Cloud model comparison: Azure Fundamental series

Welcome to Azure Fundamentals!

Public cloud
Advantages:

• No CapEx You don’t have to buy a new server in order to scale.
• Agility Applications can be made accessible quickly, and deprovisioned whenever needed.
• Consumption-based model Organizations pay only for what they use, and operate under an OpEx model.
• Maintenance Organizations have no responsibility for hardware maintenance or updates.
• Skills No deep technical skills are required to deploy, use, and gain the benefits of a public cloud. Organizations can leverage the skills and expertise of the cloud provider to ensure workloads are secure, safe, and highly available.

Disadvantages:

• Security There may be specific security requirements that cannot be met by using public cloud.
• Compliance There may be government policies, industry standards, or legal requirements which public clouds cannot meet.
• Ownership Organizations don’t own the hardware or services and cannot manage them as they may wish.
• Specific scenarios If organizations have a unique business requirement, such as having to maintain a legacy application, it may be hard to meet that requirement with public cloud services.

Private cloud
Advantages:

• Control Organizations have complete control over the resources.
• Security Organizations have complete control over security.
• Compliance If organizations have very strict security, compliance, or legal requirements, a private cloud may be the only viable option.
• Specific scenarios If an organization has a specific scenario not easily supported by a public cloud provider (such as having to maintain a legacy application), it may be preferable to run the application locally.

Disadvantages:

• Upfront CapEx Hardware must be purchased for start-up and maintenance.
• Agility Private clouds are not as agile as public clouds, because you need to purchase and set up all the underlying infrastructure before they can be leveraged.
• Maintenance Organizations have the responsibility for hardware maintenance and updates.
• Skills Private clouds requires in-house IT skills and expertise that may be hard to get or be costly.

Hybrid cloud
Advantages:

• Flexibility The most flexible scenario; with a hybrid cloud setup, an organization can decide to run their applications either in a private cloud or in a public cloud.
• Costs Organizations can take advantage of economies of scale from public cloud providers for services and resources as they wish. This allows them to access cheaper storage than they can provide themselves.
• Control Organizations can still access resources over which they have total control.
• Security Organizations can still access resources for which they are responsible for security.
• Compliance Organizations maintain the ability to comply with strict security, compliance, or legal requirements as needed.
• Specific scenarios Organizations maintain the ability to support specific scenarios not easily supported by a public cloud provider, such as running legacy applications. In this case, they can keep the old system running locally, and connect it to the public cloud for authorization or storage. Additionally, they could host a website in the public cloud, and link it to a highly secure database hosted in their private cloud.

Disadvantages:

• Upfront CapEx Upfront Capital expenditure is still required before organizations can leverage a private cloud.
• Costs Purchasing and maintaining a private cloud to use alongside the public cloud can be more expensive than selecting a single deployment model.
• Skills Deep technical skills are still required to be able to set up a private cloud.
• Ease of management Organizations need to ensure there are clear guidelines to avoid confusion, complications or misuse.

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Author © Siddhesh Prabhugaonkar

Siddhesh is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Azure Certified Corporate trainer. Contact him for training in Azure, Angular and .NET full stack

Cloud Models : Azure Fundamentals series

Welcome to Azure Fundamentals!

Public cloud

A public cloud is owned by the cloud service or hosting provider. It provides resources and services to multiple companies and users, who connect to the cloud platform via a secure network connection, usually over the internet.

Features

• Ownership The resources in the cloud are owned and operated by the cloud service provider.
• Multiple End Users Cloud service can be used by multiple companies and users.
• Public Access Cloud service is publicly available.
• Connectivity Using a web browser, users and companies connect to the public cloud over the internet.
• Skills Public cloud does not require in-depth technical know-how to administer or use its service.

In a public cloud, everything runs on the cloud provider’s hardware, hence you dont have to manage or maintain the hardware.

Use cases

1. Deploy a web application (website, web service, API) or a blog without having to bother about the underlying infrastructure, as it is managed by the cloud provider. You get your web application or blog up quickly, and then focus on maintaining it without worrying about buying, managing or maintaining the underlying infrastructure to run it.
2. Companies can use multiple public cloud service providers at different scale as per their requirements.

Private cloud

A private cloud is owned and operated by the company that uses the resources from that cloud. They create a cloud environment in their own datacenter, and provide self-service access to cloud services to users within their company. The company is fully responsible for the operation and maintenance of the cloud services they provide.

