Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Years ago, I ran into a blog series " Just enough Azure for Hadoop " that Anagha Khanolkar started as there was no guide with just enough information about Azure to get her going with a bigger task on Hadoop on Azure. I liked that series and theme of having "just enough" contextual info handy These days it is good to see targeted content designed as Learning Paths & documentation on cloud services from public cloud providers for those crossing over from a competing Cloud - Azure for AWS professionals   Azure for Google Cloud Professionals Google Cloud Fundamentals for AWS Professionals Map Microsoft Azure services to Google Cloud Platform products Map AWS services to Google Cloud Platform products Journey to Google Cloud: Paths for AWS and Azure Professionals OCI for AWS Architects OCI for Azure Architects  

This Week I Learned -  * A workload is a collection of resources and code that delivers business value, such as a customer-facing application or a backend process. A workload might consist of a subset of resources in a single AWS account or be a collection of multiple resources spanning multiple AWS accounts. * The AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is now available . The Hyderabad Region consists of three Availability Zones. As per AWS, the Hyderabad Region is estimated to support an average of more than 48,000 full-time jobs annually through a planned investment of more than $4.4 billion (INR 36,300 crores) in India by 2030. *  How to have files and documents (whether Word, Excel or whatever) in Teams open in "reviewing" mode by default, rather than the "editing" mode ?  To meet your requirement, since these files are stored on the same name SharePoint site, you need to contact the site owner/admin, let them set the option “Require documents to be checked out bef

This Week I Learned -  *  Microsoft Entra is a new family of  identity and access products including Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), as well as two new product categories: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and decentralized identity. * Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture, with a higher number indicating more improvement actions taken. It can be found at https://security.microsoft.com/securescore in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal. * The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance helps to promote open authentication standards and reduce the use of passwords as a form of authentication. FIDO2 is the latest standard that incorporates the web authentication (WebAuthn) standard. *  Load balancing on-premise applications from Azure with Application Gateway is possible. * Microsoft's interactive AI demoes are available at  AIDemos.microsoft.com * The diagram shows how data is encapsulated and de-encapsulated when t

This Week I Learned -  * Azure Sentinel provides a cloud-based SIEM & SOAR (Security Orchestration & Automated Response) solution with the ability to detect, collect, investigate threats across the enterprises. * AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is now AWS IAM Identity Center. It is where you create, or connect, your workforce users once and centrally manage their access to multiple AWS accounts and applications. * You shouldn’t unintentionally lock yourself into an IaaS provider’s Kubernetes since you can easily lift and shift cloud-native applications.  10 anti-patterns for K8s Deployments * A hard token is an electronic device that generates one-time passwords for logging into a computer system. A hard token provides an extra layer of security called multi-factor authentication.  * Citrix Independent Computing Architecture (Citrix ICA) is a proprietary protocol for an application server system.  * Terraform will be offers less code & no code options for cloud configuration

Excerpts from the article " Scalable Efficient Big Data Pipeline Architecture " by Satish Chandra Gupta The big data pipeline is the railroad on which the heavy wagons of ML run. A data pipeline stitches together the end-to-end operation consisting of collecting the data, transforming it into insights, training a model, delivering insights, applying the model whenever and wherever the action needs to be taken to achieve the business goal. There are 5 stages in the big data pipeline: 🔹 Collect - Collect data from internal & external sources 🔹 Ingest - Ingest data through batch jobs and streams 🔹 Store - Store in Data Lake and/or Warehouse 🔹 Compute - Compute analytics aggregations and ML features 🔹 Use - Use it in dashboards, data science, and ML Typical serverless architectures of big data pipelines on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are shown below.

This Week I Learned -   * Windows Virtual Desktop is now called Azure Virtual Desktop * Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) that operates on multiple clouds. It provides rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all your cloud services. * CASB monitors the overall cloud usage. DLP is built for protecting data in the cloud or wherever it is. * Twitter uses Druid, Beam, Presto, Hadoop, Airflow, Flume, Scribe, Kafka, Avro, Parquet, Thrift, Dataflow, BigQuery * Stable diffusion is a state of the art text-to-image model that generates images from text. Lexica  is a Stable Diffusion search engine *  Bloom is an open and multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters, it was trained using the NVIDIA AI platform, with text generation in 46 languages and 13 programming languages. * The two main types of hemophilia are A and B, with a third, rarer form called hemophilia

For Gartner clients, Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities research identifies and then analyses the most relevant providers and their products in a market.  Leaders: AWS Azure GCP Visionaries: Alibaba Cloud Oracle Niche players: Tencent Cloud IBM Huawei Cloud Excerpts - The hyperscale cloud providers are in a race to colonize enterprises in an attempt to become the primary strategic supplier of cloud services to address a broad range of IT workloads. The ultimate goal of the cloud providers is to move enterprises further up into the PaaS layer where the margins are higher and the ability to extricate workloads and processes become more difficult. AWS’s revenue makes it the current market-share leader in the cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) market, exceeding Microsoft Azure, its closest competitor, by two times. AWS, the leading provider in this market by market share, has a relatively weak strategy to support customers seeking sovereign and multicloud solutions. Go