How to improve Reliability in the cloud? Did you get a phone call from your customer saying they want to improve their application reliability while you move their workload to the cloud? If yes then continue reading this article. I will use Microsoft Azure to explain the Reliability concept and its improvement steps. You can certainly do the same in Google Cloud or Amazon AWS. What is Reliability? Well reliability is a derived concept. Basically you want your application to be available for your customer. Also you should ask what latency is acceptable for your application. If your application is slower or normal, your application users should not keep retrying to finish any transaction. How should your application fidelity be while your application is slow and not rendering properly. So in order to define reliability of your application you have to answer how much your application should be Available and what is your Latency that you want for your application. Reliability = Availability + Latency So basically reliability is something your Business has to define. You must talk to your customer and understand what kind of business they are running, what problem they want to solve, who are the target users for the application.

Creating cost optimized highly scalable cloud architecture is challenging but it is possible! Using Spot Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances you can save up to 90% of on-demand pricing. In this article you will learn what spot instances and what should be your strategy to use spot instances. Additionally, I will give you scenarios where most of the customers are using spot instances. Amazon EC2 Purchasing Options Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers 3 purchasing options: On-Demand Reserved Instances Saving Plans

Cloud Security Defense In-Depth Azure Approach In a traditional data center you create one perimeter, secure them by installing firewall, WAF, SIEMS etc. and have 100% confidence that the data center is secure. However, when you migrate to cloud then your VPC or Virtual Network is not 100% secure you have to not only secure your perimeter however, inside of perimeter you have to take care of security. Since it's a public cloud you have to be more cautious and make sure whatever workload or source code you are moving to is cloud aware. There are various best practices at each level you have to take care of in order to secure your cloud. What is Defense in-depth? There is a concept of Defense in-depth which makes sure that at each level there is security in-place which makes your cloud data center almost 100% secure. However, it needs continuous awareness, assessments and audits. In this article let’s explore how Azure helps us to secure data centers in the cloud. Defense in-depth design of azure services and capabilities to help you secure, manage and monitor your cloud data, infrastructure, compute Azure offers unified security management and advanced threat protection for your cloud, on-premise data centers or both. When you want to secure your cloud you should think of securing from the physical layer till your data layer.

What is Multi-Cloud and Multi-Cloud Strategy? Cloud itself is complex so why are customers bothering about multi-cloud at all? Why not just take google cloud and deploy all of your workload and be happy? Well it's just like you should not put all eggs in one basket.Let's explore Multi-Cloud in this article. According to a VMWare Customer survey 2 out of 3 customers are using multi-cloud so it is very important for you to be aware of the challenges and strategies of multi-cloud. Doing Multi-Cloud is possible but not easy and comes with some tradeoffs. While we are going towards microservices architecture each microservice can use any kind of technology stack. Example one service can use raven db then another service can use Microsoft SQL server. So if you have that kind of workload in your architecture that means you are already investing in multiple database vendors in your technology portfolio. Similarly you may create your workloads in multiple cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google or Amazon and create multi-cloud situations. In this article you will learn what is multi-cloud, why you do multi-cloud and what is the multi-cloud strategy? So stay tuned and keep scrolling. Who is the cloud provider? Cloud Provider is a company who provides online delivery of IT services via internet on an on-demand basis and pay as you go model. Example of cloud providers are: Google Cloud

Introduction to CAP Theorem Are you planning to design your next advanced distributed architecture? Make sure you are aware of the concepts such as high availability, consistency and partition tolerance. The CAP theorem states that a distributed system cannot simultaneously be consistent, available, and partition tolerant. CAP Theorem is very important in the Distributed systems, Microservices architecture, Big Data world, especially when we need to make trade offs between the three, based on our unique customer’s use case. CAP stands for C - Consistency, A - Availability, P - Partition tolerance. While building a distributed system you will get 2 things up and running at a time and the 3rd thing you will have to sacrifice. CAP theorem helps system architects to make better decisions to trade off to design distributed systems based on requirement and customer priorities. AP - If you make the system Highly Available and Partition Tolerance then you will not get immediate consistency. It has to be eventually consistent.

