TWIL: October 2, 2022

This week my learning was mostly focused on Azure Data Services, such as Azure Data Explorer, Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics. I’m also highlighting the latest episodes from the usual suspects on Azure API Management, accessibility in software development and Commodore 64 OS. Have fun!


Podcasts

.NET Rocks

Episode 1812: Vision Impairment, Screen Readers, and Accessibility with Courtney Heitman
How do you make applications that work well for the visually impaired? Carl and Richard talk to Courtney Heitman about building applications that the visually impaired can use. Courtney talks about different kinds of visual impairment including field of view, color blindness, low and no vision. There are tools to help you understand what those impairments are like and to help you test how your app will work for everyone. Then the conversation turns to screen readers – which are challenging to test with because it does take quite a bit of experience to use. There are powerful solutions, you just need to incorporate these accessibility features – sooner, rather than later!

Episode 1813: Developing .NET on AWS with Isaac Levin
What can AWS do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Isaac Levin about the experience of being a .NET developer working with Amazon Web Services. Isaac talks about the broader strategy of moving applications to the cloud and what Amazon offers to make your life easier, with various migration and validation tools that can help you understand how an existing application will behave on cloud services. The goal is to get beyond the virtual machine and into containers, serverless, and more!

The Azure Podcast

Episode 439: APIM Self Hosted Gateway V2
Kendall and Sujit talk to Tom Kerkhove again, now a Senior Software Engineer in the Azure team and still the maintainer of KEDA. He gives us insights into the new API Management Self Hosted Gateway V2 option, which allows customers to host API Management capabilities in other clouds and on-premises with many more deployment options.

Hanselminutes

Episode 860: C64 OS – A new operating system for the Commodore 64 with Gregory Naçu
C64 OS has one goal. Make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful in today’s modern world. It’s a very high bar. The C64 was introduced in 1982 and has an 8-bit, 1MHz, 6510 CPU with just 64 kilobytes of directly addressable memory. It has a screen resolution of 320×200 pixels, and a fixed palette of 16 colors. But, it is an incredibly versatile machine. And it enjoys an active userbase and a great variety of modern hardware expansions. How did Gregory Naçu do it in 2022?


Azure Data Explorer

Log and Telemetry Analytics Performance Benchmark
This report focuses on the performance of cloud-enabled, enterprise-ready, popular log analytical platforms Microsoft Azure Data Explorer (part of Azure Synapse Analytics), Google BigQuery, and Snowflake. Due to cost limitations with Elasticsearch and AWS OpenSearch, we could not run our tests on Elasticsearch. Microsoft invited GigaOm to measure the performance of the Azure Data Explorer engine and compare it with its leading competitors in the log analytics space. The tests we designed intend to simulate a set of basic scenarios to answer fundamental business questions that an organization from nearly any industry might encounter in their log analytics.

Big data analytics with Azure Data Explorer
This solution illustrates how Azure Data Explorer and Azure Synapse Analytics complement each other for near real-time analytics and modern data warehousing use cases. This solution is already being used by Microsoft customers. For example, the Singapore-based ride-hailing company, Grab, implemented real-time analytics over a huge amount of data collected from their taxi and food delivery services as well as merchant partner apps. Using this pattern, Grab processed more than a trillion events per day. This solution is optimized for the retail industry.


Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks Clusters
An Azure Databricks cluster is a set of computation resources and configurations on which you run data engineering, data science, and data analytics workloads, such as production ETL pipelines, streaming analytics, ad-hoc analytics, and machine learning.

Azure Databricks Best Practices for Cluster Configuration
Azure Databricks provides a number of options when you create and configure clusters to help you get the best performance at the lowest cost. This flexibility, however, can create challenges when you’re trying to determine optimal configurations for your workloads. Carefully considering how users will utilize clusters will help guide configuration options when you create new clusters or configure existing clusters.


Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Synapse SQL Resource Consumption Models
This article describes the resource consumption models of Azure Synapse SQL, namely for Serverless SQL Pools and Dedicated SQL Pools.

Backup and restore in Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL pool
Learn how to use backup and restore in Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL pool. Use dedicated SQL pool restore points to recover or copy your data warehouse to a previous state in the primary region. Use data warehouse geo-redundant backups to restore to a different geographical region.


Architecture

Lambda Architecture in Azure
Lambda architecture is the state-of-the-industry, Big Data workload pattern for handling batch and streaming workloads in a single system. If you’re researching how to modernize your data program, the lambda architecture is the place to start.


Have a great week!

Photo by Elizabeth Woolner on Unsplash