This Week I Learned - Week #7 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Migrate application workloads written in full .NET Framework, which requires running in Windows containers to .NET Standard. Migrated workloads will run in Linux containers with a smaller footprint in terms of a container image and hence provide better density. This decreases the number of agent nodes required to host and run applications.

* Azure shared disks is a feature for Azure managed disks that allow you to attach a managed disk to multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. 

* You can attach an SSD persistent disk in multi-writer mode to up to two N2 virtual machine (VM) instances simultaneously so that both VMs can read and write to the disk. Persistent disks in multi-writer mode support a subset of SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations (SCSI PR) commands. You can attach a non-boot persistent disk to more than one VM in read-only mode, which lets you share static data between multiple VMs. Sharing static data between multiple VMs from one persistent disk is less expensive than replicating your data to unique disks for individual instances. You can share persistent disks only with instances that are in the same zone as the disk. 

* You can use open-source tools like kubecost to monitor and govern an AKS cluster cost. Cost allocation can be scoped to a deployment, service, label, pod, and namespace, giving flexibility in how you charge back or show back costs to cluster users.

* With Azure DevOps, teams can easily create builds for their AKS clusters using built-in tools such as Azure Pipelines or Jenkins.

* Elliot Graebert used Terraform to deploy a couple of Helm charts on every major cloud to see which one fared well in terms of Platform experience, Kubernetes experience & Cost. His opinion is that Azure is best overall while Linode is best for startups.

* Each Azure resource has its corresponding Terraform resource block. Those resource blocks are part of a Terraform configuration, which will provide the Azure resources after applying it using the dedicated Terraform commands.

* Azure NetApp Files is a fully managed, highly available, enterprise-grade NAS service that can handle the most demanding, high-performance, low-latency workloads requiring advanced data management capabilities. It enables the migration of workloads, which are deemed "un-migratable" without. ANF is built on NetApp's bare metal with ONTAP storage OS running inside the Azure datacenter. It supports:

• SMB 2.1, 3.x (including SMB Continuous Availability optionally)
• NFSv3, NFSv4.1
• Dual protocol access (NFSv3/SMB and NFSv4.1/SMB)

* AzCopy can only be used in migration scenarios where the source or target is a storage account. Azure NetApp Files is not a storage account. NetApp offers a SaaS based solution, NetApp Cloud Sync. The solution enables you to replicate NFS or SMB data to Azure NetApp Files NFS exports or SMB shares. You can also use a wide array of free tools to copy data. For NFS, you can use workloads tools such as rsync to copy and synchronize source data into an Azure NetApp Files volume. For SMB, you can use workloads robocopy in the same manner. These tools can also replicate file or folder permissions.

* The term workload refers to a collection of database and application resources that support a common business goal or the execution of a common business process. Oracle workloads comprise not only Oracle Databases, but also applications such as Siebel, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite or customized WebLogic Server applications. 

* DevSecOps is seeing mass adoption. DevSecOps is a term that encompasses the processes and tooling that allows security to be built into the application development life cycle, rather than as a separate process. - Red Hat 2022 State of Kubernetes Security Report

* Cloudmaker.ai lets you build Azure solutions visually by dragging and dropping cloud components onto a drawing surface. Its configuration engine lets you enter any configuration you need and then deploy to Azure. 

* Decision tree to find the best-fit IaC tool for cloud-native infrastructure

Image credit - Lee Brigs

* “Kos kos par badle paani, chaar kos par vaani”. The proverb means that the water changes every kos (a unit of distance equal to about 3 km), and the language changes every four kos. It reflects the diversity of India, where different regions have different cultures, cuisines, 23 official languages and over 700 dialects!

The proverb is also used to imply that one should adapt to the local customs and habits when traveling to different places. With the new Bing integration with ChatGPT, it supports multilingual chat in mixed mode for all Indic languages.

* You can use ChatGPT as your copilot to level up your developer experience with this Visual Studio Code extension available on the Visual Studio Marketplace.

* Large Language Models (LLMs) are Generative AI models trained on massive datasets of text from the internet, books, program source code, and other sources. They learn to predict the likelihood of a given sequence of words in a given context. In the last couple of years, there has been a slew of LLMs coming out, such as BERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa.

* GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) models are a series of large language models developed by OpenAI that have progressively demonstrated an unprecedented ability to generate human-like text. 

* ChatGPT is powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) which is ultimately a statistical tool used to predict language without understanding it and produce "statistically plausible" answers.

* People have compared ChatGPT to “mansplaining as a service”, or “CEO at a keynote” speak.

* As of now, Opera is ranked sixth in the worldwide browser market with a 2.4% share, as per data from Statcounter. Opera's parent company, Kunlun Tech, is based out of Beijing and is listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange. 

* remove.bg can remove backgrounds from images. 

* The Hotstar website was down this week as their domain was not renewed before the expiry date. The propagation time for renewal of an expired domain varies - can be a couple of hours or even >24 hours. Domain registrars usually provide 30 days of extension period so it is unlikely anyone could have purchased that domain name in any case.

* Jack Kerouac's On The Road has been said to be to hippies what the Bible is to Christians.