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GPU for DL: Benefits and Drawbacks of On-Premises vs. Cloud

As technology advances and more organizations are implementing machine learning operations (MLOps), people are looking for ways to speed up processes. This is especially true for organizations working with deep learning (DL) processes which can be incredibly long to run. You can speed up this process by using graphical processing units (GPUs) on-premises or in the cloud.

GPUs are microprocessors that are specially designed to perform specific tasks. These units enable parallel processing of tasks and can be optimized to increase performance in artificial intelligence and deep learning processes.

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3 Fundamental Components of a Reusable .NET Microservices Platform

Development teams frequently need to build new microservices to either add new functionality or replace existing microservices. However, microservices must support some standard features such as providing insight into their health through logging, allowing monitoring, and following the organization's security standards. A reusable microservices platform can help developers jumpstart the development process by providing reusable components that they can use to build new microservices.

To implement a reusable microservices platform, you can use the sidecar pattern or build NuGet packages that are installed in every microservice. Monitoring, tracing, and logging are the key components that must exist in your platform. We will cover an implementation of the platform consisting of the three components in this article. However, you may build many more platform components to implement standard technical policies such as handling database connections, retries, timeouts, etc.

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Test Automation: Maven Profiles and Parallelization in Azure Pipelines Using IaaS

When it comes to Test Automation, configuring parallel threads can become challenging especially when logins are involved. It's more of a challenge for the UI/ Selenium test to run batches in a separate thread on Azure pipelines with separate credential sets. 

Solution Overview: Create test suites using tags for the cucumber framework. Create profiles for login credentials and environments to run on. Compile the build with a test suite, login credentials, and environment to run on. This approach can be used for other types of test suits as well such as Junit. 

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Cloud Technology News of the Month: September 2021

Autumn is officially here and with it another portion of fresh cloud technology news. 

This series brings you up to speed with the latest releases, acquisitions, research, and hidden gems in the world of cloud computing – the stuff actually worth reading.

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Azure File AD Integration

Today I am going to show you how to perform Azure File AD integration in a simplified way. I hope you will enjoy this blog like my previous one. 

Let's understand the Azure File role. It works as Distributed File System (DFS), which means I can share folder/file with multiple clients at the same time. The client computer has to map the drive and start sharing the data within the team through it. 

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Integrating Alexa With Microsoft LUIS

Alexa has a very good Natural Language Processing engine. However, there are other NLP engines in the market that can be used and those are including more and more capabilities.

  • Integrating Alexa with Microsoft LUIS
    • Prerequisites
    • Preface
    • Setting up our Alexa Skill
    • Creating Azure Cognitive Services
    • Creating MS LUIS App
    • Calling MS LUIS from Alexa Skill
    • Final Result
    • Resources
    • Conclusion

Prerequisites

Here you have the technologies used in this project

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Generate Image Thumbnail Using Azure Computer Vision and Logic Apps

This video tutorial walks you through the complete end-to-end flow on how one can generate a thumbnail from an image using Azure Cognitive Services - Computer Vision API. The workflow starts by adding an image into Azure Storage, passing it to Computer Vision, and storing the generated thumbnail back to Azure Storage and all this is achieved without writing even a single line of code. 

On the technology front, it uses Azure Computer Vision API, Azure Blob Container, and Logic Apps. 

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DNS Hosting With Azure DNS

What Is DNS Service?

DNS service plays a vital role in any infrastructure as it is always easy to remember English text than IP address. It is responsible to resolve a domain name to an IP address or vice versa for any computer or user. 

Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the industry-standard suites of protocols defined by Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

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Auto Filter Messages Into Subscriptions in Azure Service Bus Topic

Azure Service Bus is the cloud messaging service offered by Microsoft Azure. Azure Service Bus is mainly used in multi-tenant architectures which need messages to be transferred securely between different services.

Azure Service Bus gives a FIFO message model and a publish/subscribe to messaging model, queues for one-to-one asynchronous message processing, as well as topic and subscriptions for multiple subscribers.

