Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  GW-BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language developed by Microsoft from IBM BASICA in 1983. It was bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles by Microsoft. Since it was included with most versions of MS-DOS, it was also a low-cost way for many aspiring programmers to learn the fundamentals of computer programming. With the release of MS-DOS 5.0, GW-BASIC's place was taken by QBasic, a slightly abridged version of the interpreter part of the separately available QuickBASIC interpreter and compiler package. *  Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is distributed in a manner that allows its users to run the software for any purpose, to redistribute copies of it, and to examine, study, and modify, the source code. The FOSS movement's "free" part originates from Richard Matthew Stallman, who noted the lost freedom to users on the decline of the public domain ecosystem and the growth of a copyrighted p...

This Week I Learned -  * Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the disparate and siloed elements of a traditional datacenter: secure storage, compute, network, and management. This integrated solution runs on off-the-shelf x86 servers to replace expensive, purpose-built hardware. Azure Stack HCI is built from the ground up to leverage an advanced level of HCI without sacrificing legacy functionality.  Azure Stack HCI connects to Azure hybrid services through Azure Arc. * The initial version of Azure Stack HCI, launched in 2019, was based on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter. Now, Azure Stack HCI is decoupled from Windows, becoming its own operating system .  * The difference between Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI is that the latter targets customers that still need to run key workloads in-house but also want to start their cloud journey. Azure Stack is a totally managed environment, meaning you really ca...

This Week I Learned - *  RBAC is an authorization system built on Azure Resource Manager that provides fine-grained access management of resources in Azure. *  Hub and spoke is a networking model for more efficient management of common communication or security requirements. It helps avoid Azure subscription limitations, save costs by centralizing services that can be shared by multiple workloads and aids separation of concerns through deployment of individual workloads between central IT teams and workload teams. *  The hub is a virtual network (VNet) in Azure that acts as a central point of connectivity to your on-premises network. The spokes are VNets that peer with the hub, and can be used to isolate workloads. *  A hub-spoke topology can also be used without a gateway, if you don't need connectivity with your on-premises network. *  As a first step toward migrating a datacenter to the cloud, the first services that need to be shared are iden...