Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Azure Migrate can help with the following: Server Assessment and Migration Database Assessment and Migration Web App Assessment and Migration *  Azure Migrate and Azure Migrate tools are available at no additional charge . However, you may incur charges for 3rd party ISV tools. Dependency visualization is free for the first 180 days from the day of associating a Log Analytics workspace with Server Assessment. After 180 days, standard Log Analytics charges will apply. The use of any solution other than Service Map within this workspace is not free and will incur standard Log Analytics charges. Azure Migrate: Server migration is free for first 180 days for each machine. After 180 days, $25/month per instance replicated will be applied. Note that for the first 180 days, you will not incur any Server Migration licensing charges, but you might incur charges for Azure Storage, storage transactions and data transfer during replication. * 2 Database Migrat...

This Week I Learned -  * Crisp article comparing Azure Container options :  Azure Container Apps (Preview) Azure App Service Azure Container Instances Azure Kubernetes Service Azure Functions Azure Spring Cloud Azure Red Hat OpenShift *  Both Linux and Windows containers are supported in Service Fabric since 2017 . *  Enterprise customers prefer to have a “golden” image (an image that meets all their organisational requirements) that they can reuse when deploying additional VMs than deploy additional VMs and then run a provisioning script post-deployment. Reusing an image makes scaling out faster and more reliable while keeping you in policy. And once you have the process in place to build images, you can easily rebuild them regularly to include OS and application updates. But creating and managing your own image pipeline to build those custom images means running extra infrastructure and managing extra software. Azure Image Builder offers you that as a cloud s...

Azure resources communicate privately, directly, and securely with each other over virtual networks. VNet is scoped to a subscription . You can implement multiple virtual networks within each Azure subscription and Azure region. VNet is scoped to a single region/location ; however, multiple virtual networks from different regions can be connected together using Virtual Network Peering. from Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches Your subnets should not cover the entire address space of the VNet. Plan ahead and reserve some address space for the future. If you create the smallest available subnet of /29 (with eight IP addresses), Azure will retain five addresses It is recommended you have fewer large VNets rather than multiple small VNets. This will prevent management overhead. Each virtual network is isolated from other virtual networks within each Azure subscription. Vnet does NOT span Regions, it can span availability zones. You can connect one VNet to another VNet using either Virtua...

This Week I Learned -   *  All of Azure SQL is built on Azure Service Fabric, which serves as the Azure backbone . * Azure SQL Edge is an optimized relational database engine geared for IoT and IoT Edge deployments. Azure SQL Edge is built on the same engine as SQL Server and Azure SQL. Azure SQL Edge is a containerized Linux application. The startup-memory footprint is less than 500 megabytes (MB). * Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform that securely delivers virtual desktops and remote apps. * Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port. Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications.  * Redshift’s SQL dialect is based on PostgreSQL * BigQuery also lets you do geospatial data analysis using familiar SQL with BigQuery G...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is a fully managed service that adapts to changing requirements by rapidly scaling storage up to 100 TB.  *  Gartner suggests considering OCI for critical Oracle Business Applications and potential use for non-Oracle workloads based on its evaluation of public cloud providers against its definition of 270 capabilities desired by organizations with enterprise-class production workloads in its annual Solution Scorecards. OCI has a good track record of service availability in 29 commercial cloud regions and seven government regions in 14 countries.  *  Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC) is a single-tenant service that is owned and operated by Oracle in a customer-provided data center. All data remains within that data center. A DRCC region contains identical services to OCI’s public cloud regions, at the same price point and with the same consumption-based billing model for betwee...

Jeffrey Richter's free 6.5 hour technology-agnostic video course  "Architecting Distributed Cloud Applications" (2017) has well-structured, well-explained and high quality material spanning 53 videos. Slide deck   1  Welcome to the 'Architecting Distributed Cloud Applications' video series 2 1.1.a- Distributed Cloud Apps--Fundamentals--Why Cloud Apps? 3 1.1.b-Distributed Cloud Apps--Fundamentals--Embracing Failure 4 1.1.c-Distributed Cloud Apps--Fundamentals--Orchestrators (?aaS) and Clusters - video explains what an orchestrator is and how it manages a cluster of machines. Specifically, an orchestrator manages the machines' life-cycle, networking, health, upgrades, scaling, and the deploying/running of your service's code. Mesos, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Azure Container Service, and Azure Service Fabricare all examples of orchestrators.  Azure Functions (the service) as an orchestrator - You upload your code (function) to it and it manag...

Tables within web pages on the internet don't provide interactivity most of the times and data is presented through plain HTML tables unless developers of the website implement it through client-side functionality through something like a jQuery plug-in such as  DataTables to make data more accessible . In such cases, you cannot filter or sort unless you manually copy the table to a spreadsheet and then use the functions of a software tool like Excel.  To minimize the steps, it is better to use bookmarklets that can create a CSV file from an HTML Table. Below are such bookmarklets graciously shared by some good folks on the internet - Stoyan Stefanov's ReactiveTable bookmarklet Davin Studer Export to CSV bookmarklet ShareProgress' TableThis bookmarklet   The screenshot shows how ShareProgress' TableThis bookmarklet can inject code to make a table within a Wikipedia page to be downloaded as a CSV file Bookmarklet code needs to be relatively short because of browser lim...