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Performing Sentiment Analysis Video

This video talks about an end-to-end flow, wherein an email content having a specific subject line will be read, the email body would be analyzed using Azure Cognitive Services (Sentiment analysis), analysis results would be saved in Azure Table Storage and finally, the chart would be drawn in Excel. All these steps include no coding at all. 

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Limit Communication Between Microservices With Kubernetes Network Policies

Security is an important concern for microservices applications. Although security is a broad topic, I want to zoom into a critical aspect: limiting communication between microservices. By default, microservices platforms such as Kubernetes allow unconstrained communication between services. However, to prevent a few compromised services from affecting all the services on the platform, a microservices platform needs to limit the interactions between services. This constraint is enforced by creating network policies in Kubernetes. Network policies allow you to specify which services can communicate with each other and which services can't. For example, you can specify that a service can only communicate with other services in the same namespace with a network policy.

A Kubernetes cluster needs a network controller to enforce the network policies. The network controller is a special pod that runs on every node in the cluster (a.k.a., DaemonSet). It monitors the network traffic between services and enforces the network policies.

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Versatile Events in Event Driven Architecture

Simple applications rely on synchronous request-response protocols. It is one of the most common patterns we encounter every day in applications and websites where you press a button and expect a response.

As the number of services increases, the number of synchronous interactions between them increases as well. In such a situation, the downtime of a single system also affects the availability of other systems.

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Data Platform: The Successful Paths

Introduction

I've been working as Solution Architect for many years, and I've seen the same mistakes very often. Usually, companies want to evolve their data platform because the current solution doesn't cover their needs, which is a good reason.  But many times they start from the wrong starting point: 

  • Identify the requirements and the to-be solution but forget the retrospective step of the current solution. 
  • Identify certain products as the main problems. Often this involves choosing another product as the magic solution to resolve these problems.
  • Identify technological silos but no knowledge silos, therefore do not support enough the data governance solutions.
  • To not plan thoroughly a coexistence plan between the current solution and the new one. The migrations never end, and the legacy products never switch off.

I think the reasons are simple, and at the same time are very difficult to change:

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Setup Cypress Tests in Azure DevOps Pipeline

This tutorial helps to integrate and run your Cypress tests with the Azure DevOps pipeline in an Easy Way

Pre-Requisite:

  1. You need to have already cypress framework up and running on your local machine
  2. Cypress Project should be checked into the repository
  3. Your framework should generate a JUnit XML file at the end of the execution of the test. If you are not sure how to do that refer to Generating JUnit XML article.

Step by Step Guide To Run / Set-Up Cypress Tests in Azure DevOps or TFS Pipeline CI/CD

This tutorial explains the easy way to configure and run Cypress Test Automation Framework into Azure DevOps. 

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Azure API App vs Web App

Azure App Service is one of the most used among the Azure offered services. When the requirement is to host web applications, REST APIs, and mobile back ends, the Azure App Service is the go-to HTTP- based solution. Apps hosted in Azure App Service can be integrated with on-premises or cloud services. It supports both the Windows and Linux-based environments to run and scale the applications.

Azure App Services are popular due to the following reasons:

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How To Build a CI/CD Pipeline in Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps by Microsoft Azure is one of the leading tools that automate CI/CD’s process and, in turn, supports automatic builds and code projects to make them available to others. The Azure pipelines combine Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) to consistently test and build the code and ship it to the target environment.

In this article, we will learn how to configure an Azure CI/CD pipeline and integrate it to LambdaTest Azure DevOps for bug tracking. 

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Getting Started With Reading Text From an Image Using Azure Cognitive Services

In this article, we will learn about how we can read or extract text from an image, irrespective of whether it is handwritten or printed.

In order to read the text, two things come into the picture. The first one is Computer Vision and the second one is NLP, which is short for Natural Language Processing. Computer vision helps us to read the text and then NLP is used to make sense of that identified text. In this article, I’ll talk specifically about the text extraction part.