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Optimizing Application Performance and User Experience With NETSCOUT for Azure

In the era of Digital Transformation (DX) the IT landscape has expanded to environments that rely extensively on virtualization, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), and cloud computing. As a result, the number of servers and the quantity of traffic have been exploding exponentially.

The cohesive, albeit heterogeneous on-premises IT environments of the past have given way to a disaggregated, interdependent mélange of compute, network, and storage components, both on-premises and in the private and public clouds.

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ASP.NET Core Code Coverage Reports On Azure DevOps

After making ASP.NET Core code coverage reports work on a local box, I took it a step further and made code coverage reports available also on Azure DevOps. This blog post shows how to generate code coverage reports for .NET and ASP.NET Core applications on Azure DevOps.

Getting Started

This blog post expects that there is .NET or ASP.NET Core project with unit tests and code coverage reports. It also assumes the existence of an Azure DevOps build pipeline that is connected to a source code repository. It's covered well on a previous blog post about automated testing, "Code coverage reports for ASP.NET Core."

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Backup and Anonymize Your Cosmos Collections With the Cosmic Clone Tool

Introduction

As part of an application lifecycle, we are periodically required to refresh our non-production (dev/test) environments with production data. This helps us test applications with the right data and ensures we do not leak any obvious defects. It also enables us to test for performance of our application, as we will have the same quantity of data as in production. Further, testing on real data is bound to inspire confidence on an application release.

But copying live data increases the risks and the exposure of confidential information. A non-production database is likely to be accessed by developers and business analysts who may not have the same access in a live environment. They might only be interested in testing a feature but should not be exposed to the confidential information in the live system itself. To reduce such risks, data needs to be anonymized. i.e., personally identifiable/confidential information is removed or replaced with dummy values.

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St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Takes to the Cloud

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has long been known as a leader in the fight to cure childhood cancer. And now it’s being recognized as another type of leader – in digital innovation.

With the launch of the St. Jude Cloud, cancer researchers can not only store their data in one central location, making it accessible to others around the globe, but they can also analyze it right on the spot using groundbreaking technology, an initiative that’s earned the organization the coveted Digital Edge 50 Award for 2019.

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Enforce Budgets With Azure Automation

Budgets are a feature of the new Azure cost management tool, which is primarily the integration of Cloudyn into the Azure portal. Budgets allow you to set a financial boundary for a subscription or a resource group, which you can monitor through cost management and trigger alerts when you are close to the cost set in your budget.

One thing you cannot do with budgets, and something that many people feel is an obvious requirement, is to stop people spending any more money when they hit the budget. If a subscription or resource group breaches its budget, then it will trigger an alert. However, it does not turn off any resources, and it does not stop further spending.

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Comparing Serverless Architecture Providers: AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Other FaaS Vendors

According to the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud report, serverless architecture penetration rate increased to 75 percent. Aware of what serverless means, you probably know that the market of cloudless architecture providers is no longer limited to major vendors such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. Now we have a range of cloud providers to choose from. But, why would anybody switch to serverless architecture? And what is the difference between all those providers and services they offer?

Where Does Serverless Come From?

To answer that question, let’s roll back a bit. Fourteen years ago, cloud technologies began being adopted in IT. The market had to change rapidly, as every year brought new approaches to app development. First, businesses mostly utilized the IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) approach. It entailed renting servers and moving the infrastructure to clouds, but teams still had to deal with server setup. Then came the gradual dismissal of manual server operation, and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) appeared. PaaS providers offered a more complete application stack, like operating systems and databases to run in the cloud and be managed by the vendor. But that wasn’t enough.

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Lessons Learned from A Legacy Serverless App

Keeping in mind the growing multi-cloud trend, developers should start working with more than one provider. However, this can mean leaving your comfort zone, and not everyone likes the idea of doing that. Recently, I’ve done this and would like to share my experiences with you. I believe they are useful, regardless of whatever cloud platform you are using/are going to use.

