TWIL: December 26, 2022

Merry Christmas! Learning never stops so I’m highlighting a few episodes from the .NET Rocks podcast, an article on the unified v-cores capacity model for Power BI, another on auto-failover groups in SQL Managed Instance and a post on how to automatically backup your Azure Data Lake. Finally, check out Bill Gates’ notes for 2023.


Podcasts

.NET Rocks

Episode 1821: Securing Existing Applications with Joylynn Kirui
How do you secure your existing applications from the security exploits out there today? Carl and Richard talk to Joylynn Kirui about the challenges developers face in making secure applications. Joylynn talks about understanding the threat landscape and staying up to date on the CVEs that can represent a zero-day vulnerability to your application. There are a ton of tools to help make you aware of the potential risks, check out all the links in the show notes. And check out Joylynn’s webinar on shifting application security left at https://aka.ms/DevSecOpsDNR

Episode 1822: Thinking High-Level Design with Billy Hollis
Why should you have high-level design in your applications? Carl and Richard chat with Billy Hollis about the concepts around high-level design and how it can help make better software. Billy talks about how high-level design addresses more than UX concerns, expanding into architecture and business workflow to think more deeply about how we use software. And of course, Billy digs into various applications we all use (looking at you, Teams!) and talks about how high-level design could help deal with the challenges around those kinds of applications. Is it needed everywhere? No – but more is needed!

Episode 1823: Wolverine .NET Command and Message Bus with Jeremy Miller
Jeremy Miller is back with more open-source goodness in the form of the Wolverine .NET Command and Message Bus. Jeremy talks about developing the Marten database and reaching a point with event sourcing that led to Wolverine – building the infrastructure to work with a variety of queuing solutions to act as an intermediary, a message bus, and a command bus, as needed. The conversation also digs into the current state of open-source with his projects, and the evolution toward more sustainable open-source development – there is more to come!

Episode 1824: Source Open vs Open Source and IdentityServer with Dominick Baier and Brock Allen
As of December 13, 2022, IdentityServer 4 is archived – now what? Carl and Richard talk to Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about the long, winding road of IdentityServer growing up to become a commercial product. Dom talks about the challenges of open source and building a sustainable model for an enterprise identity product. Ultimately, it resulted in a transformation from open-source to source-open – so what does that mean? Growth and sustainability!


Power BI

Simplifying capacity management with unified v-cores
We’re excited to announce a platform update to simplify the way customers manage Power BI Premium capacities.  Starting on December 11th 2022, we’ll be rolling out changes to unify the concepts of front-end and back-end virtual cores for capacity management. Unification of these concepts addresses the feedback we’ve heard from customers who sometimes misinterpret the concepts of customer-managed v-cores from Microsoft managed v-cores.


SQL Managed Instance

Auto-failover groups overview & best practices (Azure SQL Managed Instance)
The auto-failover groups feature allows you to manage the replication and failover of all user databases in a managed instance to another Azure region. This article focuses on using the Auto-failover group feature with Azure SQL Managed Instance and some best practices.

Public preview: License Geo-redundant Disaster Recovery for SQL Managed Instance for free
You can now add a free passive secondary instance in another Azure region for no additional license cost, allowing you to have an up to date secondary at all times. Instantaneous fail-over drills are included in this benefit; however, production applications should not be connected to the secondary instance. This new benefit adds cost effective geo-redundancy to your business continuity plans in the case of failover in one region.


Azure Data Lake Store

How to automatically backup your Azure Data Lake(house)
Out of the box, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 provides redundant storage. Therefore, the data in your Data Lake(house) is resilient to transient hardware failures within a datacenter through automated replicas. This ensures durability and high availability. In this blog post, I provide a backup strategy on how to further protect your data from accidental deletions, data corruption, or any other data failures. This strategy works for Data Lake as well as Data Lakehouse implementations. It uses native Azure services, no additional tools, software, or licenses are required.


Interesting Stuff

Bill Gates: The Year Ahead 2023
I’ve always viewed my philanthropy as a way to help reduce the awful inequities I see around the world. I also feel a responsibility to give my wealth back to society in ways that do the most good for the most people. But I started looking at the world through a new lens recently—when my older daughter gave me the incredible news that I’ll become a grandfather next year.


Have a great week closing the year!

Image created with the help of Artificial Intelligence.