The content below is taken from the original ( Azure Virtual WAN: Multiple capabilities and new partners now generally available), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Today we are announcing the General Availability of multiple enhancements in Azure Virtual WAN, including hub-to-hub, custom routing and transit capabilities.

The content below is taken from the original ( Alphabet’s Loon launches its balloon-powered Kenyan internet service), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Alphabet’s Loon has officially begun operating its commercial internet service in Kenya . This is the first large-scale commercial offering that makes use of Loon’s high-altitude balloons, which essentially work as cell service towers that drift on currents in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Loon’s Kenyan service is offered in partnership with local telecom provider Telkom Kenya, and provides cellular service through their network to an area covering roughly 50,000 square kilometres (31,000 square miles) that normally hasn’t had reliable service due to the difficulty of setting up ground infrastructure in the mountainous terrain.

Loon has been working towards deploying its first commercial service deployment in Kenya since it announced the signed deal in 2019, but the company says that the mission has taken on even greater significance and importance since the onset of COVID-19, which has meant that reliable connectivity, especially in light of the restrictions upon travel that the epidemic has placed, making the ability to remotely contact doctors, family members and others all the more important.

Some of the technical details of how Loon’s stratospheric balloons will offer this continuous service, and what kind of network quality people can expect include that the fleet includes around 35 balloons acting together which are moving constantly to maintain the target area coverage. Average speeds look to be around 18.9Mbps down, and 4.74 Mbps up, with 19 millisecond second latency, and real-world testing has shown that this has served well for use across voice and video calls, as well as YouTube streaming, WhatsApp use and more, according to Loon.

The path followed by Alphabet’s balloons as they provide service to the target area in Kenya.

The company actually began testing its service earlier this year, with many customers connecting to the network without even realizing it during those tests, and Loon says it has served over 35,000 customers and provided the services listed during those tests.

Prior to today’s commercial service launch, Loon has also employed its balloons to provide emergency service to areas affected by disaster, including Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. It’s now working with a number of commercial telecom partners to deploy non-emergency service in a number of underserved regions globally.

The content below is taken from the original ( BOINC Radio 26 – New BOINC Projects!), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

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The content below is taken from the original ( DJing Without The Truckload Of Equipment; Secret Ingredient is Raspberry Pi), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

There is a romance to notions of a byegone age of DJing — driving a pair of Technics 1200s dwarfed on either side by the stacks, pumping techno bass through the laser-tinged darkness into a hungry crowd. Even if the reality of early evening Saturday wedding parties playing inoffensive crooners for the 50-somethings didn’t really live up to it.

The trouble with DJing old-style was that it required extensive logistics to shift all that equipment not to mention a record collection, so the modern DJ for whom everything has gone digital is truly lucky in the scale of their operation. For some people even that is too much to carry, and [Dennisdebel] has minimised a DJ rig to the next level, by running the popular Mixxx DJing software on a Raspberry Pi hooked up to his DJ controller. You can see the result in the video below the break.

This is more of a HOWTO for installing a set of software packages on the Pi to achieve an aim rather than a special hardware hack, but as he points out the interest lies in regaining control of the process. The DJ space is dominated by commercial offerings increasingly laden with DRM and proprietary cloud offerings, so this represents a means of taking back control of the process. If it’s not hacky enough, you can always add a home-made DJ mixing station.

The content below is taken from the original ( Could this new hub be the end of the 1x gearing debate?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Wireless shifting, hub gears and a cassette – is this the future?

The content below is taken from the original ( AWS attempts to woo devs with new tool aimed at porting .NET applications to Linux), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Bezos’ bunch beats Microsoft to the punch, though it has limited use for now

Amazon Web Services is trying to lure more to developers to its cloud by creating a tool built for porting .NET applications to Linux, though in its current form we found it to be less useful than hoped.…

The content below is taken from the original ( Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Great problem of our time solved: Classic FM won’t have to rebrand as Classic DAB

Analogue radio station licences will be extended for another 10 years, the UK government has said – entirely reversing plans to shut off FM and AM radio stations in favour of DAB digital radio.…

The content below is taken from the original ( Decided to go with the Sleeper Aesthetic), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

submitted by /u/SWIMMlNG to r/battlestations [link] [comments]

The content below is taken from the original ( Meet BukuWarung, the bookkeeping app built for Indonesia’s 60 million “micro-merchants”), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In Indonesia, there are about 60 million “micro-merchants,” typically small store owners who sell food and other staple items, and have close relationships with their customers. Many often extend informal lines of credit to shoppers, but much of their financial tracking is still done with pen and paper ledgers. Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty, the co-founders of BukuWarung, want to digitize the process with a financial platform designed especially for small Indonesian businesses. Their goal is to start with bookkeeping tools, before expanding into services, services including access to working capital.

The startup is currently taking part in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. BukuWarung has also raised seed funding from East Ventures, AC Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Tanglin Ventures, Samporna, as well as strategic angel investors from Grab, Gojek, Flipkart, PayPal, Xendit, Rapyd, Alterra, ZEN Rooms and other companies.

Chauhan and Peddisetty met while working together at Singapore-based, Singapore-based peer-to-peer marketplace Carousell, where they focused on developing monetization products for sellers. Chauhan also worked on products for merchants at Grab, the largest ride-sharing and on-demand delivery company in Southeast Asia. But the inspiration behind BukuWarung is also personal, because both Chauhan and Peddisetty’s families run small neighborhood stores.

“We can look at this more deeply given the experience we have monetizing merchants at Grab and Carousell,” Chauhan said. “We also know good potential exists in Indonesia, where we can help 60 million micro-merchants come online and digitize. From a macro-level, we felt this would be a huge opportunity, and there is also the personal element of being potentially being able to impact millions of merchants.”

Paper records not only make tracking finances a labor-intensive process, but also means it is harder for merchants to gain access to lines of credit. Chauhan and Peddisetty told TechCrunch that their goal is to expand the company to financial services as well, doing for Indonesian merchants what KhataBook and OKCredit have done in India.

Since launching last year, BukuWarung has signed up 600,000 merchants across 750 cities and towns in Indonesia and currently has about 200,000 monthly average users. The founders say their goal is to reach all 60 million micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses in Indonesia. It has already made its first acquisition: Lunasbos, one of the first Indonesian credit-tracking credit tracking apps.

BukuWarung founders Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty

While preparing to launch BukuWarung, the founders traveled through Indonesia, speaking to almost 400 merchants about their challenges with bookkeeping, credit tracing and accounting. Based on those conversations, the two decided to start by focusing on a bookkeeping app, which launched 10 months ago.

Despite a partial lockdown in Indonesia from April to June, BukuWarung continued to grow because most of its users sell daily necessities, like groceries. In smaller cities and villages, merchants often offer credit lines because their customers’ cash flow is very tight, and many do not have a regular monthly paycheck, Chauhan said. “Everyone is buying and selling on credit, that is something we validated in our research.”

Then there is the community aspect, where many merchants are close to their customers.

“This changes depending on the location of the business, but business owners have often known a lot of people in their neighborhoods for a long time, and when it comes to credit, they typically offer 500 Indonesian rupiah all the way up to about one million rupiah [about USD $70.56],” Chauhan said. But when it’s time to settle bills, which often means going to customers’ homes and asking for payment, many merchants feel hesitant, he added.

“They will never chase or call the person. The app we built sends automatic reminders to customers, and this ‘soft message’ really helps merchants not feel shy while at the same time professionally giving customer reminders.”

While talking to merchants, BukuWarung’s founders also realized that many were using pay-as-you-go data plans and lower-end smartphones. Therefore, their app needed to be as lightweight as possible, and work offline so users could access and update their records anytime. This focus on making their app take up as little data and space as possible differentiates them from other bookkeeping apps, the founders said, and helps them sign up and retain users in Indonesia.

Chauhan and Peddisetty said the company will partner with financial tech companies as it grows  to give users access to online payment systems, including digital wallets, and financing.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer said, “Building digital infrastructure for emerging economies is a huge opportunity, especially in the post-COVID world. And we believe BukuWarung is a team that can take on this challenge. We have seen this journey before with Khatabook and OkCredit in India and see that BukuWarung is on a similar growth trajectory to empower micro-businesses in Indonesia.”

The content below is taken from the original ( Plan your migration to Azure VMware solution using Azure Migrate), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Azure Migrate now supports assessments for Azure VMware Solution (AVS), providing even more options for you to plan your migration to Azure. AVS enables you to run VMware natively on Azure. AVS provides a dedicated Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) for your VMware environment on Azure, ensuring you can leverage familiar VMware tools and investments, while modernizing applications overtime with integration to Azure native services. Delivered and operated as a service, your private cloud environment provides all compute, networking, storage, and software required to extend and migrate your on-premises VMware environments to Azure.

As organizations now more than ever look for cost efficiencies, business stability, and consistency, choosing the most efficient migration path is imperative. This means considering a number of different workload scenarios and destinations, such as migrating your servers to Azure Virtual Machines or running your existing VMware workloads natively on Azure with AVS.

Previously, Azure Migrate tooling provided support for migrating Windows and Linux servers to Azure Virtual Machines, as well as support for database, web application, and virtual desktop scenarios. Now, you can use the migration hub to assess machines for migrating to AVS as well.

With the Azure Migrate: Server Assessment tool, you can analyze readiness, Azure suitability, cost planning, performance-based rightsizing, and application dependencies for migrating to AVS. The AVS assessment feature is currently available in preview.

This expanded support allows you to get an even more comprehensive assessment of your datacenter. Compare cloud costs between Azure native virtual machines (VMs) and AVS to make the best migration decisions for your business. Azure Migrate acts as an intelligent hub, gathering insights throughout the assessment to make suggestions, including tooling recommendations for migrating VM or VMware workloads.

How to perform an AVS assessment

You can use all the existing assessment features that Azure Migrate offers for Azure Virtual Machines to perform an AVS assessment. Plan your migration to AVS with up to 35,000 VMware servers in one Azure Migrate project.

• Discovery: Use the Azure Migrate: Server Assessment tool to perform a datacenter discovery, either by downloading the Azure Migrate appliance or by importing inventory data through a CSV upload. Read Assess your servers with a CSV import into Azure Migrate to learn more about the import feature.
• Group servers: Create groups of servers from the list of machines discovered. Here, you can select whether you’re creating a group for an Azure Virtual Machine assessment or AVS assessment. Application dependency analysis features allow you to refine groups based on connections between applications.
• Assessment properties: You can customize the AVS assessments by changing the properties and recomputing the assessment. Select a target location, node type, and Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) level—there are currently three locations available—including East US, West Europe, and West US, and more will continue to be added as additional nodes are released.
• Suitability analysis: The assessment gives you a few options for sizing nodes in Azure, between performance-based or as on-premises. It checks AVS support for each of the discovered servers and determines if the server can be migrated “as is” to AVS. If there are any issues found, the assessment automatically provides remediation guidance.
• Assessment and cost planning report: Run the assessment to get a look into how many machines are in use and what estimated monthly and per-machine costs will be in AVS. The assessment also recommends a tool for migrating the machines to AVS. With this, you have all the information you need to plan and execute your AVS migration as efficiently as possible.
   

