Microsoft

Recently I took some time to revisit Azure Cache for Redis I got first introduced to the service in 2018 and a lot has changed since then. I won’t go into detail about Redis and what it is or What is caching. But instead, I want to share my thoughts on using it on the Azure platform.

A particular use benefit of using Azure Cache for Redis instead of the self-hosting version for data cache needs is it will allow a business to bring the frequently called data to the cloud so that the data can be called faster with higher availability. This is perfect for situations where you have a frequently queried data source stored within a private network with high latency and an even higher constraint on memory usage from on-prem servers.

A little disclaimer here, these are notes from a live demo on 4-28-22 sorry if this doesn’t make sense later.

Overview:

Azure Terrafy is a new tool currently in preview as of April 27th from Microsoft designed to help you export Azure Resources listed within the AzureRM provider to a terraform main.tf file and maintain a state file.

How To Install It:

1. To be able to install Terrafy you’ll need to download the binary from the github repo. If you haven’t installed terrform you’ll want to do that as well. Click here for details

Back in July fellow Azure blogger Billy York wrote a blog post about Monitoring SSL certificates with Azure monitor utilizing a standard test within App Insights, it’s really cool that Azure finally added this ability. I want to talk about an alternative less known method using Azure Key Vault certificate contacts and lifetime contacts.

What is Azure Key Vault?

For those who are unfamiliar with The Azure service Azure Key Vault the fastest way to sum it up is that its a cloud service on Azure used for storing sensitive application information like tokens, passwords, API keys as well as TLS and SSL certificates used by resources on Azure or accessing Azure resources. The benefit of using a service like this is it will greatly reduce the risk of secrets being leaked accidentally. If you would like a more comprehensive overview of the service go to the Azure Key Vault website.

2019 was a big year for me using VS Code before the beginning of the year I was still using Notepad++ along with Visual Studio as my daily IDE’s. But in January I tried to use VS Code every day for 30 days and I haven’t stopped and along the way, I also convinced a few of my Co-workers to convert over as well. I remember reading the 2018 Stack Overflow release their annual Developer survey results last December, one of the interesting things that I noticed was that VS Code had risen to the top as the Most Popular Development Environment among Developers and Admins with 35% of 75,398 respondents claiming to use it which is pretty cool for a tool-less than 5 years old. What makes VS Code so popular is first it’s platform agnostic, then the design is clean simple and how easy it is to create and add an extension to the marketplace. That means depending on the type of task programming or administration you want to do at that time VS Code can help you accomplish it. Ok so here are some of my favorite plugins I use.

It’s true when they say no news is good news, my Windows Home Server has been just chugging along currently were approaching 180 days without rebooting, which is quite impressive to even to me. Actually now that think about it I made a major change to my setup back in March. I purchased a Dell PowerEdge 700 for 25 dollars on eBay which a real server instead of an old desktop I had lying around. This was a major performance increase and adds additional room to the cabinet for more hard drives, I think like another 2 or 4 which I’m thinking of throwing all my old drives into the pool to just max out the space. Also I’m not sure what to do with the tape drive currently installed.

Another #Meme 15 topic brought you by MVP Jason Strate (Blog | twitter). This month topic “What are ten blogs that you think other SQL Server professionals should be following but might not be?” Coming up with a list of just 10 is harder than I thought narrowing it down to ten is just way to hard but i was able to do. The list I  put together covers everyone from the newbie to SQL to the all-round DBA.