This Week I Learned - Week #132

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft Azure suffered more downtime than its main rivals in 2014, with almost 54 hours of downtime for its two main services, according to CloudHarmony, a third-party that monitors cloud provider uptime.

* Availability set can be specified during VM provisioning or after a VM has been provisioned

* There is a nice PowerShell script in the Technet Script Center that can be used to keep Azure PowerShell current by checking for updates on Github

* Failure to ensure the OS disk has the necessary IOPS may result in the Azure VM restarting. The IOPS limit for a storage account is 20,000 IOPS and the limit for each individual disk is 500 IOPS. Therefore the most disks that should ever be placed in a storage account is 40. If you have more than 40 disks in a storage account all being used then they will not be able to get their typical 500 IOPS and obviously the more disks the less IOPS they will get. If an OS disk gets a small enough number of IOPS then the OS will be starved of IOPS and backlog IOs until it eventually will just restart.

* Availability sets do not today perform automatic customer-initiated updates. If you update the VM-Web-1 in an Availability Set, it will not impact or affect VM-Web-2 which is also in the same Availability Set. You must apply the update to VM-Web-2 also. The only time these updates will be performed automatically on each VM in a sequential fashion is for platform-initiated planned maintenance.

* AlwaysOn Availability Groups provides an effective solution for high availability for SQL Server in on-premises deployments as well as for Windows Azure VM deployments. However, there are some differences while deploying in Azure VMs, due to the differences in the way clustering and networking infrastructure works in Azure.

* Both Google Drive & OneDrive allow images to be copied from the user's clipboard to a document created on either of the services.

* In order for VMs to be put into the same Availability Set today, they must reside within the same Cloud Service. By spinning up multiple VMs within the same Cloud Service, you'll be able to add the VMs to the same Availability Set.

* Handsontable is a data grid component with an Excel-like appearance. Built in JavaScript, it integrates with any data source

* The website What Does My Site Cost can find out how much it costs for someone to use your site on mobile networks around the world.

* Vietnam is $24 billion in garment exports. India's textile export is $40 billion but garment exports are only $18 billion.

* IMDb was started in 1990 by Colin Needham while Needham was working as an engineer in Bristol at Hewlett-Packard (HP). The site that was initially his personal movie database. By the summer of 1996, thanks to IMDb's first film-related advertising campaign (for Independence Day), Needham had quit HP to work on IMDb full-time as a paid employee. It was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998.

* S Anand on how he shapes his talks in real time - "When my audience laughs, I steer my talk more towards funny insights. When my audience claps, I steer it towards more impressive techniques. When my audience reacts like dead fish, I switch to Q&A. When my audience is lost in their own conversation, I terminate the talk early."

* "When I later read that Facebook, through clever computerized detective work, could tell when two of its users were falling in love, I wondered whether Google might have similar powers. It struck me that the search engine might know more about my unconscious than I do—a possibility that would put it in a position not only to predict my behavior, but to manipulate it. "

* Blood accounts for 7% of the human body weight. The average adult has a blood volume of roughly 5 litres

* Most road accidents in Hyderabad happen on Fridays and they involve 2-wheelers