AVS Assessment and cost planning report.

 
AVS Readiness report with suggested migration tool.

Learn more

• For detailed instructions on how to perform an AVS assessment, go to the documentation page.
• Read more about Azure VMware Solution on the website or documentation page.
• Learn more about Azure Migrate on the Azure Migrate website.
• Watch the latest Azure Migrate video for a demo of performing a server migration.
• Check out the new Azure Migrate e-book.

The content below is taken from the original ( Supreme Court rules generic website names can be trademarked), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The Supreme Court has ruled that website names are trademarkable even if they consist of a generic term followed by ".com." The ruling means that Booking.com is eligible for a trademark on the generic name that's associated with its domain. Booking.c…

The content below is taken from the original ( Microsoft is offering low-cost certifications to job seekers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Microsoft believes that one of the best ways to help the economy rebound and reduce the staggering rate of unemployment is to help workers learn new digital skills. Today, it announced an initiative designed to train 25 million people worldwide by th…

The content below is taken from the original ( Resources from Google Cloud partners to support businesses during COVID-19), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( Wyze launches its $50 wire-free outdoor camera), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In recent years, Seattle-based Wyze made a name for itself thanks to making a lot of smart home gadgets affordable. These days, the company sells everything from smart plugs and locks to scales and fitness bands, but what started it all was the $20 Wyze indoor security camera. Today, the company is following that up with its newest camera, the Wyze Cam Outdoor, which is launching in early access today.

It’ll cost $50 for the starter bundle with a base station and once the camera is out of early access, you’ll be able to add additional cameras for $40 each. As usual, Wyze is undercutting many of its direct competitors in this space for basic outdoor security cameras on price.

For the most part, the that name tells you everything you need. It’s a 20 fps 1080p camera for live streaming and recording and features IP65 water resistance that keeps the overall blocky aesthetics of the original Wyze camera. It also offers a night vision mode and two-way audio through the Wyze app, which also offers a rolling 14 days of free cloud storage, in addition to on-device storage. And, of course, it also uses some onboard smarts to do motion detection, using a standard PIR sensor.

Image Credits: Wyze /

Like similar products, it runs purely on battery power, so you don’t have to string any cables across your yard. The company says the battery should last three to six months.

It mounts to its base with magnets, but you still need to do a bit of DIY to screw that base into your walls, ceilings or garden fences.

The base station itself is obviously cabled (and that includes the option to plug in an Ethernet ethernet cable, in addition to Wi-Fi WiFi support). One nice feature here is that the base station also includes an SD card slot, so you can store videos on there, too.

Given that it’s pretty small, at 2.3×2.3×2.8 inches, Wyze also built another nifty feature into the software: offline travel mode. With this, the company says, you can watch your hotel room or campsite while you’re away from home.

Image Credits: Wyze

Based on the samples, this looks to be a pretty capable outdoor camera, but hardware is only one piece of the puzzle here. A lot depends on how well the app and on-camera motion detection work, too. We’ll take a closer look at those once we get a review sample in the next couple of weeks.

If you don’t want to wait until then, the starter pack is now available in Wyze’s shop and in the Wyze app.

The content below is taken from the original ( How Azure.com operates on Azure part 2: Technology and architecture), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

When you’re the company that builds the cloud platforms used by millions of people, your own cloud content needs be served up fast. Azure.com—a complex, cloud-based application that serves millions of people every day—is built entirely from Azure components and runs on Azure.

Microsoft culture has always been about using our own tools to run our business. Azure.com serves as an example of the convenient platform-as-a-service (PaaS) option that Azure provides for agile web development. We trust Azure to run Azure.com with 99.99-percent availability across a global network capable of a round-trip time (RTT) of less than 100 milliseconds per request.

In part two of our two-part series we share our blueprint, so you can learn from our experience building a website on planetary scale and move forward with your own website transformation.

This post will help you get a technical perspective on the infrastructure and resources that make up Azure.com. For details about our design principles, read Azure.com operates on Azure part 1: Design principles and best practices.

The architecture of a global footprint

With Azure.com, our goal is to run a world-class website in a cost-effective manner at planetary scale. To do this, we currently run more than 25 Azure services. (See Services in Azure.com below.)

This blog examines the role of the main services, such as Azure Front Door, which routes HTTP requests to the web front end, and Azure App Service, a fully managed platform for creating and deploying cloud applications.

The following diagram shows you a high-level view of the global Azure.com architecture.

• On the left, networking services provide the secure endpoints and connectivity that give users instant access, no matter where they are in the world.
• On the right, developers use Azure DevOps services to run a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline that delivers updates and features with zero downtime.
• In between, a variety of PaaS options that provide compute,  storage, security, monitoring, and more.

Azure.com global architecture: A high-level look at the Azure services and dataflow.

Host globally, deliver regionally

The Azure.com architecture is hosted globally but runs locally in multiple regions for high availability. Azure App Service hosts Azure.com from the nearest global datacenter infrastructure, and its automatic scaling features ensure that Azure.com meets changing demands.

The diagram below shows a close-up of the regional architecture hosted in App Service. We use deployment slots to deploy to development, staging, and production environments. Deployment slots are live apps with their own host names. We can swap content and configurations between the slots while maintaining application availability.

Azure.com regional architecture: App Service hosts regional instances in slots.

A look at the key PaaS components behind Azure.com

Azure.com is a complex, multi-tier web application. We use PaaS options as much as possible because managed services save us time. Less time spent on infrastructure and operations means more time to create a world-class customer experience. The platform performs OS patching, capacity provisioning, and load balancing, so we’re free to focus elsewhere.