We have a legacy serverless application hosted on Azure Functions. There were some issues with it:

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Everything You Need to Know to Get Started With Azure Console

Microsoft Azure, which holds second-highest market share in the cloud computing domain is threatening to grab top honors in near future. To a great extent, the credit for this success is also due, to the ease with Microsoft Azure can be accessed to carry out computing. Azure Portal contributes greatly to this vertical. In this article, we will be exploring how Azure Portal makes it easy to bring all Azure's services under one umbrella.

Before we dive deeper and understand Azure Portal any further, here is a sneak peek into the pointers this article focuses on:

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Bootiful Azure: Integration With Azure Service Bus (4/6)

This is part 4 of a 6 part series, introducing Microsoft Azure for Spring developers. I couldn't have put this together without input from Microsoft's Asir Vedamuthu Selvasingh, Yitao Dong, Bruno Borges, Brian Benz, and Theresa Nguyen. You can find the code for this series on Github. You can also learn more about Microsoft Azure in my Spring Tips (@SpringTipsLive) installment, Bootiful Azure.

Here are all the installments:

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A Lap Around Functions 2.0

You might be familiar with Azure Functions, a capability in Azure to run small pieces of code. Microsoft launched Azure Functions in early 2016 as a preview, and it became generally available mid-November of 2016. Now almost two years later Microsoft made Azure Functions 2.0 available. In this blog post, we take a lap around this second version of Azure Functions. Here you get a look at new UI changes, templates, development, DevOps, and future roadmap.

Introducing Azure Functions 2.0

The new version of Azure Functions is available with an SLA of 99.95% – meaning that functions running on a consumption plan will run 99.95% of the time after the trigger is successfully fired, or on an app service plan, the compute will be available 99.95% of the time. Furthermore, you can benefit from:

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WIQL Editor Extension for Azure DevOps

One of the nice features of Azure DevOps is extendibility. Thanks to the REST API, you can write add-ins or standalone programs that interact with the services. One of the add-ins that I like the most is the Work Item Query Language Editor, a nice add-in that allows you to interact directly with the underlying syntax of Work Item query.

Once installed, whenever you are in the query editor, you have the ability to directly edit the query with WIQL syntax, thanks to the “Edit query wiql” menu entry.

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Azure Resource Manager Templates and Nested Loops: A Commentary

What is Azure Resource Manager, or ARM?

ARM is a Microsoft Azure provided managed service that enables an automation designer to define their design intent, expressed as templates, using ARM's automation language, which is currently AzureRM and is transitioning to Az.

ARM enables a designer to express their intent as to the selection, configuration, and assembly sequence of computing resource objects as specified by ARM automation resource templates.

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How to Configure a SQL Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster Instance in Azure

Introduction

If you are reading this article you probably are still using SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 and want to take advantage of the extended security updates that Microsoft is offering if you move your SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 into Azure. I previously wrote about this topic in this post.

You may be wondering how to make sure your SQL Server instance remains highly available once you make the move to Azure. Today, most people have business critical SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 configured as a clustered instance (SQL Server FCI) in their data center. When looking at Azure you have probably come to the realization that due to the lack of shared storage it might seem that you can't bring your SQL Server FCI to the Azure cloud. However, that is not the case thanks to SIOS DataKeeper.

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Cloud Cost Optimization for 2019

Practically everything runs in the cloud these days. Cloud technology and the multiple platforms available today certainly make running apps and web services in the cloud easier. At the same time, cloud infrastructure has new features that expand its capabilities, including deployment features like containers and advanced administrative tools.

It is relatively easy to set up a capable cloud environment for any app or service. The real challenge is creating an environment that is both effective and efficient, especially in terms of setup and running costs. With the New Year already moving quickly, every business is no doubt looking for ways to run smoother and more economically. Thankfully, cloud cost optimization can be done in many different ways across multiple services.

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Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Security Features

Today, we are deploying a Kubernetes cluster for our application. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has many advantages over similar Kubernetes platforms because the user does not pay for the master VMS or its maintenance. An Azure subscriber pays only for the worker VMS. However, AKS — out of the box — is not a production-ready product. The following are the steps we need to take before we became almost production-ready.

In this article, we are going to discuss the following topics: