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10 Rules for Better Cloud Security

Introduction

It’s estimated that already 50% of all global corporate data is being stored in the cloud, which is quite telling about the explosive growth of this still relatively young sector. We all know the benefits which propelled this adoption: increased agility, ease of scaling, and cost-effectiveness.

But regarding security, things are more nuanced: for some, the idea of handling most if not all of one business’s most valuable assets to a third-party organization is a kind of crazy, but for the (vast majority) of the others, it totally makes sense. You can benefit from the enormous security resources put in place by the cloud providers to protect your data, with the very best engineers working 24/7 to fulfill their mission. Even though, this is not quite the end of the story.

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Azure Synapse vs Snowflake: The Definitive Guide

With the world on pace to reach 175 Zettabytes of data by 2025, it’s no wonder why organizations are placing such a high emphasis on building out their technology stacks. Now more than ever, companies need a way to collect and consolidate data into a single platform to derive insights quickly.

This is one of the core reasons that Snowflake and Azure Synapse Analytics have risen to such popularity. However, Synapse and Snowflake are different solutions and both should be analyzed from an unbiased lens. With that in mind, here are some of the core differences and pros/cons to Snowflake and Synapse.

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What Does 2022 Have in Store for Cybersecurity and Cloud Security Specialists?

Cloud adoption and industry transformation are accelerating as the world looks for efficiency. Let’s face it, 2022 promises to be another busy year for cybersecurity and cloud security specialists. 

According to the 2021 ISC Cybersecurity Workforce Study, we are still short 2.7 million cybersecurity professionals globally. There aren’t enough people to keep up with the rising threat, so we need to deploy automation heavily to tackle it. 

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Deploy an Application for Azure Container Registry

Overview Docker Container and Image

Introduction to Docker Images

Docker is a tool that makes it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using a containerization approach. These containers are lightweight and take less time to start than traditional servers. These containers also increase performance and lower cost, while offering proper resource management. Another benefit to using Docker is that you no longer need to pre-allocate RAM to each container.

Docker Container and Docker Image

A Docker container is a virtualized runtime environment used in application development. As mentioned before in the definition of Docker, with Docker, we are able to create, run and deploy applications that are isolated from the underlying hardware. A Docker container can use just one machine, share its kernel and virtualize the OS to run more isolated processes. So, Docker containers are lightweight.

A Docker image is like a snapshot in other types of VM environments. It is a record of a Docker container at a specific point in time. Docker images are also immutable. While they can’t be changed, they can be duplicated, shared, or deleted. The feature is useful for testing new software or configurations because whatever happens, the image remains unchanged.

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DOAG 2021 Conference Report

The DOAG 2021 conference took place November 16-18. This is the long-running annual event organized by the German Oracle technology user community — one of the largest in the world. Due to the pandemic, the 2021 event was virtual. There is always some Java-related content in the event, including on Jakarta EE, WebLogic, Coherence, and Helidon. I delivered two talks on Jakarta EE, WebLogic, and Azure.

DOAG 2021 Conference and Exhibition Cover

Running WebLogic on Azure Kubernetes and Virtual Machines

On the second day of the conference, I had the relatively rare opportunity to deliver a talk titled “Running WebLogic on Azure Kubernetes and Virtual Machines”. The material covers the key work Microsoft and Oracle is doing to power WebLogic on Azure. The work includes tools, solutions, guides, samples, and scripts to fully enable WebLogic on both Azure Virtual Machines as well as the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The solutions support simple use cases such as easily creating a single working WebLogic instance. They also support common use cases such as clustering, load-balancing, failover, disaster recovery, database connectivity, caching via Coherence, consolidated logging via ELK, and Azure Active Directory integration. The introductory session includes demos for VMs and AKS. I also cover the longer-term roadmap for WebLogic on Azure. The slides for the talk are available on SpeakerDeck.

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Azure App Service, Azure Cloud Services, or VMs – Which Hosting Service Is Right for Your App?

Learn How To Choose Between Azure App Service, Azure Cloud Services, and VMs To Host Your App in the Azure Cloud

Microsoft Azure provides different ways to deploy your applications to the Azure cloud and choosing the right fit can often become a challenging. Azure App Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines are the most popular and easiest to use. 

Let us have a look at all 3 and then compare them against each other to figure out the strengths and weaknesses, and over all compatibility with your project.

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DevOps Engineer Salary: GCP Guide for 2021

With DevOps engineering being an emerging field, Knowing what fair compensation looks like can be confusing, especially if you are new to the profession. A 'fair' DevOps engineer salary differs from one company to another. Furthermore, it can be challenging to differentiate your role as a DevOps engineer from your colleagues within the development profession. 

This article examines how much a DevOps engineer salary is in the current market and highlights all you need to know about the profession. 

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Build A Crypto Price Tracker Using Node.js and Cassandra

Since the big bang in the data technology landscape happened a decade and a half ago, giving rise to technologies like Hadoop, which cater to the four ‘V’s. — volume, variety, velocity, and veracity there has been an uptick in the use of databases with specialized capabilities to cater to different types of data and usage patterns. You can now see companies using graph databases, time-series databases, document databases, and others for different customer and internal workloads.

