This week I bring you a collection of interesting stuff I found on Microsoft Azure, an awesome Data Science resource as well as training materials for Microsoft Cloud App Security technologies. Good reading!

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Microsoft Azure

Alan Rodrigues YouTube Channel
Alan Rodrigues is a well known technical course author and this is his YouTube channel. If you’re trying to get the Microsoft Azure Developer certification or one of the AWS certifications, give it a shot.

Automated Azure Infrastructure Diagrams with PowerShell
Have you ever tried to document an Azure infrastructure? If you do it manually, you’ll spend a lot of time and, when you finish, you might need to start over to keep it up to date. There are a few visualization tools that automatically generate infrastructure diagrams but these have a few limitations. With that in mind, Prateek Singh has create AzViz, a PowerShell module to automatically generate Azure resource topology diagrams and rich infrastructure visualizations.

Microsoft Announces Azure Functions 4.0 with .NET 6 Support in Preview
Microsoft recently announced the public preview release of Azure Functions 4.0 – its Function as a Service (FaaS) offering. The release of this new runtime includes support for .NET 6.0. Earlier this year, the company provided support for Node.JS 14 and .NET 5, including a new isolated process model that runs .NET function apps in a separate worker process outside the Azure Functions host runtime.

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Data Science

Applied ML
This is an awsome list of curated papers, articles and blogs about data science & machine learning in production. It brings you real world examples from well known companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, Facebook and others, on 30 different ML topics such as Data Quality, Data Engineering, Forecasting, Recommendation, Computer Vision or Ethics. A real gold mine!

Model compression and optimization: Why think bigger when you can think smaller?
In recent years the push for better neural network models has resulted in larger model sizes. We’ve seen model parameter counts grow from the millions to the billions, with associated growth in deployment costs. While these models are “better” in that they beat others’ benchmarks on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the question must be asked: What if a better model means a smaller model that performs just as well?

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Security

The Show Must Go On: Securing Netflix Studios At Scale
In 2017, Netflix Studios was hitting an inflection point from a period of merely rapid growth to the sort of explosive growth that throws “how do we scale?” into every conversation. The vision was to create a “Studio in the Cloud”, with applications supporting every part of the business from pitch to play. This article explains how the security team worked to support this effort by streamlining security processes while raising the overall security bar.

Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) Ninja Training | September 2021
If you’re looking to learn more about Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) this is for you! Microsoft has put together a curated list of videos and other training materials, organized by knowledge levels, so that you can navigate your way through all the content.

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Programming

Getting Started with CloudEvents and AsyncAPI
This article by David Pereira, takes you on a lap around two event-driven specifications that are gaining a lot of momentum: CloudEvents and Async API. Well worth reading.

GraphQL & REST with Typescript, Prisma and Azure SQL: love at first sight!
If you’re into Typescript and prefer a code-first approach when working with databases, you’ll be happy to learn about Prisma! Prisma is a next-generation Node.js and TypeScript ORM, that allows you to define a schema using a dedicated DSL so that you can then have all the comforts of modern development environments like intellisense, static type checking, automatic scaffolding and more.

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Cool Stuff

Chaos Engineering Saved Your Netflix
To hear Greg Orzell tell it, the original Chaos Monkey tool was simple: It randomly picked a virtual machine hosted somewhere on Netflix’s cloud and sent it a “Terminate” command. Unplugged it. Then the Netflix team would have to figure out what to do. That was a decade ago now, when Netflix moved its systems to the cloud and subsequently navigated itself around a major U.S. East Coast service outage caused by its new partner, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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Happy learning! Have a great week!

Photo by Lagos Techie on Unsplash