Features

• Ownership The company owns the cloud infrastructure and services.
• Hardware The owning organization is completely responsible for the purchase, management and maintenance of the cloud infrastructure.
• Users A private cloud operates only within one company and cloud resources are used exclusively by the users of that company.
• Connectivity A private network is used to connect to the private cloud, and is highly secure.
• Public access General public do not have access the private cloud.
• Skills Requires deep technical knowledge to administer, maintain and manage.

Use cases

1. Use private cloud, when a company has data that cannot be put in the public cloud, for compliance, legal or regulatory reasons. For example, it has medical data that must be stored privately.
2. A government policy or regulatory compliance requires specific data to be kept within the country.

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud integrates public as well as private cloud, allowing you to run your services or applications in the most appropriate site.

Features

• Control Companies retain management control in private cloud, but not in public cloud.
• Resource location Each resource is run or used in a public or private cloud as per requirement.
• Cost and efficiency Hybrid cloud allows a company to utilize some of the advantages of cost, scale and efficiency of a public cloud.
• Skills Technical skills are required to manage and maintain the private cloud and ensure that both cloud models can operate together.

Use Case

1. Host a website in the public cloud and link it to a highly secure database hosted in a private cloud.
2. Regulatory, compliance or legal requirements could mandate that the data cannot be exposed publicly, like medical data. In this case, hybrid cloud is useful.
3. Applications that run on old hardware such as Mainframe, are not supported on public cloud and could still be run in hybrid model.

Author © Siddhesh Prabhugaonkar

Siddhesh is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Azure Certified Corporate trainer. Contact him for training in Azure, Angular and .NET full stack

Economies of scale

Welcome to Azure Fundamentals!

In this post, we look at economies of scale, consumption based model and CapEx vs OpEx expenditure models

Economies of scale is the ability to reduce costs and gain efficiency when operating at a larger scale. Cloud providers are very large businesses, and thus can leverage the benefits of economies of scale and then pass those benefits on to their customers.

Examples of Cloud service providers include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Consumption-based model

Cloud service providers operate on a consumption-based model, which means that end users only pay for the resources that they use for the usage time.

Consumption-based model has following benefits:

• No upfront cost
• No need to purchase and manage costly infrastructure which you may or may not use wholly
• Only pay for additional resources if and when they are required
• Stop paying for resources that are no longer required

CapEx vs OpEx

In earlier years, organizations required to setup a physical premise and infrastructure to start their business and begin operating. Big budget was required to get a new business up and running, or to grow an existing organization. They would have to buy new datacenters or new servers to allow them to create and host new services, which they could then deliver to their clients.

Today, companies and individuals can sign up for service(s) from a cloud provider to set up and start operating. This enables them to start selling or giving services to their clients more quickly, without having to invest significant upfront costs.

These two approaches of investment are called as:

• Capital Expenditure (CapEx): Spending up front money on physical infrastructure, and then debiting that cost from your tax bill over time. CapEx is an upfront cost whose value diminishes over time.
• Operational Expenditure (OpEx): There is no upfront cost, you pay for a service or product as you use it. You can debit this cost from your tax bill in the same year.

Organizations starting a new business or grow their business do not have to incur upfront cost for a new product or service for clients. Instead, they can get into a market immediately and pay only for the infrastructure required to operate the business.

You will receive bill as per the usage of the cloud services, in that month.

Author © Siddhesh Prabhugaonkar

Siddhesh is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Azure Certified Corporate trainer. Contact him for training in Azure, Angular and .NET full stack

Cloud Computing Concepts and Terminology

Welcome to Azure Fundamentals!

Module 1:Cloud Concepts

In the first module, we will learn and understand about:

• Cloud computing services and their benefits
• Key terminology used while working with cloud computing services
• The concept of economies of scale and the difference between Capital Expenditure (CapEx) and Operational Expenditure (OpEx)
• Three types of cloud models: public, private and hybrid
• Three types of cloud services: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS)

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, intelligence and more, over the internet. Clouding computing enables provisioning and de-provisioning resources as per need and economies of scale. You pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as per changes in the business needs.

