Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

This week I delivered an online session about Azure Data Security to  DataPlatformGeeks . If you want to check my session, you can find more details below. Topic : Top 13 best security practices for Azure Abstract : Security nowadays is just a buzzword. Even so, by joining this session, we discover together what are the most important security best practices that you need to have in mind when you work inside the cloud - inside Microsoft Azure. Slides: Cloud Security Fundamentals - Developer View from Radu Vunvulea

The most common question when you start a cloud project is “Shall I use Terraform or a native tool like ARM or CloudFormation?” No answer fits all needs, and there are many things that we need to consider. In this article, we tackle this topic from multiple dimensions, creating awareness related to things that we need to consider and what are the pros and cons of different approaches. The feedback was collected from various teams that have experience with Terraform and ARM or CloudFormation. Configuration Language   The ARM language is based on JSON, that it is easy to be used, but sometimes can be a little cumbersome. Even so, because it is a notation language, you can separate the configuration in multiple files (e.g. having variables separately, nested templates). The support for conditions makes ARM super powerful - once you learn the notation language. CloudFormation is using YAML or JSON, that is pretty powerful, but the feedback in comparison with ARM is that...

In most of the cases, the latency problems are from the backend to our customers. They want to be able to access our data as fast as possible. Sometimes things are different, and the real challenge is to find ways how you can provide a reliable and fast way for customers to upload their content to the backend system. Imagine that you have a system where agents around the world upload insurance policies every few minutes. The system is hosted in only one Azure Region – UK West. From the quality attributes of the system, there is no need to deploy the solution in multiple locations and building a native application or plugin for this purpose it is not acceptable (there is no business justification). Even so, agents are all around the world and the latency and internet speed, it ’s a fact that needs to be handled. At a high level, the system uses Azure Storage and Azure CosmosDB to store information that it is uploaded by agents. Agents are using a web portal and some REST API th...