Azure DNS

Azure DNS enables self-service quick edits to DNS records, global nameservers with 100-percent availability, and blazing fast DNS response times via Anycast addressing. We use Azure DNS aliases for both CNAME and ANAME record types.

Azure Front Door Service

Azure Front Door Service enables low-latency TCP-splitting, HTTP/2 multiplexing and concurrency, and performance based global routing. We saw a reduction in RTT to less than 100 milliseconds per request, as clients only need to connect to edge nodes, not directly to the origin.

For business continuity, Azure Front Door Service supports backend health probes, a resiliency pattern, that in effect removes unhealthy regions when they are misbehaving. In addition, to enable a backup site, Azure.com uses priority-based traffic routing. In the event our primary service backend goes offline, this method enables Azure Front Door Service to support ringed failovers.

Azure Front Door Service also acts as a reverse proxy, enabling pattern-based URL rewriting or request forwarding to handle dynamic traffic changes.

Web Application Firewall

Web Application Firewall (WAF) helps improve the platform’s security posture by providing load shedding bad bots and protection against OWASP top 10 attacks at the application layer. WAF forces developers to pay more attention to their data payloads, such as cookies, request URLs, form post parameters, and request headers.

We use WAF custom rules to block traffic to certain geographies, IPs, URLs, and other request properties. Rules offload traffic at the network edge from reaching your origin.

Content Delivery Network

To reduce load times, Azure.com uses Content Delivery Network (CDN) for load shedding to origin. CDN helps us lower the consumed bandwidth and keep costs down. CDN also improves performance by caching static assets at the Point of Presence (POP) edge nodes and reducing RTT latency. Without CDN, our origin nodes would have to handle every request for static assets.

CDN also supports DDoS protection, improving app security. We enable CDN compression and HTTP/2 to optimize delivery for static payloads. Using CDN is also a sustainable approach to optimizing network traffic because it reduces the data movement across a network.

Azure App Service

We use App Service horizontal autoscaling to handle burst traffic. The Autoscale feature is simple to use and is based on Azure Monitor metrics for requests per second (RPS) per node. We also reduced our Azure expenses by 50 percent by using elastic compute—a benefit that directly reduces our carbon consumption.

Azure.com uses several other handy App Service features:

• Always On means there’s no idle timeout.
• Application initialization provides custom warmup and validation.
• VIP swap blue-green deployment pattern supports zero-downtime deployments.
• To reduce network latency to the edge, we run our app in 12 geographically separate datacenters. This practice supports geo-redundancy should one or more datacenters go dark.
• To improve app performance, we use the App Service DaaS – .NET profiler. This feature identifies node bottlenecks and hotspots for weak performing code blocks or slow dependencies.
• For disaster recovery and improved mean time to recovery (MTTR), we use slot swap. In the event that an app deployment exception is not caught by our PPE testing, we can quickly roll back to last stable version.

App Service is also a PaaS service, which means we don’t have to worry about the virtual machine (VM) infrastructure, OS updates, app frameworks, and the downtime associated with managing these. We follow the paired region concept when choosing our datacenters to mitigate against any rolling infrastructure updates and ensure improved isolation and resiliency.

As a final note, it’s important to choose the right App Service plan tier so that you can right-size your vertical scaling. The plan you choose also affects sustainable energy proportionality, which means running instances at a higher utilization rate to maximize carbon efficiency.

DaaS – .NET Profiler: identifying code bottlenecks and measuring improvements. In this case we found our HTML whitespace “minifier” was saturating our compute nodes. After disabling it, we verified response times, and CPU usage improved significantly.

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor enables passive health monitoring over Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Azure Data Explorer data sources. We rely on these query monitor alerts to build configuration-based health models based on our telemetry logs so we know when our app is misbehaving before our customers tell us.

For example, we monitor CPU consumption by datacenter as the following screenshot shows. If we see sustained, high CPU usage for our app metrics, Monitor can trigger a notification to our response team, who can quickly respond, triage the problem, and help improve MTTR. We also receive proactive notifications if a client-browser is misbehaving or throwing console errors, such as when Safari changes a specific push and replace state pattern.

Performance counters: We are alerted if CPU spikes are sustained for more than five minutes.

Application Insights

Application Insights, a feature of Monitor, is used for client– and server-side Application Performance Management (APM) telemetry logging. It monitors page performance, exceptions, slow dependencies, and offers cross-platform profiling. Customers typically use Application Insights in break-fix scenarios to improve MTTR and to quickly triage failed requests and application exceptions.

We recommend enabling telemetry sampling so you don’t exhaust your data volume storage quota. We set up daily storage quota alerts to capture any telemetry saturation before it shuts off our logging pipeline.

Application Insights also provides OpenTelemetry support for distributed tracing across app domain boundaries and dependencies. This feature enables traceability from the client side all the way to the backend data or service tier.

Data volume capacity alert: Example showing that the data storage threshold is exceeded, which is useful for tracking runaway telemetry logs.

Developing with Azure DevOps

A big team works on Azure.com, and we use Azure DevOps Services to coordinate our efforts. We create internal technical docs with Azure Wikis, track work items using Azure Boards, build CI/CD workflows using Azure Pipelines, and manage application packages using Azure Artifacts. For software configuration management and quality gates, we use GitHub, which works well with Azure Boards.

We submit hundreds of daily pull requests as part of our build process, and the CI/CD pipeline deploys multiple updates every day to the production site. Having a single tool to manage the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) simplifies the learning curve for the engineering team and our internal customers.

To stay on top of what’s coming, we do a lot of planning in Delivery Plans. It’s a great tool for viewing incremental tasks and creating forecasts for the major events that affect Azure.com traffic, such as Microsoft Build, Microsoft Ignite, and Microsoft Ready.

