This Week I Learned - Week #8 2022

This Week I Learned - 

* Microsoft, which sells the rival Azure, used open programming interfaces to hook into its competitors’ products, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services and provide its cybersecurity services. 

* Azure Security Center and Azure Defender are now called Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Defender for Cloud is a tool for security posture management and threat protection. Defender for Cloud protects workloads running in Azure, hybrid, and other cloud platforms including Google Cloud and AWS. 

* Chaos engineering is a methodology that helps developers attain consistent reliability by hardening services against failures in production. 

* Google Cloud Cheat Sheet v2 for developers has a flashcard version of Google Cloud 4-words-or-less cheat sheet

* Oracle Cloud Infrastructure currently offers a realm for commercial regions and two realms for government cloud regions: FedRAMP authorized and IL5 authorized. A realm is a logical collection of regions. Realms are isolated from each other and do not share any data. Your tenancy exists in a single realm and has access to the regions that belong to that realm. 

* Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is based on the concept that infrastructure is code. Servers are designed to be stateless, with their identity, configuration, and connectivity extracted into variables that can be set through software. This enables management tools to help guarantee consistent, error-free, policy-based alignment of server personalities with workloads. Through automation, transforming the server and networking components of your infrastructure into a complete solution is fast and error-free because programmability eliminates the error-prone manual configuration of servers and integration into solutions.

* The most distant space probe, Voyager 1, was launched 44 years ago. It's now about 23 billion kilometers away. That's .0025 light years. That's how far a light year is.

* We desire what other humans desire. In other words, our desires are mimetic. We are wired to play status games. Mimetic Desire is the reason we become like the people we spend time with or look up to. They shape what we choose to want, often unconsciously. And what we choose to want impacts how we spend our lives. Find desires that stand the test of time. Find desires that can create a journey you will enjoy, for the destination is never guaranteed.

* Russia is the second-largest exporter of crude oil with 12% market share. 

* Europe gets about 40% of its natural-gas imports from Russia.

* Germany imported 55 percent of its gas from Russia last year.

* India imports nearly 85% of its crude-oil requirements. 

* Of the 2.5 million tonne sunflower oil consumed in India, about 90% is imported from Ukraine and Russia. 

* Russia has around USD630 billion in forex reserves. If Western nations block major Russian banks from accessing the international money transferring channel SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), it will prevent the country from using it to prevent the fall of Ruble. 

* The acquisition of BillDesk by PayU for USD4.7 billion would create a payment gateway player much larger than the nearest competitor. BillDesk saw its core business of utility bill payments shifting to the NPCI-owned BBPS platform. BillDesk is the market leader in India with close to 50% share. PayU which was founded in 2010 acquired CitrusPay, Paysense, and Wibmo over the last few years. The joint entity will be processing around USD150 billion in payment value. Only 28% of the country’s payments are currently digital.

* One97 Communications, better known as Paytm, came up with an initial public offering with an issue price of INR2,150 a share. The stock is now trading at INR778, down 64% from that.

* Bikaji Foods International, Rajasthan-based company, is among the market leaders in the country’s ready-to-eat packaged foods snacks market. It claims to be the largest producer of Bikaneri bhujia. It produced 26,690 tonnes of the same. Its products are retailed across 22 states in India and in 35 international markets. 

* To get same day NAV in case of NPS, the cut-off time for fund receipt is 9.30 AM. In case of receipt of funds after 9:30 AM (or funds received on a non-working day – Saturday, Sunday or a Public Holiday), NAV of the next working day will be applicable. 

* Saint philosopher Sri Ramanujacharya laid the foundation stone for erecting the holy city of Tirupati in the year 1130.

* The 216-foot-tall statue of Ramanujacharya which is part of Samata Kendram, a religious centre, privately built at Shamshabad on the outskirts of Hyderabad, is among the tallest metallic sitting statues in the world. Reports state that the statue was made in China and cost around Rs 135 crore. The statue was brought to India in 1,600 pieces and the installation took around 15 months. The world’s tallest statue, the Statue of Unity in Gujarat, had its surface created with 553 bronze petals, which were cast in a foundry in China.

* Hyderabad produces 35% of world's vaccines. 

* The backlog of unpaid challans has touched Rs 600 crore since 2014 & the number of unpaid challans have piled up to 1.75 crore, for Hyderabad alone; while it is unknown for Rachakonda and Cyberabad. Hyderabad traffic police cover 6 zones (South, North, Central, East, West, and West-central). Traffic police have 2500 jawans operating from 25 police stations. There are 4000 colonies in the GHMC purview.

* "Rumination is recycling old thoughts about what went wrong. Reflection is looking for new insights on how to do better." - Adam Grant

* "Haters are like crickets. You can't see them but you can hear them, and when you walk by them they are quiet" - Israel Houghton