Cloud computing represents renting resources (i.e. CPU, RAM, storage) from a cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure and only paying for what you use, commonly known as “pay-as-you-go” model.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

• Cost: Eliminates capital expenditure (CapEx) on IT infrastructure as you can rent and pay for the resources as you use. You can also predict what costs you will incur for a particular cloud service via predictive cost analysis tools.
• High availability: The ability to keep services up and running with very little downtime.
• Fault tolerance: The ability of a service to continue operating in the event of the the failure of some or all of its components. Fault tolerance is achieved via redundancy of resources.
• Disaster recovery: Defines a set of policies and procedures to enable recovery or continuation of a service, following a natural or user induced failure or disaster.
• Scalability: The ability of a service to process change in load by scaling up (vertical scaling) by increasing/decreasing capacity such as RAM, disk space, CPU etc. OR scaling out (horizontal scaling) by adding/removing resources such as virtual machine. Scalability can be done manually or automatically.
• Elasticity: The ability to increase or decrease resources as per load automatically or dynamically. A difference between scalability and elasticity is that elasticity is done automatically.
• Agility: Refers to the ability to rapidly develop, test and launch software applications that drive business growth. It allows us to provision or deprovision the resources on demand and as per load, without any manual intervention.
• Security: Cloud providers offer a large set of policies, procedures and controls in place to help protect data, applications, and infrastructure from any potential threats, in line with regulatory, legal and compliance requirements.
• Global reach: Delivering the right amount of IT resources right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location.
• Reliability: Data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity is easier and less expensive in the cloud. Data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
• Increased productivity: On-site datacenters require hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can focus on business goals.

Cloud computing Terms reference guide https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/cloud-computing-dictionary

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Author © Siddhesh Prabhugaonkar

Siddhesh is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Azure Certified Corporate trainer. Contact him for training in Azure, Angular and .NET full stack

Create Free Azure Account

Welcome to Azure Fundamentals!

In this part, we will create a FREE Azure Account, which we will use in this series

Benefits of FREE Azure Account

With your Azure free account, you get 12 months of popular free services, $200 free credit over 30 days and 25+ services which are always free.

What happens after you use your $200 free credit or your 30 days are over? You can upgrade to a pay-as-you-go subscription to get continued access.

What happens at the end of the 12 months free products? Again, you can upgrade to a pay-as-you-go subscription and what do I need to sign up? You need a phone number, credit card, debit card, and a Microsoft account.

If you click on the FAQ. there are more answers related to the questions for the free account.

1. Launch a browser session with Edge/Chrome/Firefox or any other browser.

2. Go to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free.

3. Click "Start free".

4. You get prompt to sign in with a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, click on "Create one" link and follow the prompts.

5. Log in with a valid phone number and connect the multi-factor authentication requiring you to enter a code or receive and enter a code.

Enter your preferences as you go.

Enter your credit or debit card number, check the checkbox to agree to the terms and conditions and then click "Sign up".

Azure free account creation is now successful and we’re ready to go.

Click on "Go to the portal", to go to the Azure portal, with a new Azure subscription.

You will get prompt to start a tour, which you can do and follow around.

Author © Siddhesh Prabhugaonkar

Siddhesh is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Azure Certified Corporate trainer. Contact him for training in Azure, Angular and .NET full stack

Azure Fundamentals

Welcome to Azure Fundamentals!

This series provides fundamental level knowledge of cloud computing services and how these services are provided by Azure, the cloud computing platform from Microsoft.

This is your first step in learning about cloud computing services and the Azure platform.

In this series, we will learn about:

• General cloud computing concepts
• Core services and solutions provided by Microsoft Azure
• Security, privacy, compliance and trust available in Microsoft Azure
• Pricing and support services available with Microsoft Azure

This series will help you learn and understand basics of cloud computing and Microsoft Azure. This will also help you to learn for and pass certification Exam AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Series Coverage

In this course, we will cover

Module 1 – Cloud Computing Concepts

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Why Cloud Services?
Lesson 3 - Types of Cloud models
Lesson 4 - Types of Cloud Services
Lesson 5 - Summary

Module 2 – Core Azure Services

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Core Azure Architectural components
Lesson 3 - Core Azure Services and Products
Lesson 4 - Azure Solutions
Lesson 5 - Azure management tools
Lesson 6 - Summary

Module 3 – Security, Privacy, Compliance and Trust

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Securing network connectivity in Azure
Lesson 3 - Core Azure Identity services
Lesson 4 - Security tools and features
Lesson 5 - Azure governance methodologies
Lesson 6 - Monitoring and Reporting in Azure
Lesson 7 - Privacy, Compliance and Data Protection standards in Azure
Lesson 8 - Summary

Module 4 – Azure Pricing and Support

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Azure subscriptions
Lesson 3 - Planning and managing costs
Lesson 4 - Support options available with Azure
Lesson 5 - Azure Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Lesson 6 - Service lifecycle in Azure
Lesson 7 - Summary

In next post, we will create a FREE Azure account.