What’s next

As the Azure platform evolves, so does Azure.com. But some things stay the same—the need for a reliable, scalable, sustainable, and cost-effective platform. That’s why we trust Azure.

Microsoft offers many resources and best practices for cloud developers, please see our additional resources below. To get started, create your Azure free account today.

Services in Azure.com

For more information about the services that make up Azure.com, check out the following resources.

Compute

• Azure App Service
• Azure Functions
• Azure Cognitive Services

Networking

• Azure Front Door
• Azure DNS
• Web Application Firewall
• Azure Traffic Manager
• Azure Content Delivery Network

Storage

• Azure Cognitive Search
• Azure Cache for Redis
• Azure Blob storage and Azure queues
• Application Insights
• Azure Cosmos DB
• Azure Data Explorer
• Azure Media Services

Access provisioning

• Azure Active Directory
• Microsoft Graph
• Azure Key Vault

Application life cycle

• Azure DevOps
• Azure Log Analytics
• Azure Monitor
• Azure Security Center
• Azure Resource Manager
• Azure Cost Management
• Azure Service Health
• Azure Advisor

The content below is taken from the original ( Azure.com operates on Azure part 1: Design principles and best practices), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Azure puts powerful cloud computing tools into the hands of creative people around the world. So, when your website is the face of that brand, you better use what you build, and it better be good. As in, 99.99-percent composite SLA good.

That’s our job at Azure.com, the platform where Microsoft hopes to inspire people to invent the next great thing. Azure.com serves up content to millions of people every day. It reaches people in nearly every country and is localized in 27 languages. It does all this while running on the very tools it promotes.

In developing Azure.com, we practice what we preach. We follow the guiding principles that we advise our customers to adopt and the principles of sustainable software engineering (SSE). Even this blog post is hosted on the very infrastructure that it describes.

In part one of our two-part series, we will peek behind the Azure.com web page to show you how we think about running a major brand website on a global scale. We will share our design approach and best practices for security, resiliency, scalability, availability, environmental sustainability, and cost-effective operations—on a global scale.

Products, features, and demos supported on Azure.com

As a content platform, Azure.com serves an audience of business and technical people—from S&P 500 enterprises to independent software vendors, and from government agencies to small businesses. To make sure our content reaches everyone, we follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We also adopted sustainable software engineering principles to help us responsibly achieve global scale and reduce our carbon footprint.

Azure.com supports static content, such as product and feature descriptions. But the fun is in the interactive components that let readers customize the details, like the products available by region page where we show service availability across 61 regions (and growing), the Azure updates page that keeps people informed about Azure changes, and the search box.

The Azure pricing page provides up-to-date pricing information for more than 200 services across multiple markets, and it factors in any discounts for which a signed-in user is eligible. We also built a comprehensive pricing calculator for all services. Prospective customers can calculate and share complex cost estimates in 24 currencies.

As a marketing channel, Azure.com also hosts demos. For example, we created in-browser interactive demos to display the benefits of Azure Cognitive Services, and we support streaming media for storytelling. We also provided a total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator for estimating cloud migration savings in 27 languages and 12 regions.

And did we mention the 99.99-percent composite SLA that Azure.com meets?

Pricing calculator: Interactive cost estimation tool for all Azure products and services.

History of Azure.com

As the number of Azure services has grown, so has our website, and it has always run on Azure. Azure.com is always a work in progress, but here are a few milestones in our development history:

• 2013: Azure.com begins life on the popular open-source Umbraco CMS. It markets seven Azure services divided into four categories: compute, data services, app services, and network.
• 2015: Azure.com moves to a custom ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) application hosted on Azure. It now supports 16 Azure services across four categories.
• 2020: Azure.com continues to expand its support of more categories of content. Today, the website describes more than 200 Azure offerings, including Azure services, capabilities, and features.

Azure.com timeline: Every year we support more great Azure products and services.

Design principles behind Azure.com

To create a solid architectural foundation for Azure.com, we follow the core pillars of great Azure architecture. These pillars are the design principles behind the security, performance, availability, and efficiency that make Azure.com run smoothly and meet our business goals.

Design principles: Azure.com follows the tenets of Azure architectural best practices.

You can take a class on how to Build great solutions with the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework.

A pillar of security and resiliency

Like any cloud application, Azure.com requires security at all layers. That means everything covered by the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, from the network to the application, web page, and backend dependencies. This is our defense-in-depth approach to security.

Resiliency is the ability to defend against malicious attacks, bad actors, or bots saturating your compute resources and possibly causing unnecessary scale-out and cost overruns. Resiliency isn’t about avoiding failure, but rather responding to failure in a way that avoids downtime and data loss.

One metric for resiliency is the recovery time objective (RTO), which says how long an application can be offline after suffering an outage. For us, it’s less than 30 minutes. Failure mode analysis (FMA) is another assessment of resiliency and includes planning for failures and running live fire drills. We use both these methods to assess the resiliency of Azure.com.

Super scalable and highly available

Any cloud application needs enough scalability to handle peak loads. For Azure.com, peaks occur during major events and marketing campaigns. Regardless of the load, Azure.com requires high availability to support around-the-clock operations. We trust the platform to support business continuity and guard against unexpected outages, overloaded resources, or failures caused by upstream dependencies.

As a case in point, we rely on Azure scalability to handle the big spikes in demand during Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite, the largest annual events handled by Azure.com. The number of requests per second (RPS) jumps 20 to 30 percent as tens of thousands of event attendees flock to Azure.com to learn about newly announced Azure products and services.

Whatever the scale, the Azure platform provides reliable, sustainable operations that enable Microsoft and other companies to deliver premium content to our customers.

