Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

Context A system needs to collect information related to the garbage locations from the user. You decide that one of the interfaces that you want to build is based on a chatbot. What do we want to achieve? The user is not all the time in the same location where the garbage was spotted. You want to provide the user the ability to use an interactive map to select the location where the garbage is. Technology stack The selected bot that you decide to use is Azure Bot Service and will be fully integrated with Facebook Messager. We are using Node.JS to write the custom code required to run the application.  The challenge  Azure Bot Service does not have the ability to display an interactive map in the chat, that would allow the user to select a location. How to solve the problem Allowing users to type a specific address or ZIP code might work, but would not indicate the exact location of the garbage.  Requiring GPS Coordinates would work, but would not be an easy task for an a...

Context A system needs to collect information related to the garbage locations from the user. You decide that one of the interfaces that you want to build is based on a chatbot. What do you want to achieve? The user is not all the time in the same location where the garbage was spotted. You want to provide the user the ability to use an interactive map to select the location where the garbage is. Technology stack The selected bot that you decide to use is Amazon LEX and will be fully integrated with Facebook Messager. You are using Node.JS to write the custom code required to run the application.  The challenge  Amazon LEX does not have the ability to display an interactive map in the chat, that would allow the user to select a location. How to solve the problem Allowing users to type a specific address or ZIP code might work, but would not indicate the exact location of the garbage.  Requiring GPS Coordinates would work, but would not be an easy task for an average user ...

Cloud lock-in is one of the most common topics related to cloud adoption. Surveys like the one done by IDG show that cloud lock-in is the biggest challenge for around 48% of large organizations. Finding the right balance between SaaS and IaaS and the level of cloud lock-in that you want for your IT systems is challenging. This is why in today's article, we talk about figures and numbers. The primary purpose is to see how we can calculate the cost of a cloud lock-in strategy vs. a multi-cloud approach from the cost point of view.  Lock-in cost To be able to assess the cost of lock-in , we need to take into account two elements.  The first one is the migration cost, giving us an overview of how much it costs us to migrate from the current cloud vendor to another. In most cases, it can be quantified in the total effort required to move a system from one cloud to another. The second element that is sometimes underestimated is the opportunity gain. How much do you obtain by using t...

I will start a series of posts about how we can avoid cloud lock-in and interoperability between managed cloud services and external systems using different solutions on the market. Cloud lock-in Overview There are multiple definitions on the market, but when we talk about cloud lock-in or vendor lock-in, we refer to direct and indirect costs of a platform to be moved from one cloud vendor to another. The lock-in makes customers more dependent on a cloud vendor, and migration to another vendor becomes expensive. There are multiple dimensions of cloud lock-in that we need to be aware like: Storage (AWS S3) Data (AWS RDS) Payloads (AWS EKS, AWS Lambda) Communication (AWS SNS, AWS Kinesis Firehose) Infrastructure (AWS VPC) Managed Cloud and Monitoring (AWS Cloudwatch) We need to be aware that cloud lock-in comes with advantages, especially from the time-to-market and cloud economics point of view. Cloud Managed Services like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS SNS, AWS ElastiCache help us build a ...

I will start a series of posts about how we can avoid cloud lock-in and interoperability between managed cloud services and external systems using different solutions on the market. Cloud lock-in Overview There are multiple definitions on the market, but when we talk about cloud lock-in or vendor lock-in, we refer to direct and indirect costs of a platform to be moved from one cloud vendor to another. The lock-in makes customers more dependent on a cloud vendor, and migration to another vendor becomes expensive. There are multiple dimensions of cloud lock-in that we need to be aware like: Storage (Azure Storage) Data (Azure SQL Elastic Pool, Azure SQL Database) Payloads (Azure Kubernetes Services, Azure VMs, Azure Functions, Azure App Services) Communication (Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hub) Infrastructure (Azure VNETs) Managed Cloud and Monitoring (Azure Monitoring, Azure App Insights) We need to be aware that cloud lock-in comes with advantages, especially from...

  In the last month, I had the opportunity to support the following training provided by Microsoft to technical communities: Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: DevOps with GitHub Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Data Fundamentals A lot of training where I had the opportunity to offer support as part of moderating (Q/A) team.

  In the last month, I had the opportunity to support the following training provided by Microsoft to technical communities: Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Implementing Hybrid Infrastructure Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: DevOps with GitHub Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Data Fundamentals A lot of training where I had the opportunity to offer support as part of moderating (Q/A) team.

  In the last month, I had the opportunity to support the following training provided by Microsoft to technical communities: Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Fundamentals Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Implementing Hybrid Infrastructure Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Fundamentals (II) Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: DevOps with GitHub Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Data Fundamentals Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Migrating On-Premises Infrastructure and Data A lot of training where I had the opportunity to offer support as part of moderating (Q/A) team.

  In the last month, I had the opportunity to support the following training provided by Microsoft to technical communities: Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: AI Fundamentals Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: DevOps with GitHub A lot of training where I had the opportunity to offer support as part of moderating (Q/A) team.

 On June 26th, 2021 I had the opportunity to be invited as a speaker at  AI and IoT Bulgaria Summit .  The session that I delivered was about message and event-based patterns and things that we need to be aware of when we want to have reliable communication between the consumer and producer. Nowadays message-based solutions are already providing us a rich list of functionality. Nevertheless, we need to be aware of different communication patterns and strategies to ensure that use them in the best possible way.