Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

A list of useful resources to understand data visualization: *  The Data Visualisation Catalogue *  Datawrapper Academy   Training material *  Datylon Chart Library * Flourish Studio Chart Guides   * Tableau: Visual Analytics - Families, Types, and Importance * Google Charts *  How to create effective charts and diagrams The first step is to focus on your purpose. What do you want to show? Comparison Distribution Composition Relationship framework by Dr. Andrew Abela to choose chart types *  How the data should be interpreted decides the type of chart to be used  - 72 types of data visualization explored a perspective by Gramener *  10 Useful Ways to Visualize Your Data (With Examples)  [PDF] *  Data visualization 'chart chooser' quick-reference guide  [PDF] by Prof. Steve Franconeri *  Data Story Visualization: A Decision Tree *  Financial Times / Chart Doctor > Visual Vocabulary *  Cheat Sh...

This Week I Learned -  * Make your page load feel more instant by using priority hints to help the browser prioritize the most critical resources. You can also prioritize iframes, scripts, links, and fetch using fetchpriority  property! * With no value, the download attribute of anchor tag forces the linked page to be downloaded . Alternatively, you can provide a value which the browser uses as the suggested file name for the downloaded resource. <a href="/example.pdf" download="my-download.pdf">Download File</a> * Kubernetes is a complex system that relies on several components being configured correctly to have a working cluster. Today, over 100 Kubernetes distributions and installers have been created, each with different default configurations for clusters and supported infrastructure providers.   SIG Cluster Lifecycle began the Cluster API project as a way to address these gaps by building declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs, that automate clus...

Azure Cost Optimization tips compiled from online resources - Utilize Azure Reserved Instances (1-year, 3-year) & Spot pricing  Azure Hybrid Benefit program allows on-premises licenses of Windows Server or SQL Server to be brought to the cloud. Azure Dev/Test Pricing provides deep discounts on services if you are using them for development and testing. Azure offers price-match guarantee against AWS on some comparable services   Azure provides tools for cost planning and optimization like  Azure Advisor, Cost Calculator, Cost Analysis and Azure Budgets which lets you track resource usage and expenditure for Azure alongside other clouds. Right-Sizing VMs by monitoring your metrics using Azure Monitor, and use auto-scaling or other methods to add and remove machines according to utilization. Azure offers B-Series virtual machines designed for applications that are typically idle and then have sudden bursts of usage at discounts of between 15-55% compared to equivalent V...

This Week I Learned -  * Azure IoT Central is Microsoft's application platform as a service (aPaaS) offering designed to simplify and accelerate IoT solution assembly and operation by assembling platform as a service (PaaS) components into an extensible and fully managed app development platform hosted by Microsoft.  * AWS recommends AWS Application Migration Service (MGN)  which is based on CloudEndure Migration technology for lift and shift migrations. Following the successful launch of AWS Application Migration (MGN), AWS plans to start restricting the CloudEndure Migration service starting June 30, 2022.  *  CloudEndure Migration affect CloudEndure Disaster Recovery have separate roadmaps and plans . The CloudEndure Migration sunset plans will not affect the CloudEndure DR service. *  AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) is the recommended service for disaster recovery to AWS. It provides similar capabilities as CloudEndure Disaster ...

 This Week I Learned -  * If you don't deploy a gateway, clients must send requests directly to front-end services. There are some potential problems with exposing services directly to clients. Some options for implementing an API gateway in your application are: * Reverse proxy server - Nginx and HAProxy * Service mesh ingress controller - linkerd or Istio * Azure Application Gateway - managed load balancing service (layer-7 routing and SSL termination) & web application firewall (WAF) * Azure API Management - turnkey solution for publishing APIs to external and internal customers. It provides features that are useful for managing a public-facing API, including rate limiting, IP restrictions, and authentication using Azure Active Directory or other identity providers. API Management doesn't perform any load balancing, so it should be used in conjunction with a load balancer such as Application Gateway or a reverse proxy. * Nginx and HAProxy will typically run in con...

This Week I Learned -  * Availability set is the first HA concept for SAP systems in Azure, that protect an application against unplanned downtime of physical servers and racks inside ONE data center (DC). It also offers planned maintenance downtime minimization. With the help of SAP on Azure PowerShell cmdlets it is possible to migrate SAP HA systems from Availability Set construct to Availability Zones to improve their infrastructure SLA from 99.9% to 99.99% while SAP systems stay online all the time or most of the time. *  NoSQL database technologies such as MongoDB (document), Cassandra (wide-column) and Gremlin (graph) are arguably the biggest and most transformative trend in the universe of databases over the past decade. Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-model NoSQL database, supporting all common NoSQL data models through open APIs, that is fully cloud based and offered as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) *  The Google Cloud Architecture Diagramming Tool includes 10...

George Westinghouse Jr. (1846 – 1914) was an American entrepreneur and engineer based in Pennsylvania who created the railway air brake and was a pioneer of the electrical industry, receiving his first patent at the age of 19.  I enjoyed reading his inspiring biography  Inventive Wizard  by Israel E Levine as a teenager and re-read the highlighted parts recently. The engaging story-telling and dramatized conversations like this between the 19-year old George and his alarmed father when he hears his son's aim in life is to be inventor, make it a great read - "An inventor. I want to invent things. I think I have a knack for it, but more important, it's what I want to do most in the world. The car replacer I've told you about, for instance I think I could sell it to the railroads." Mr. Westinghouse turned to his son and stared at him for a long moment. "George, I'm going to be perfectly frank. You've always had pretty much your own way. You're a man...