Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Azure availability zones-enabled services are designed to provide the right level of resiliency and flexibility. They can be configured in two ways. They can be either zone redundant, with automatic replication across zones, or zonal, with instances pinned to a specific zone. You can also combine these approaches. * Many customers who had a metro Disaster Recovery strategy while hosting applications on-premises sometimes look to mimic this strategy once they migrate applications over to Azure. These customers acknowledge the fact that metro Disaster Recovery strategy may not work in case of a large-scale physical disaster and accept this risk. File level backup and restore are supported. Disk and VM level backup and restore are not supported. * The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) leverages AWS experience and best practices to help you digitally transform and accelerate your business outcomes through innovative use of AWS. AWS CAF groups its capabil...

This Week I Learned -  * Site Recovery does not move or store customer data out of the region in which it is deployed when the customer is using Zone to Zone Disaster Recovery . Customers may select a Recovery Services Vault from a different region if they so choose. The Recovery Services Vault contains metadata but no actual customer data.  * Hotpatching is a new way to install updates on supported Windows Server Azure Edition virtual machines (VMs) that doesn’t require a reboot after installation. * Blob storage now supports the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). *  Business and technical offers from premier Microsoft partners for Cloud Adoption Framework phases, based on where you are in your digital transformation journey . Offers are aligned to and validated against the guidance in the stages of the Cloud Adoption Framework. * The Google Cloud Digital Leader exam is job-role independent. The exam assesses the knowledge and skills of individuals who want or a...

Mike Tholfsen often shares nifty Excel tips through short Tiktok videos (<1m) .  These are inaccessible in India as the domain is blocked but you can view them on Twitter where he posts the same videos. Here's a compilation of his tips that I found useful - Extract first names from a list using the LEFT() function S equence () function for calendar dates Sequence() to automate a big list of numbers   SUMIF() formula VLOOKUP Extract names out of a list of email addresses with a single shortcut -Ctrl T, Flash fill Bulk-delete blank rows in Excel in 11 seconds Excel Geography data type - Data > Data Types | Geography   Auto-size rows and columns quickly in Excel using keyboard shortcuts - Ctrl+A, Alt H+O+A, Alt H+O+I AutoSum rows or columns - Alt+= Quick Analysis tool to gain insights - Ctrl+Q Pivot Table

Key differentiators according to Oracle on how OCI is better than Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Microsoft Azure , and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - Pricing Predictability - Same pricing worldwide across 36 cloud regions in 19 countries (as of Feb 2022) Lowest TCO for Oracle Database and applications - Oracle Bring Your Own License (BYOL) is 50% less on OCI than any other public cloud, including Azure. Oracle offers Universal Credits and BYOL2PaaS to help customers bring their existing Oracle software licenses to OCI. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) don’t support Oracle technology in the same way. High-performance Oracle workloads, large Oracle databases and a wider portfolio of Oracle DBaaS are all better supported by OCI than other CSPs.  As a rule of thumb , organizations may require double licenses for the same computing capabilities related to the number of core processors to enable the same Oracle product on other CSPs, compared with OCI. Fully supported advanced data...

This Week I Learned -  * If you are running sensitive workloads at risk of side-channel attacks in public clouds, all of the major IaaS suppliers provide options to use hardware dedicated to you, removing the option for an attacker to become coresident with your virtual machines. AWS offers Dedicated Instances, Azure has Isolated Instances and recently announced Dedicated Hosts, and Google Cloud has sole-tenant nodes. These options all cost a little more than their standard shared tenancy offerings, typically in the range of 6% to 10% for pay-as-you-go pricing. - 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know  [PDF] *  Microsoft Ignite 2021 Session Viewer created with Power BI  *  OpenCV is one of the most widely used face detectors . This algorithm performs best for frontal face imagery and excels at computational speed. It's ideal for real-time face detection and is used widely in mobile phone apps, web apps, robotics, and for scientific research. * Rabies (Latin...

State-run Buses & Multi Modal Transit System (MMTS) run by Indian Railways have been popular in the past in Hyderabad but the services have been degrading not due to lack of public patronage but due to Government indifference. These services though reduced due to Covid & other factors, continue to aid in moving people across long distances at an affordable cost while conserving the environment. Considering the number of 2 & 4-wheel vehicle drivers who brazenly ride  the Hyderabad roads drunken or while talking on the phone while driving, public transport is also a relatively safe way to reach your destination with life and limb. The Hyderabad Metro Rail Project was first initiated by N. Chandrababu Naidu, then-Chief Minister of United Andhra Pradesh state, in 2003. The first stretch was opened for commercial operations on 24th September 2018. Currently, it is the second longest operational metro network in India after the Delhi Metro (285 stations) with 57 station...

This Week I Learned -  * A landing zone is an environment for hosting your workloads, preprovisioned through code.  Azure landing zones provide cloud adoption teams with  implementation options for a well-managed environment for their workloads. * Automating ML monitoring and re-training is an important part of MLOps . The accuracy of ML models can deteriorate over time, a phenomenon known as model drift. Many factors can cause model drift, such as changes in model features. Concept drift can also affect your models, and if you have 100’s of them deployed to production, the good news is that you can use Amazon Sagemaker Pipelines’ workflow automation components to build operational resilience and reproducibility.  *  Clarity , a behavioral analysis tool that helps you understand user experience. * The aircraft manufacturer ATR is a joint venture between two European aeronautical players, Airbus and Leonardo. Their aircraft are designed and built around turbop...