Introduction of EBIT and EBITDA EBITDA and EBIT is a very fundamental financial term that is nowadays mostly considered during the cloud adoption phase. If your company is planning to migrate to cloud and you are going to present a finance key performance index to your CFO then make sure you learn these concepts. Broadly for any company there exist 3 types of financial statements as following: Balance sheet Income or Profit & Loss (P&L) Statement Cache Flow Statement

Introduction to Point of Presence and Network Access Point Point of presence is a fundamental block of the telecommunication domain. You must be aware of this concept. If you want to system design for video content delivery like YouTube, Netflix or Hotstar.com then you must learn what is PoP and how this helps to propagate massive amounts of content across the globe with faster performance and lower latency. What is the internet? The internet is a massive network of interconnected smaller networks. What is the Point of Presence (PoP)? Point of Presence (PoP) is the Network Interface Point between communicating entities. A PoP is located in a data-center that houses servers, routers, network, switches, multiplexers and other network interface equipment. PoPs are located at colocation centers and Internet exchange points. A PoP is the local access point for an Internet Service Provider (ISP). PoP consists of high-speed telecommunications equipment that  helps customers to connect to the internet via their ISPs.

Application and Service Principal Objects in Azure In azure cloud in order to protect your resources  like web applications you must register them in Azure Active Directory. After registering an application you get service principal. All of your users registered in Azure AD have user principal as security key. . Application Registration in Azure Active Directory You register your application in Azure AD tenant to manage identity & access by creating identity configuration of your application. While registration you must specify: URL of your application URL to redirect after authentication URI to identify your application

What is Authentication? Authentication (AuthN) is the process to prove that you are who you say you are. Microsoft identity platform uses open Id connect protocol for handling authentication. What is Authorization? Authorization (AuthZ) is the act of granting an authenticated party permission to do something. Microsoft identity platform uses OAuth2.0 protocol for handling authorization. What are security Tokens? Microsoft identity provider authenticates users and provides security toneks as JWT that contains claims . There are 3 types of Security tokens:

Microsoft Azure Active Directory Basics Securing your workload and datacenter over the cloud is very challenging. You want your resources to be protected by both machines and users. Azure Active directory helps you to achieve single sign on and provides you centralize identity and access management across your subscriptions. Let's learn more basic concepts about Azure Active Directory in this article. Microsoft provides Azure AD for developers and Microsoft Identity platform to help both programmatic and operational support for single-sign on, Identity and access management. What is Azure Active Directory? Azure AD is an Identity and Access Management (IAM) system for the Microsoft cloud. A centralized identity system provides a single place to store user information that can then be used by all applications. These systems have come to be known as Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems. Azure AD performs the authentication using the tenant directory stored in the cloud. Making Azure AD aware of these apps, and how it should handle them, is known as application management. You manage applications on the Enterprise applications page located in the Manage section of the Azure Active Directory portal. How does Azure AD work with apps?

Senior Developer Coding Guideline Are you writing code that is not production ready? Are you writing code which violates DRY principle? Have you been writing specs/unit-test which is missing important specs and has tests for things which are not important with respect to a given PBI or task required? What is a modeling session for developers? In modeling session developers discuss the business user acceptance requirements. They come up with an optimal approach to solve the business problems by following clean code principle and other policies and patterns that your company is already following. Next they divide the solutions in small tasks, distribute among them and go to their respective work station and write the code, write the specs/unit-test and deploy to QA. What Architects expect from Senior Developers? If you are given a bug you should be able to fix it independently. You should be able to model independently and come up with an approach that meets all the requirements of the given task or PBI.

