TWIL: April 24, 2022

This week I was able to catch up on Hanselminutes episodes. I highly recommend episode 832, about standup comedy with Alex Falcone, which was really cool. Beside that, I spent a ton of time around Dapr and Cosmos DB, and I recommend reading about the launch of Microsoft Purview, the new suite of products for compliance and data governance. Enjoy!


Podcasts

The Azure Podcast

Episode 421: Project Flash
The team talks with Pujitha and Sidhanshu about Project Flash, an initiative to improve VM availability monitoring that allows for immediate actions and trend analysis at scale.

Hanselminutes

Episode 829: Voice for Everyone with Hillary Juma from Mozilla Common Voice
Common Voice is a crowdsourcing project started by Mozilla to create a free database for speech recognition software. The project is supported by volunteers who record sample sentences with a microphone and review recordings of other users. Community Manager Hillary Juma talks to Scott about how the system works and why it’s so important to enable all languages and voices with the power of Open Source!

Episode 830: Flutter for Windows with Google’s Chris Sells
Flutter for Windows lets you deliver cross-platform, beautiful, tailored apps that are compiled to machine code and run natively on your devices! Scott talks to Google’s Chris Sells about Flutter for Windows, how it works, how it’s architected, and how it can help you!

Episode 831: What does it take to go fast? with Fastly’s Inés Sombra
Inés Sombra is the VP of Engineering of Core Systems at Fastly, and she knows how to go fast. She talks to Scott about the needs of the product, the business, and the engineering team and explains the processes needed for YOUR organization to go fast.

Episode 832: Standup Comedy is a Real Job with Alex Falcone
Alex Falcone is making it happen! A Portland comedian who now lives in LA because that’s the next step for comedians just released his album “Vanilla” that you can enjoy on streaming services everywhere! How is this a real job? Scott talks to Alex about the creative process, running out of jokes, and the power of friendship.

Episode 833: From Broadway to Engineering to Product with Liana Leahy
Scott talks to engineering manager Liana Leahy about her journey from Broadway to Technology…and why it was the absolute right and most obvious move! How does Liana’s stage and screen experience make her a better more empathetic technologist?

Episode 834: Pyjion, a JIT compiler for Python using .NET Core with Anthony Shaw
In this episode Scott talks to developer Anthony Shaw about Pyjion (pronounced “Pidgeon” like the bird) a JIT compiler for Python that uses .NET Core technology for speed! We discuss the concept of JIT’ers in general, look at the Python JIT ecosystem, and explore the work that Anthony is doing to make Python as fast as possible by any means necessary!


Microsoft Purview

The future of compliance and data governance is here: Introducing Microsoft Purview
To meet the challenges of today’s decentralized, data-rich workplace, we’re introducing Microsoft Purview—a comprehensive set of solutions that help you govern, protect, and manage your entire data estate. This new brand family combines the capabilities of the former Azure Purview and the Microsoft 365 Compliance portfolio that customers already rely on, providing unified data governance and risk management for your organization.


Data Architecture

The Lakehouse Architecture
This article covers the fundamentals of lakehouse architecture along with its needs, evolution, core components, functions, technologies, challenges and the roadmap.


Azure Cosmos DB

Data modeling in Azure Cosmos DB
While schema-free databases, like Azure Cosmos DB, make it super easy to store and query unstructured and semi-structured data, you should spend some time thinking about your data model to get the most of the service in terms of performance and scalability and lowest cost.


Dapr

Dapr: Overview
Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Dapr: Building Blocks
A building block is an HTTP or gRPC API that can be called from your code and uses one or more Dapr components. Building blocks address common challenges in building resilient, microservices applications and codify best practices and patterns. Dapr consists of a set of building blocks, with extensibility to add new building blocks.

Dapr: Components
Dapr uses a modular design where functionality is delivered as a component. Each component has an interface definition. All of the components are pluggable so that you can swap out one component with the same interface for another. The components contrib repository is where you can contribute implementations for the component interfaces and extend Dapr’s capabilities. A building block can use any combination of components. For example the actors building block and the state management building block both use state components. As another example, the pub/sub building block uses pub/sub components.

Dapr: Observability
When building an application which leverages Dapr building blocks to perform service-to-service calls and pub/sub messaging, Dapr offers an advantage with respect to distributed tracing. Because this inter-service communication flows through the Dapr sidecar, the sidecar is in a unique position to offload the burden of application-level instrumentation.

Dapr: Security
Security is fundamental to Dapr. This article describes the security features and capabiliies when using Dapr in a distributed application.

Dapr and service meshes
Dapr uses a sidecar architecture, running as a separate process alongside the application and includes features such as service invocation, network security, and distributed tracing. This often raises the question: how does Dapr compare to service mesh solutions such as Linkerd, Istio and Open Service Mesh among others?


Have an awesome week!

Photo by Chad Stembridge on Unsplash