales, or IT support.  Business unit strategy Geographic strategy Mix subscription strategies *  AWS App2Container (A2C) is a command line tool to help you lift and shift applications that run in your on-premises data centers or on virtual machines, so that they run in containers that are managed by Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, or AWS App Runner. App2Container is offered at no additional charge. You are charged only when you use other AWS services to run your containerized application. You can use Ap...

Hotstar (Disney’s OTT streaming service) live streamed the recent India Pakistan  T20 cricket match to 1.2 crore viewers! Back in 2019, Hotstar had already created a global record for live streaming to 25.3 million concurrent viewers during the rain-affected World Cup Cricket match between India & New Zealand.  In the following 2 videos delivered at separate events, Gaurav Kamboj, Cloud Architect at Hotstar, explains why traditional autoscaling doesn’t work for Hotstar and other interesting facets about how the streaming site is architected to run on AWS.  Some highlights from the talks - * 10 Tbps is 70% of India's bandwidth * Load testing is done across geo distributed AWS Regions

This Week I Learned -  * With RBAC  (Role Based Access Control) you control the so-called Management Plane and with the Access Policies the Data Plane. A user with Contributor right on a subscription can do (almost) everything except change or assign permissions. If there is no Access Policy for that user in Azure Key Vault, they will not have access to keys, passwords, etc.  *  AzGovViz is a PowerShell based script that iterates your Azure Tenant´s Management Group hierarchy down to Subscription level. It captures most relevant Azure governance capabilities such as Azure Policy, RBAC and Blueprints and a lot more. From the collected data AzGovViz provides visibility on your HierarchyMap, creates a TenantSummary, creates DefinitionInsights and builds granular ScopeInsights on Management Groups and Subscriptions. The technical requirements as well as the required permissions are minimal. * AWS Well-Architected Labs repository contains documentation and code in ...

A heatmap (aka heat map) depicts values for a main variable of interest across two axis variables as a grid of colored squares.  There was only one instance in 3 decades where there was 20+% return over 3 consecutive months in 1992 and that too was a result of a scam. Apart from this there has not been a year where there’s 10% return in 3 consecutive months till 2020. Higher volatility may not always be a bad thing, and some investors might prefer that as it allows them to earn superlative returns in some years. The above table from a Times of India infographic shows that prevalence of Dengue was higher during the October-November months in the last decade.

Gartner’s view of the enterprise backup and recovery software solution market is focused on transformational technologies or approaches delivering on the future needs of end users. It is not focused on the market as it is today.  Gartner defines the market as follows: Backup and recovery software solutions are designed to capture a point-in-time copy (backup) of an enterprise workload and write the data out to a secondary storage device for the purpose of recovering this data in case of loss. Gartner's evaluation of vendors specializing in Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions: Leaders: Commvault - Portfolio mainly consists of Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault HyperScale X (HS2300 and HS4300 ) and Commvault Metallic Rubric - Portfolio mainly consists of Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM), Polaris Cohesity - Portfolio includes DataProtect, which is a service that runs on Cohesity Helios, a SaaS-based data management platform Veeam - Portfolio includes...

Anant Pai  also known as Uncle Pai and Walt Disney of India, started Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories), an educational comic-book series which retold traditional Indian folk tales, Hindu mythology and biographies of historical persons. He took on the role of writer, editor and publisher. The series went on to become a publishing milestone for the Indian comic book scene, selling over 86 million copies of about 440 titles. The idea behind starting a comic-book series devoted to Indian culture and history came to Pai from a quiz contest aired on Doordarshan in February 1967, in which participants could easily answer questions pertaining to Greek mythology, but were unable to reply to the question "In the Ramayana, who was Rama's mother?" The first Amar Chitra Katha, Krishna rolled out in February 1970. The script for the comic was written by Anant Pai & it was illustrated by Ram Waeerkar. Uncle Pai wanted Indian children to be familiar with their heritage.  T...

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft lists prioritizing assessments as one of our top three recommendations to accelerate your cloud migration journey. Comprehensive cloud migration assessments should cover the entire fleet and help you arrive at key decisions related to candidate apps, optimum resource allocation, and cost projections. You’ll want to understand your applications, their on-premises performance, uncover dependencies and interrelated systems, and estimate cloud readiness and run-cost. This analysis is critical to fully recognize what you are working with and proactively understand how to best manage these resources in the cloud. Further, in our experience with customers, inadequately planned migrations—especially those that don’t focus on optimizing infrastructure resources and cost levers such as compute, storage, licensing, and benefits including Azure Hybrid Benefit and Software Assurance—often result in long-term sticker shock. * Azure Migrate provides a...

Notes & illustrations from the Pluralsight course  Azure Arc: The Big Picture and other online resources:  With Cloud and especially Edge computing, our data and compute estate is more distributed than ever before  Azure Arc extends resources that are outside of Azure to Azure and brings services that were previously only available in Azure to any infrastructure  Azure Arc Service offerings: Azure Arc-enabled Servers Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server Azure Arc-enabled Data Services Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning The Azure Arc Jumpstart project provides a “zero to hero” experience With Azure Arc, pretty much all data to be consumed and used by Azure Monitor will be stored in an Azure Log Analytics workspace.  Many of the features require an Azure Automation account, which is kind of like a service account for automation tests within Azure, unlike a service principal that authenticates from the outside to perform some of the servi...

This Week I Learned -  *  Dynatrace offers an observability, AIOps, and application security platform for modern, dynamic hybrid, and multicloud environments .  The reinvented Dynatrace platform is built on Azure. Customers will soon have access to the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform directly within the Azure Portal, which means customers can easily implement Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability and application security capabilities for their Microsoft Azure and hybrid cloud environments.  * Facebook says a "faulty configuration change" was the cause of this week's mass outage that saw Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger wiped offline for over 6 hours. The outage marked the longest stretch of downtime for Facebook since 2008. Facebook employees were unable to access critical work tools during the six-hour outage. * Written in 1897 by French poet and dramatist, Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac is about a man born with ...

Mindy Kaling is the first Indian American to create and star in her own TV show (“The Mindy Project”).  Kind of Hindu is one of seven essays each available as a Kindle book from her collection titled "Nothing Like I Imagined". Though largely secular, she adopts Hindu traditions when they fit the moment. On the eve of her daughter's mundan or the ancient Hindu ritual of shaving her baby's head to ward off negativity, she delves on the religion of her birth, the ceremony and the question: "How Indian do I want my daughter to be?" through the essay. Excerpts & my favorite parts: I am kind of Hindu. Or, more accurately, when I was growing up in Massachusetts in the 1980s and '90s, I was told that I was Hindu. This knowledge was a positive thing, largely because it helped me to answer questions about ethnicity on forms. What it meant essentially was that I attended pujas (Indian religious gatherings/ceremonies) once or twice a year, which always felt mor...

This Week I Learned -  * The Azure Spring Cloud offering is created and managed jointly by Microsoft and VMware, the company that builds the Spring Framework. Spring Cloud provides support both for OS and JVM updates and patches, such as Azure App Service, and for advanced Spring services. *  Data stories are similar to just regular stories. You see a question and try and answer it with data. Sometimes the data to answer that question exists, sometimes it doesn’t. * An  analysis  of  24000+ Bollywood songs   from 1950-2017  with D3.js * The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that gives browned food its distinctive flavor. Seared steaks, fried dumplings, cookies and other kinds of biscuits, breads, toasted marshmallows, and many other foods undergo this reaction. It is named after French chemist Louis Camille Maillard, who first described it in 1912 while attempting to reproduce biological protein syn...