Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

Highlights of  Azure CosmosDB emulator
Azure Services: Azure CosmosDB
Cost: free of use How is delivered: Windows Service or Docker container, exposing web endpoint on a local port Top 3 features: #1 Docker support#2 A web explorer similar with the one available inside Azure Portal for local documents #3 The option to delete all the data with only one click Pain points: #1 No consistency level supported#2 Limited to 25 fixed containers or 5 unlimited containers#3 Lack of support for other APIs  Download URL:
MSI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/local-emulator-release-notesDocker: https://github.com/Azure/azure-cosmos-db-emulator-docker Credits: Azure CosmosDB Team

When I first discovered the emulator support for Azure CosmosDB I was super excited. Azure CosmosDB is not cheap and for development teams is always a challenge when they need to share a data repository.
Usually, each person in the team is working on different areas of the project and needs a different data setup. By …

I decided to start a new series of articles about tools that can be used by Developers to improve their experience with Microsoft Azure. Each week I will publish a post related to a tool. The main focus is on tools that are free of charge, but sometimes I might include paid one.
Context: Having discussions with various technical people, especially from the development area, I realize that the tools that they are aware of are limited. There are so many tools that can improve our experience when we work with Microsoft Azure. Even so, many times we rely only on a few of them.
Highlights of Azure SAS Generator
Azure Services: Azure Storage (blobs, tables and queues) Cost: free of use How is delivered: Native Windows application Top 3 features: #1 SAS key generator#2 Works offline#3 Update the SAS key dynamically when you change an attribute
Pain points: #1 Sometimes freeze and does not generate the keys#2 Cannot add accounts using your Azure account#3 Does not load the resources dynamically from t…

This week I attended the ISTA Conference for my 3rd time, and I was impressed. This year I found a conference with more than 850 attendees and 25 presentations. I really liked the format, with only two tracks in parallel. This allowed the organisers to increase the quality of content. There were speakers from different companies like Uber, Google, VMWare, Experian and even Falcon.

I had the opportunity to deliver a session about how we can develop and build an application that runs on top microservices and serverless and what are the technical challenge that we need to tackle. You can find below my session details and slides.
Thank you ISTA team for this opportunity!

Title: A hybrid approach of the serverless world 2019
Abstract: This session prepares us for tomorrow problems and needs by trying to present a world where serverless can coexist with microservices and even traditional systems. We discover an architecture approach that can solve today problems with tomorrow technologies – …

On November 12th and 13th I attended ITDays conference. At ITDays I was invited to speak about
how we can reinvent the IT using Microsoft Azure and what is the future of cloud - Cloud as a Service how I like to call it. You can find more about my sessions, including the slides at the end of my post.

It was the 7th edition of ITDays, where there were more than 80 sessions on 4 different tracks. The topics presented during the event were from different domains and industry from IoT & cloud to security and programming art. ITDays it's a good place where you can see what are the current trends of IT in the world and what is happening in Cluj-Napoca from this point of view.
Title: CaaS - Cloud as a Service Abstract: Working with the cloud is not a big thing anymore; it is just another place where you can run your workload. Have you ever ask yourself what does the future prepare for us? Join this session if you want to discover how cloud is transforming the way how we do business and …

In my previous post, I’ve made a subjective comparison between AWS Cognito and Azure AD. I took into consideration only the features that I was directly interested in.  In this post, I want to summarise what are the main differences between Azure AD and AWS Managed Microsoft AD. Why? Because on AWS, the documentation related to what are features of AD available inside AWS Managed Microsoft AD is limited, and you cannot find a clear statement. Some of the cases I had to spin-up a service instance and check manually if a feature is available or not.
First of all remember that the Azure AD is the last version of AD that Microsoft has, full-featured. In comparison, AWS is offering a ‘legacy’ instance, with features that are available inside the on-premises AD deployments. Because of this, the features available inside AWS Managed Microsoft AD is just a subset of the ones available inside Azure AD. The question that we need to answer is WHICH ARE THE ONES…
The below tables covers the most…

In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, wherewe had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account.

Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more.

The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.
 Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified SAML token lifetime Default 1h – the value is conf…