Cost-effective high performance is a core design principle

Our customers often tell us that they want to move to a cloud-based system to save money. It’s no different at Azure.com, where cost-efficient provisioning is a core design principle. Azure.com has a handy cost calculator to compare the cost of running on-premises to running on Azure.

Efficiency means having a way to track and optimize underutilized resources and use dynamic scaling to support seasonal traffic demands. This principle applies to all layers of the software development life cycle (SDLC), starting with managing all the work items, using a source code repository, and implementing continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). Cost-efficiency extends to the way we provision and host resources in multiple environments, and maintain an inventory of our digital estate.

But being cost-conscious doesn’t mean giving up on speed. Top-notch performance takes minimal network latency, fast server response times, and consistent page load and render times. Azure.com performance always focuses on the user experience, so we make sure to optimize network routing and minimize round-trip time (RTT).

Operating with zero downtime

Uptime is important for any large web application. We aim for zero downtime. That means no service downtime—ever. It’s a lofty goal, but it’s possible when you use CI/CD practices that spare users from the effects of the build and deployment cycles.

For example, if we push a code update, we aim for no site downtime, no failed requests, and no adverse impact on Azure.com users. Our CI/CD pipeline is based on Azure DevOps and pumps out hundreds of builds and multiple deployments to the live production servers every day without a hitch.

Another service level indicator (SLI) that we use is mean time to repair (MTTR). With this metric, lower is better. To minimize MTTR SLI, you need DevOps tools for identifying and repairing bottlenecks or crashing processes.

Next steps

From our experience working on Azure.com, we can say that following these design principles and best practices improves application resiliency, lowers costs, boosts security, and ensures scalability.

To review the workings of your Azure architecture, consider taking the architecture assessment.

For more information about the Azure services that make up Azure.com, see the next article in this blog series, How Azure.com operates on Azure part 2: Technology and architecture.

The content below is taken from the original ( Netbooks: The Next Generation — Chromebooks), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Netbooks are dead, long live the Chromebook. Lewin Day wrote up a proper trip down Netbook Nostalgia Lane earlier this month. That’s required reading, go check it out and come back. You’re back? Good. Today I’m making the case that the Chromebook is the rightful heir to the netbook crown, and to realize its potential I’ll show you how to wring every bit of Linuxy goodness out of your Chromebook.

I too was a netbook connoisseur, starting with an Asus Eee 901 way back in 2009. Since then, I’ve also been the proud owner of an Eee PC 1215B, which still sees occasional use. Only recently did I finally bite the bullet and replace it with an AMD based Dell laptop for work.

For the longest time, I’ve been intrigued by a good friend who went the Chromebook route. He uses a Samsung Chromebook Plus, and is constantly using it to SSH into his development machines. After reading Lewin’s article, I got the netbook bug again, and decided to see if a Chromebook would fill the niche. I ended up with the Acer Chromebook Tab 10, codename Scarlet. The price was right, and the tablet form factor is perfect for referencing PDFs.

The default ChromeOS experience isn’t terrible. You have the functionality of desktop Chrome, as well as the ability to run virtually any Android app. It’s a good start, but hardly the hacker’s playground that a Linux netbook once was. But we can still get our Linux on with this hardware. There are three separate approaches to making a Chromebook your own virtual hackspace: Crostini, Crouton, and full OS replacement.

The Official Solution: Crostini

Crostini is the officially supported way to run Linux applications on a Chromebook. It’s a refined process, if your device supports it. Crostini uses virtualization to sandbox the Linux install, so there are some older devices that will never receive support for it. If you want to use Crostini, make sure you purchase a supported device.

Crostini is particularly simple to set up. Go into the ChromeOS settings, to the Linux section, and press the button to enable it. ChromeOS will download a Debian image and do all the install. It asks you for a username to use, and that’s it. Once it’s set up, you have a Debian system ready to go.

Apt works as expected, and the whole Debian collection of software is available. Any graphical programs are forwarded to the ChromeOS graphical layer, so you can interact with them as expected. Even audio is forwarded.

Crostini is quite flexible, all things considered. You can swap the default Debian system for Fedora, Kali, Arch, or another Distro. On an x86 Chromebook, it’s possible to install Steam and run OGL accelerated games. If you’re looking for a full desktop experience, there are even guides to install a desktop environment like KDE.

There’s even an Unsupported USB flag that can be enabled to forward virtually any device into the Linux VM. Want to program an Arduino? Yeah, it’s possible. Another experimental flag adds the ability to forward ports into the Linux VM. This opens up the ability to do web programming and all sorts of other tasks. The best part about Crostini is that it’s still being actively developed, and features are being added. For example, an experimental audio capture flag was recently added. One of the best resources I’ve found for learning more about Crostini developments is the aptly named r/Crostini subreddit, and particularly their wiki.

As neat as Crostini is, it does depend on your device getting whitelisted by Google. If you’re stuck with hardware that isn’t on the Crostini supported list, there is another option: Crouton.

Crouton

I won’t wade into the debate on which is tastier, but Crouton does have some distinct advantages. The biggest advantage is that it runs on just about any ChromeOS device that has devmode. Instead of running a VM, Crouton is based on chroot, so direct access to the hardware is possible. On the other hand, Crouton requires putting your device in developer mode, AKA the official rooting process. If you’re willing to commit to dev mode, and the powerwash it requires, then the steps required to install crouton are simple.

Download the crouton binary, install it to the proper location, and run sudo crouton -t xfce to download and set up the image. Once it’s installed, sudo enter-chroot startxfce4 starts up the chroot and launches the XFCE desktop. From there, install the Crouton extension and xiwi, and you can run linux application GUIs right on your ChromeOS desktop. It’s a little less refined than Crostini, but does the trick.