Author © Siddhesh Prabhugaonkar

Siddhesh is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Azure Certified Corporate trainer. Contact him for training in Azure, Angular and .NET full stack.

How to Write Effectively (UChicago Leadership Lab)

Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, gave a fantastic lecture on how to effectively write (academically, however can be extrapolated to writing in general) and to write for the benefit of the reader. I generally quit watching the youtube lectures, but I was hooked to it. Watch the video

Read the summary at https://buomsoo-kim.github.io/learning/2020/03/30/Craft-of-writing-effectively.md/

He uses the paper as reference material and the whole is available as PDF

Click to access UnivChic_WritingProg-1grt232.pdf

CRUD application using Angular and Web API

I conducted a FREE 2 day MINT session on “CRUD application using Angular and Web API” to the Techsters community recently.

Sanjay Vyas sir has created a Telegram group called Techsters (join here) and many have volunteered to conduct FREE MINT sessions on various technologies. There are many tech authorities like Pinal Dave, Shivprasad Koirala conducting sessions often.

Source Code of the session available at Github.

Here are the 2 part series recordings on youtube.

MINT: CRUD application using Angular and Web API: Day 1

MINT: CRUD application using Angular and Web API: Day 2

Understanding File System used by Microsoft SQL database

Sanjay Vyas sir has created a Telegram group called Techsters (join here) and many have volunteered to conduct FREE MINT sessions on various technologies. There are many tech authorities like Pinal Dave, Shivprasad Koirala conducting sessions often.

Appreciate Sanjay sir and others for helping us to upskill during this lockdown and kudos to them.

I am sharing raw notes of today’s session on “Understanding File System used by Microsoft SQL database” by Priti Belnekar ma’am. Thank you ma’am for the awesome session.

Sharing my raw notes, please feel free to correct/enhance them in comments.

1. Data Files
   1. Primary Data file (.mdf) – only 1
   1. Secondary data file (.ndf) – zero or more
   1. Data file contains
      1. File Header
      1. PFS – Page Free Space
      1. GAM – Global Allocation Map: Extent Level => Extent Availability
         1. bitmap = 1 => Extent Available
         1. bitmap = 0 => Extent Not available
      1. SGAM – Secondary Global Allocation Map
         1. Page Level – Page Available
      1. BCM – Bulk Change Map: Bulk Operations – Bulk DML      
      1. DCM – Differential Changed Map: useful for backup
         1. database must have Bulk Logged Recovery Model
2. Transaction Log file (.ldf)
   1. used to restore/recreate database in case of failure
   1. can be used for rollback of a transaction
   1. contains virtual logs: 1 or more
   1. Log Sequqnce Number (LSN):
3. File Groups
   1. only applicable for data files
   1. data files are grouped for allocation & administration
   1. Primary File Group
   1. Secondary/User Defined File Group
      1. User Data
      1. File Stream – for unstructured data
      1. In memory
4. Extents
   1. Mixed extent – data for any database object is stored
   1. Uniform extent – data for only single database object is stored
   1. 1 extent = 8 pages
   1. Index Allocation Map (IAM) – index of which page is allocated to which database object; created for each database object
5. Page
   1. Text/Image Page = 2 GB
   1. contains              
      1. Page Header (96 Bytes) – allocated to which database object
         1. contains Page Id, Object Id, Lock, Index, Previous Page id, Next Page Id
      1. Data row – 1 or more
      1. Row offsets
6. Row

A Shayari

Written during a recent training assignment, on the tunes of Bollywood song Saavan ka mahina

Training का महीना
सिर दर्द करे Core
MoD implement करते करते
ये दिल मांगे no more

Core refers to .NET core.

MoD – a case study for implementation