Apache Cassandra™ is a wide-column, NoSQL database that is ideal when used for append-only, write-intensive workloads that capture data from IoT sensors, GPS devices, transaction logs, any time-series applications, and more. A lot of these applications need to be coupled with visualization engines for creating reports and dashboards. As most of the visualization libraries are written in JavaScript, using Node.js to interact with the database and the visualization engine is a good idea.  

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EclipseCon 2021 Conference Report

EclipseCon 2021 took place October 25-28. EclipseCon has long been a world-class conference for all things Eclipse. With the Java EE transition to the Eclipse Foundation, EclipseCon has become a truly significant event for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile developers. Due to the pandemic, the 2021 event was virtual (and free!). Jakarta EE unsurprisingly had a strong presence at the conference with talks on Jakarta EE 9.x, Jakarta EE 10, MicroProfile 4.x, MicroProfile 5, Jakarta Security, Jakarta Concurrency, Jakarta REST, Jakarta NoSQL, and MicroProfile GraphQL from speakers such as Tanja Obradovic, Ivar Grimstad, Josh Juneau, Otavio Santana, Emily Jiang, Steve Millidge, Arjan Tijms, Werner Keil, Ed Burns, Rudy De Busscher, and Graham Charters. 

I delivered two talks and participated in a panel at the conference focused on Java, Jakarta EE, and Azure. I also helped organize Community Day along with Werner Keil and Petr Aubrecht.

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JCON 2021 Conference Report

JCON 2021 took place October 5 to 8. This is a world-class conference run by the German JAVAPRO magazine. Due to the pandemic, the 2021 event was virtual. 

Jakarta EE had a strong presence at the conference with talks on the Jakarta EE Core Profile, Jakarta EE Security, Jakarta NoSQL, MicroProfile 4, Quarkus, Helidon, and Open Liberty from speakers such as Ivar Grimstad, Adam Bien, Otavio Santana, Emily Jiang, Werner Keil, Ed Burns, Grace Jansen, Rudy De Busscher, and Graham Charters. 

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Getting Started With Azure Load Testing

A new sheriff in town. Microsoft launched the fully managed Azure service for performance test engineers and developers to perform high scale load testing called Azure Load Testing, currently in preview mode. It is quite a big announcement for performance engineers. Let us see whether Azure Load Testing fulfills our needs or not in this blog post.

What is Azure Load Testing?

As foretold, aptly put, Azure Load Testing is an offering for the customers who are in the Azure ecosystem. Even if you are not in Azure, you can still spin up the load test resource for performance testing. But the catch is PRICING. We can discuss the pricing in another blog post. Let us focus on the features, how to get started, and more.

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DevOps Services Pricing: AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

Cloud computing has rapidly become a strong driving factor for companies worldwide, as software is transferred out of in-house data centers in an effort to modernize, reduce costs, and boost agility. Businesses more and more use it as an all-in-one solution, a model in which a third-party supplier comprises and manages a customer’s fundamental infrastructure.

Among the most used and popular DevOps services, namely Amazon Web Services, Azure DevOps services, and Google Cloud services, there is a battle going on in the market. Based on Statista analytics, Amazon Web Services, the most prominent provider in the cloud computing industry, held 32% of the total market in the 3rd quarter of 2021. Microsoft Azure comes in 2nd place with a 21% market share, followed by Google Cloud with an 8%. Therefore, in the 3rd quarter of 2021, these three cloud suppliers are undoubtedly leading within the statistics.

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Management and the Future of AI with Azure’s CTO

Has your entire career ever hinged on a single moment? For Darren Dillon, free beer in college set him on the path to a computer science degree and eventually a wildly successful career at Microsoft.

Today, as the CTO of Azure and AI at Microsoft Industry Solutions, Darren leads an impressive team of over 130 engineers and is at the forefront of cloud computing and AI technology.

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Deploying Jamstack Sites to Azure

Azure and Static Web Apps

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service. Developers use it for building and deploying all sorts of applications and services. Many larger organizations rely on their secure, global data centers for managing enterprise applications. But, an increasing number of smaller teams are embracing the platform, especially ones with quick scale in mind.

Recently, Microsoft officially released Azure Static Web Apps at their virtual Code to Scale event. This announcement means that Microsoft users can now use Github CI/CD pipelines and their favorite development tools to deploy static resources and even trigger Azure API functions. 

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Kubernetes Container Lifecycle Events and Hooks

You might encounter cases where you need to instruct Kubernetes to start a pod only when a condition is met, such as dependencies are running, or sidecar containers are ready. Likewise, you might want to execute a command before Kubernetes terminates a pod to release the resources in use and gracefully terminate the application.

You can do so easily with two container lifecycle hooks:

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Cloud Observability – Understand the Complex State of Your System

Cloud-based systemic optimization is central to the agility of a business in today’s post-COVID world. Whilst the accelerating trend to embrace the cloud is good, the key focus should lie in identifying and outmaneuvering any future uncertainties. Nobody expected to be forced to work from home, neither did some industries expect a volatile growth in traffic and demand. For example, Netflix saw a sharp 16 million spike in the number of new subscribers, highlighting the unprecedented growth in demand and the need for tactical systems to handle the same. 

With the growing scale and complexity of systems architecture and new challenges being imposed, IT professionals are under high pressure to identify anomalies, derive solutions for the same, and ensure that they don’t arise in the future. To assure that, enterprises are looking at Observability.