Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Container Apps (ACA) vs Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) *  AWS Global Accelerator (AGA) relies on ELB to provide the traditional load balancing features such as support for internal and non-AWS endpoints, pre-warming, and Layer 7 routing. However, while ELB provides load balancing within one Region, AWS Global Accelerator provides traffic management across multiple Regions. AWS Global Accelerator is a network layer service that combines advanced networking features with the dedicated AWS Global Network to improve your application network performance by up to 60%. Global Accelerator enables you to scale your network up or down. * At the Ignite conference, Microsoft announced a new Kubernetes distribution branded AKS Lite targeting the IoT and edge workloads . AKS Lite shouldn't be mistaken as a lightweight version of AKS running in the cloud. It’s a platform built from the ground up to simplify the management of edge infrastructure...

This Week I Learned -  * At the Google Cloud Next conference, Google introduced a new computer vision platform, Vertex AI Vision, that simplifies the process of building analytics based on live camera streams and videos. Currently, in preview, Vertex AI Vision is an extension of AutoML Vision that can train models to perform image classification and object detection. - Forbes *  Brendan Dahl's PDF Utilities : browser - explore the internal structure and contents of a PDF file. Handy tool for anyone who has to deal with PDFs that just won't render properly or won't get parsed properly. XFA browser - explore XFA contents of a PDF file maker - create a minimal PDF using the extracted font of another PDF *  The Movies App is a demo application built on top of the TMDB (The Movie Database) API. The Movie Database was started by Travis Bell * Jitter measures the fluctuations in the speeds at which a stream of data is sent. A high jitter score can affect streaming an...

Paraphrased notes from Microsoft documentation : Azure Synapse Analytics is an integrated  cloud-based platform for big data processing and analysis . You can use it to build descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics solutions . Azure Synapse Analytics combines a centralized service for data storage and processing with an extensible architecture through which linked services enable you to integrate commonly used data stores , processing platforms , and visualization tools . A Synapse Analytics workspace defines an instance of the Synapse Analytics service in which you can manage the services and data resources needed for your analytics solution.  After creating a Synapse Analytics workspace, you can manage the services in it and perform data analytics tasks with them by using Synapse Studio ; a web-based portal for Azure Synapse Analytics . One of the core resources in a Synapse Analytics workspace is a data lake , in  which data files can be st...

This Week I Learned -  * Within AWS, a common pattern is to split the system into services that are responsible for executing customer requests (the data plane), and services that are responsible for managing and vending customer configuration (the control plane) .  *  Azure operations can be divided into two categories - control plane and data plane . You use the control plane to manage resources in your subscription. You use the data plane to use capabilities exposed by your instance of a resource type. * Sometimes, the terms Control plane and Management plane are interchangeably used as they are both used for management services. Specifically, Control plane is responsible for creation and deletion of services. Management plane handles management and monitoring services. *  The control plane provides management and orchestration across an organization’s cloud environment . This is where configuration baselines are set, user and role access provisioned, and applica...

Terraform is an open-source, infrastructure as code , software tool created by HashiCorp.  It lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. You can then use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. Terraform uses declarative configuration to describe the desired final state.  Once a user invokes Terraform on a given resource, Terraform will perform CRUD actions on the user's behalf to accomplish the desired state .  The infrastructure as code can be written as modules , promoting reusability and maintainability. Terraform manages external resources (such as public cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure, network appliances, software as a service, and platform as a service) with " providers ".  HashiCorp maintains an extensive list of official providers and can also integrate with community-developed providers. Publish ...

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). A CASB is used to help ensure regulatory compliance and data protection, govern cloud usage across devices and cloud applications, and protect against threats. * Stack Overflow started in 2008. It is part of the Stack Exchange family of Q&A sites. It serves all the traffic with only 9 on-premise web servers, and it’s on a monolith ! It's a single multi-tenant monolithic application  - a pragmatic choice. One application powers around 200 sites of Stack Exchange. It has its own servers and does not run on the cloud .  It runs on .NET & IIS serving 6000 requests per second and 2 billion page views per month. 80% of the traffic is anonymous. It's data center is in New Jersey. 50 engineers work on the Q&A platform.  *  Cloudockit lets you automatically generate architecture diagrams and technical documentation of your cloud environments *...

Paraphrased notes from the Microsoft documentation - Azure Blueprints allow you to implement governance as code . Azure Blueprints  is a service that lets you define a repeatable set of Azure resources to implement your organization standards, patterns, and requirements .  You'll use Azure Blueprints in a declarative way to build and deploy new environments with a set of built-in components. You should think about Azure Blueprints as a package that you'll use to deploy and deliver governance as code . You can integrate it with your continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines. Blueprints are JSON files , and are composed of the following artifacts: Role assignments Policy assignments Azure Resource Manager templates Resource groups These artifacts are embedded into the package, which can then be composed, versioned, and assigned to a management group containing multiple subscriptions, or assigned directly to a single subscription. Once assigned, the package w...

Paraphrased notes from the official Microsoft documentation - Azure Management Groups  help you organize your resources and Azure subscriptions. Management groups give you enterprise-grade management at scale Management groups are containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance across multiple subscriptions.  Create these containers to build an effective and efficient hierarchy that can be used with Azure Policy and Azure Role Based Access Controls.  Each management group and subscription can only support one parent. Management Groups contain one or more subscriptions.  Inside of Subscriptions are Resource Groups.  Resource Groups belong to exactly one Subscription .  A Subscription can have many resource groups, but a resource group may belong to only one subscription.  Resource groups are containers that hold related resources for an Azure solution. Azure management groups support Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) for a...

 This Week I Learned -  * Azure Resource Graph is an Azure service designed to extend Azure Resource Management by providing efficient and performant resource exploration with the ability to query at scale across a given set of subscriptions so that you can effectively govern your environment. Azure Resource Graph powers Azure portal's search bar, the new browse All resources experience, and Azure Policy's Change history visual diff. It's designed to help customers manage large-scale environments. * Azure mind-maps * CIOs Guide to Kubernetes [ PDF ] *  AWS Firecracker “microVMs” combine the security of virtual machines with the efficiency of containers. It was released in November 2018 as an open-source virtualization platform. Firecracker offers the best of both worlds: the security of hardware-virtualization-based virtual machines and the resource efficiency and fast startup time of containers. Firecracker powers the AWS Lambda service, where it currentl...

I passed the Google  Cloud Digital Leader   Certification Exam ! I found the no cost Learning Path for the exam on Google Cloud Skills Boost very useful, especially the material on business transformation strategy.  It has 4 very well-written modules delivered via videos with transcripts: 1. Introduction to Digital Transformation with Google Cloud 2. Innovating with Data and Google Cloud 3. Infrastructure and Application Modernization with Google Cloud 4.  Understanding Google Cloud Security and Operations For a summary of the important Google Cloud services, I reviewed the illustrations in GCP Sketch Notes which are now also a part of the book Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects Some highlights from the Google Cloud Skills Boost modules that also come with great illustrations - The Digital Transformation module introduces Google's six core tenets for transforming culture: Talent  Environment Structure Strateg...