Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

I think that the functionality offered by Azure DevOps and how easily it can be configured and used change the way how we build our cloud environments and our solutions.  The number of projects and companies that are starting to use is higher and higher each day. This is an excellent thing because Azure DevOps allows us to redefine how we build and deploy our solutions and environments.  Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Benefits The licensing model for users that can access Azure DevOps seems simple but created a lot of confusion, especially when large organizations start to spin-up projects inside Azure DevOps very fast. It is interesting that during the adoption of Azure DevOps, the number of Visual Studio license requests by the teams grow 3 or 4 times more than the previous year.  One of the causes could be the Visual Studio benefits package, from which Azure DevOps is part of. The benefit package of a Visual Studio license includes access to one or multiple services th...

It is not uncommon to migrate a cloud solution from one cloud provider to another. The business assessment that is done before decided to do such a migration with a direct impact on the financial and business areas is crucial.  Unfortunately, this kind of decision is taken in most of the cases based on personal preferences or in fast response to an incident (e.g. slow response of an open ticket). The migration analyzes of the impact from business, technical, financial, and long term vision is complex. In this post, I present an initial exercise that can be done to measure the impact on such a migration that offers a financial score. There are 8 main factors that impact the migration cost: (1) Cloud Services Integration: The impact and effort to update the application layer to be able to communicate with the SDK and API of the new cloud provider (e.g. migration from AWS S2 to Azure Blob Storage). (2) Component rewrite: Sometimes there are no 1:1 match cross-cloud services. It means ...

If you want to host your web application or a REST API inside Microsoft Azure then App Services should be on your shortlist. The SLA of the service is 99.95% availability, but we need to be careful on how to handle maintenance windows.  PaaS and Maintenance Window Like any other PaaS service, there are specific maintenance windows that are used by Microsoft to upgrade the software and the hardware that is behind the Azure Services. When the availability of your system is important, you need to have the application deployed in two different App Services Plans (ideally from different Azure Regions). You might ask yourself why this is important? You might want to be protected for situations when things don't go as planned. For example, there are isolated situations when during maintenance windows things don't go as planned and your web application is unavailable until you restart it. What happens when File Server of App Service goes down? Let's analyze the following case and s...

The Azure team is offering a service where you can run code and develop Jypyter notebook called Azure Notebooks. Azure Notebooks is allowing us to build our notebooks in multiple languages (e.g. R, Python 2/3, F#) and run them automatically inside our Azure Subscriptions. We don't need anymore to spin up the resources, manage them and think about how we can deploy the notebook from our machine to different environments. THE PROBLEM One of the most common questions that I receive is  How I can share my Notebook with another person from my team? CONTEXT In most of the cases, you are not the only one that is working on a notebook, you might have a team of people that would like to work on a collection of notebooks from the same project. In other cases, the client would like to own the notebook project and allow external teams to use the notebooks.  REALITY The reality is that at this moment in time, sharing notebooks is limited. Why? Let see below. A notebook project can be priva...