Since we have root from dev mode, it’s easy enough to pull a few tricks, like adding a udev rule to redirect devices into the chroot. Want direct access to a built-in camera? Crouton can do it.

Full OS Replacement

For absolute full control over your device, the only option is to ditch ChromeOS altogether and install a Linux distro. On x86 devices, chrx is a popular option for dual-booting a full-fat Linux distro with ChromeOS. Even some Arm models can be convinced to boot a Linux distro that supports their chipset, but beware that you’re way outside the realm of what’s officially supported by Google. Not that that ever stopped us before.

There’s a distro that’s designed specifically for Chromebooks, GalliumOS. It’s a stripped down Xubuntu, designed to run well on the lightweight Chromebook hardware. There is, of course, a catch. GalliumOS can only run on certain devices. Arm devices are totally unsupported, and some older machines have other various incompatibilities.

Google did add support for a legacy boot mode that makes the installation of a full Linux OS much easier. Even if your device has a firmware write-protect switch, it’s probably possible to put the device in dev mode and boot via the venerable BIOS process.

Final Thoughts

I’ve written most of this article from the Acer tablet I mentioned earlier. The experience reminds me a lot of working from a netbook. I have Crostini installed, and have been working my way though testing out a multitude of programs. Not everything works perfectly, but each update brings fixes and features.

Is a Chromebook the next netbook for you? Maybe. A modern Chromebook is an impressive piece of hardware, and it brings a lot of hackability.

If you go the Chromebook route, be sure to let us know in the comments how it’s worked for you, and send in some other Chromebook related hacks!

The content below is taken from the original ( Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Passwords are a pain and they are also a security risk. Microsoft has been trying to persuade IT, professionals and consumers, to do away with passwords in recent years. Social engineering techniques, like phishing and malware, make passwords vulnerable. Around 80 percent of successful attacks originate from compromised passwords.

Users also make passwords less secure by choosing passwords that are easy to guess and that can be hacked in dictionary attacks. Moreover, it’s common that people use the same password across multiple devices and services, increasing the damage if a password compromised. Multifactor authentication (MFA) helps protect passwords but it has a low adoption rate.

What is passwordless sign-in?

Microsoft’s answer to these security problems is passwordless authentication. With passwordless sign-in, passwords are replaced by something you have, like a security key, plus something you are or know. Something you are might be a biometric gesture like a fingerprint. Something you know might be a PIN.

If you read through Microsoft’s documentation on passwordless sign-in, it refers mainly to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Azure AD is the identity management platform used by Microsoft 365, Office 365, and of course Azure. To add to the complexity, Microsoft supports three different passwordless technologies in Azure AD and Windows 10:

• Windows Hello for Business
• Microsoft Authenticator app
• FIDO2 security keys

Windows Hello

Designed for users that have a designated Windows 10 device, Windows Hello uses the PC itself as the ‘something you have’. Windows Hello can be used to sign in to Windows 10 and it also provides single sign-on (SSO) to services like Microsoft 365.

For devices that don’t have a built-in biometric device, like a fingerprint scanner, a PIN can be used. While PINs might not seem to offer an advantage over passwords, unlike passwords, Windows Hello PINs can only be used on the device where they are registered.

Microsoft Accounts

If you log in to Windows 10 using a Microsoft account and have Windows Hello set up, you can access Microsoft services, like Outlook.com, in supported browsers using Windows Hello.

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You will be required to enter a PIN or use a biometric gesture to complete the sign-in.

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Work or school accounts (Microsoft 365)

To use Windows Hello for Business with Microsoft 365, you must first sign in to Windows 10 using Windows Hello with your work or school account. To log in to Windows 10 from the lock screen using a work or school account, the device must be Azure AD joined. Once logged in, single sign-on works with Microsoft 365, so there’s no need to enter a password or confirm your identity again using a PIN or biometric gesture.

For more information on joining Windows 10 to an Azure Active Directory domain, see Join Windows 10 to Azure Active Directory During OOBE on Petri. It is also possible to join, or connect in Microsoft’s terminology, a Windows 10 device to Azure AD in the Settings app.

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Microsoft Authenticator app

Users with accounts registered for MFA will likely be familiar with the Microsoft Authenticator app or similar solutions like Google Authenticator. But the Microsoft Authenticator app can also be used for passwordless authentication in Microsoft 365.

Unlike Windows Hello, the Microsoft Authenticator app is a good solution for passwordless sign-in where users share PCs. The app runs on iOS 8.0 or later, and Android 6.0 or later. Microsoft Authenticator app passwordless authentication isn’t enabled in Azure AD by default.

If Microsoft Authenticator app passwordless is setup, after entering a username to log in to Microsoft 365, the user gets a message displaying a number that they must tap in the Authenticator app on their mobile device. To complete sign-in, the user must click Approve and provide a PIN or biometric gesture.

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Before evaluating the Microsoft Authenticator app as a passwordless sign-in solution, your Azure AD tenant must have Azure MFA with push notifications enabled as a verification method. Azure AD MFA requires a premium Azure AD subscription.

FIDO2 security keys

If users that share PCs don’t want to or can’t use their mobile phones with the Microsoft Authenticator app, security keys are a hardware alternative. Security keys usually come in the form of small USB devices and they provide stronger security than software passwordless solutions like the Microsoft Authenticator app. Keys from manufacturers such as Yubico and Feitian are FIDO2 compatible and work with Azure AD, so allow passwordless sign-in to Microsoft 365.

Some security keys also support NFC so that they can be used with mobile devices. And a few can be used with Windows Hello. But using a security key with Windows Hello usually requires extra software to be installed on the Windows 10 device.

