This Week I Learned - Week #11 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Defender for Cloud provides Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) features for your AWS and GCP workloads. CSPM features are agentless and don’t rely on any other components except for successful onboarding of AWS/GCP connectors.

Defender for Containers protects all weak links of your container deployment based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

Risk Points of Container Environments

* Azure Chaos Studio is a managed service that uses chaos engineering to help you measure, understand, and improve your cloud application and service resilience. Chaos engineering is a methodology by which you inject real-world faults into your application to run controlled fault injection experiments.

* You can use chaos engineering for various resilience validation scenarios that span the service development and operations lifecycle. There are two types of scenarios:

• Shift right scenarios use a production or pre-production environment. Usually, you do shift right scenarios with real customer traffic or simulated load.
• Shift left scenarios can use a development or shared test environment. You can do shift left scenarios without any real customer traffic.

* Open City is a civic tech project that helps public data on cities be available, discoverable, easily accessible, shareable, understandable, and analyzable. On their website, they have explainers to how to make use of Open Data.

* Visual ChatGPT is a new AI tool combines two different types of artificial intelligence (AI) models; visual AI models, and ChatGPT to understand and process both language and images. With Visual ChatGPT, users can communicate with the ChatGPT model through pictures instead of just text. For instance, if a user shows a picture to Visual ChatGPT and asks it a question about the image, the model can provide an answer. Furthermore, it can also perform more complicated tasks like editing images based on user inputs. 

* Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing. AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better - OurWorldInData.org 

* All AI systems that rely on machine learning need to be trained, and in these systems training computation is one of the three fundamental factors that are driving the capabilities of the system. The other two factors are the algorithms and the input data used for the training. For the first six decades (starting from 1950), training computation increased in line with Moore’s Law, doubling roughly every 20 months. Since about 2010 this exponential growth has sped up further, to a doubling time of just about 6 months.

* XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. WampServer is another installer also available for free (under GPML license) that installs automatically all you need to start developing PHP web applications. WampServer ships with Apache, MySQL & PHP / phpMyAdmin. After developing the app with PHP, you can choose to host PHP web applications with Azure App Service and Azure Database for MySQL if it has a back-end component. With an Azure free account, B1ms tier (Burstable Compute with 1 vCore, 2 GiB Memory) is free for 12 months, up to the monthly limits.

* A PHP code sample that shows how to perform CRUD operations with MySQL

* Thanks to the magic of DALL‑E artificial intelligence (now in its second generation as DALL‑E 2), Microsoft Designer now lets anyone generate totally unique images that have never been seen before, simply by writing a clear AI image prompt—just type what you want to see! 

"Fearful face, anxiety, scrunched eyes, geometric Bauhaus illustration from 1963"

AI-generated image for "a polar bear reading a book on climate change"