Importing WordPress or Blogger Blogs to Jekyll Blog I have WordPress or Blogger blog and I decided to move away from WordPress and switch to Jekyll. I loved the way Jekyll is working. You can deploy Jekyll blog to GitHub pages for free. Only thing you need is domain. If you want otherwise custom domain is optional. In this article, I will show you how you can export WordPress blogs to your new Jekyll Project. Same technique can be used for Blogger Blogs import and migration to Jekyll project. Step 1: Downloading WordPress content Download the WordPress blog Content as xml. Navigate to https://YOUR-USER-NAME.wordpress.com/wp-admin/export.php Then download you all content in your local box. For downloading Blogger Blog Content follow the instruction below:

Learn how can you can create & host your own new Blog site for FREE. With high performance and SEO enabled using Jekyll and host them in GitHub Pages. I will use windows machine to demonstrate you please read this article till end. Installing Ruby with Devkit on Windows https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/ Installing Jekyll bundler on Windows gem install jekyll bundler gem install tzinfo-data (is necessary when developing on Windows)

GitHub profile is great thing to have it. And if you write articles/blogs then it's good idea to show your recent posts on your GitHub profile. Read this article to learn how to show recent blog posts on your GitHub profile. Step 1: Adding placeholder for Recent Blogs Go to your GitHub Repo ReadMe.md file and add the following section to your GitHub Profile README.md file. Read this article to know how to create GitHub Profile README.md # 📩 Latest Blog Posts <!-- BLOG-POST-LIST:START --> <!-- BLOG-POST-LIST:END -->

Publishing Jekyll Blog Post to Dev.to using GitHub CI/CD Pipeline If you have a blogging site using Jekyll and you want to publish your blogs to your Dev.To account? Then read this article. Jekyll Project I have my Jekyll project and I do have 1 post. Publish to dev.to Action I will use pre-built action by sinedied/publish-devto to publish my post to dev.to. Market Place Publish to dev.to Action

Do you wonder should you use GitHub Actions or Azure CI Pipelines for your open-source Repo CI build and releases? I prefer Azure Pipelines read why I like Azure Pipelines over GitHub actions. GitHub Actions does not show build summary nicely. Where Azure Pipeline CI does Native way to publish Test and Code Coverage Integrate with Badges to show Test and Code Coverage on Readme page. Visit to https://shields.io/ and then you will see you can create code coverage badge using Azure DevOps. However, with GitHub actions you have to upload coverage to Become full stack developer 💻

Restoring and Publishing NPM Packages from Azure CI Pipeline Do you want to restore and publish your scoped and public npm packages from Azure CI Pipeline? Do you want to Configure CI/CD for Node application with Azure Pipelines? Are you Configuring a Node.js app? Then read this article. I will demonstrate the azure pipelines how to use .npmrc file and publish node packages to artifacts. And consume the same node package in your project by installing it locally. Introduction I have one project, where I depend on 2 scoped npm libraries from my own company's artifacts feed. And I want to create Azure Build CI pipeline which will do below on build machine: Install node packages both private scoped and public npm packages. Build project (optional)

Publishing Code Coverage in Azure CI Pipeline Do you want to show Angular Code Coverage Report in Azure CI Pipeline then read this article and follow the steps. IstanbulReporter in Karma.conf.js Go to Karma.conf.js of your angular project and confirm you have cobertura reporter. coverageIstanbulReporter: { dir: require("path").join( __dirname,

Sharing Variables within Tasks in Azure CI Pipeline Do you want to create one variable in task-1 and read the value of that variable in task-2 in your azure ci pipeline? If your answer is yes then read this article. I will show you how to get new build number from node.js. Then we will use the new build number in another task to update the azure pipeline build number. azure devops setvariable task We will write expression to run inbuilt task from azure pipeline to set new variable. When we run script from azure pipeline then basically it is a command line script you are running in windows command prompt. echo '##vso[task.setvariable variable=one]secondValue'

Publishing Code Coverage in Azure CI Pipelines Publish Code Coverage task Publishes Cobertura or JaCoCo code coverage results from your build. Azure DevOps provides us with the ability to show an overview of the code coverage of our application's unit tests. To do so, just like publishing the test results in a specific format, we'll need to publish the code coverage results in a supported format. Currently, Azure DevOps supports both Cobertura and JaCoCo. In Angular Generating Code Coverage using Cobertura In Angular out of the box you get karma-coverage-istanbul-reporter. The Istanbul, the code coverage tool used by the Angular CLI, has support for Cobertura built-in, so we don't need to add any dependency in order to use Cobertura. Go to karma.conf.js you should see below coverageIstanbulReporter settings.