To sign in to a service like Microsoft 365 using a security key, the key must be plugged into a USB port on the Windows 10 device. Alternatively, if the key supports NFC, an NFC reader can be used. There is usually a touchpad or sensor on the device that the user must tap to complete a passwordless sign-in. Some keys replace the sensor with a fingerprint reader to further improve security.

Before you can use a FIDO2 security key to sign in to Microsoft 365, FIDO2 security key sign-in must be enabled in Azure AD. FIDO2 Microsoft-compliant security keys are supported for passwordless login in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update and later. A supported browser is required, like Microsoft Edge. Users can register compatible security keys without any help from IT.

Support for hybrid Azure AD-joined devices

The Windows 10 May 2020 Update (version 2004) supports signing in using FIDO2 security keys to devices that are hybrid joined to Azure AD. Hybrid-joined devices are joined to a Windows Server Active Directory (AD) domain and registered, not joined, to Azure AD. Using security keys with AD requires making some changes to extend AD’s Kerberos realm to Azure Active Directory.

In the rest of this series, I will look at each of the three passwordless sign-in options in more detail, starting with Windows Hello.

The post Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original ( Microsoft’s Free New Tool to Recover Files in Windows), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you have never had to recover a file in Windows, you are in the minority. At some point in time, many of us have accidentally deleted a file on either a drive or removable storage like an SD card or USB stick.

While there are tons of third-party tools that Google will surface, you never quite know if these tools will work or worse, if they are installing malware or crypto mining software in the background. That’s where professional services come into play but those options can be expensive and depending on the task, completely overkill.

Microsoft has a new application that makes it easy to recover files and below you will find a tutorial about how to use the application. If you need additional documentation, you can find that here.

Application:

The first thing you will need to do is download the recovery tool. You can download the application from the link below:

Download: Microsoft Windows File Recovery Tool

Recovery Modes:

It’s important to understand which file system your device is using as this will help to determine which mode you should use. The file recovery tool supports FAT/exFAT/ReFS/and NTFS. Us the table below to determine which mode you should be using.

Command Line Syntax:

When entering your commands, here is a breakdown of the parameters that you will need to know:

• /r – Uses segment mode, which examines File Record Segments (FRS).
• /n – <filter> – Scans for a specific file by using a file name, file path, or wildcards. For example:
  • File name: /n myfile.docx
  • File path: /n /users/<username>/Documents/
  • Wildcard: /n myfile.*
    /n *.docx
    /n *<string>*
• /x -Uses signature mode, which examines file types and works on all file systems.
• /y:<type(s)> – Scans for files with specific file types. Separate multiple entries by using commas. For a list of extension groups and corresponding file types, see the table, “Signature mode extension groups and file types” in the section, “About modes and file systems”.
• /# – Shows signature mode extension groups and corresponding file types in each group.
• /? – Shows a quick summary of syntax and switches for general users.
• /! – Shows a quick summary of syntax and switches for advanced users.

How to Recover lost files on Windows 10

If you need to recover files in Windows 10, the first thing you will need to do is to download the app from the store.

• After installing the app, press the Windows key, enter Windows File Recovery in the search box, and then select Windows File Recovery.
• In the Command Prompt window, enter the command in the following format: winfr source-drive: destination-drive: [/switches]
  • Note: The source and destination files must be different to recover the object
• The tool will automatically create a recovery folder for you called, Recovery_<date and time> on the destination drive.
• To change ‘modes’ you use either /n for default /r for segment and /x for signature
• Default Mode Example: To recover a file from you C: drive to your E: drive, you would enter the following command:
  • winfr C: E: /n \Users\<username>\Documents\Importantinfo.docx
• If you want to recover an entire folder, use the following command:
  • winfr C: E: /n \Users\<username>\Documents\
• Segment Mode Example: Recover PDF and Word files from your C: drive to the recovery folder on an E: drive.
  • winfr C: E: /r /n *.pdf /n *.docx
• Signature mode example:
  • winfr C: E: /x /y:JPEG,PNG

Important to Remember:

If you are trying to recover a file from your device, you need to stop writing content to the disk immediately. For best results, once the file is deleted, you need to try and recover the contents at that time, the longer you wait, the harder it will be to retrieve the file

As a default, you should always create full backups of your devices and not depend on a tool such as this one to retrieve files. This type of application works best for immediately recovering contents, not trying to recover a file from three weeks ago.

The post Microsoft’s Free New Tool to Recover Files in Windows appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original ( Stop Windows 10 from upgrading to next version and Set the target Feature Update version), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

You can Enable the Select the target Feature Update version Group Policy setting or use the TargetReleaseVersionInfo Registry key to stop Windows 10 from installing […]

This article Stop Windows 10 from upgrading to next version and Set the target Feature Update version first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( Amazon Honeycode is a no-programming-needed app builder for businesses), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Amazon Web Services customers now have an easy-to-use app-building tool at their disposal. The e-commerce giant has launched a fully managed service called Honeycode that allows AWS clients to build interactive mobile and web applications with no pro…

The content below is taken from the original ( Coming to Google Meet: Customizable backgrounds, Nest integration, and more), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( Veea Brings Enterprise-Grade Security to SMB/SMEs and IoT with New vTPN Security Edge Service), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Veea Inc., a pioneer in smart edge connectivity and computing, announced the availability of their Virtual Trusted Private Network (vTPN) Security as Read more at VMblog.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( How to change the default scheduled Scan Type in Microsoft Defender), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Although the in-built Windows Defender antivirus scans your Windows 10 system automatically every day, if you want to specify the scheduled scan type, you can […]

This article How to change the default scheduled Scan Type in Microsoft Defender first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.