DEV Community: Head in The Clouds Blog

Life as a Bootcamper!

Head in The Clouds Blog — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 20:46:32 +0000

I remember vividly the first time I attended my first ever bootcamp. It was an outdoor group fitness bootcamp in a beautiful serene park on a hot and still summers day (although not as hot as recent heatwaves).

I am not quite sure what I was expecting, but 20 minutes into the 1 hour session and my lungs were in my throat and my heart rate had taken up outerspace exploration! I was breathing so hard, I thought I’d collapse there and then and be in need of a hospital! But you know something? I was enjoying it!

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As the team of fitness instructors mercilessly took a group of 20–30 of us through our paces, I joked with them about being real life drill sergeants, not disimilar to the ones found in military bootcamps — where of course, such groups derive their name!

Rising to the challenge, I returned week after week and as I pushed myself under the bark of our friendly instructors, something amazing happened! I was able to run faster for longer, and push the physical capabilities of my body to extremes it had never seen before. Sure every fibre of newly torn muscle screamed expletives at me, but I was being sharpened into a leaner, stronger, faster, fitter and ever more dynamic version of myself — and I loved it. My gait was taller, my movements more agile, effortless and precise and my mind also sharper!

Meeting new people of similar and varying fitness levels and from all walks of life, and rising to those challenges together, I learnt so much. I learnt from others and their personal stories. We would often go to brunch afterward and bond over the fitness challenges and targets we’d achieved together that day, other lifestyle changes we were adapting, and witnessing our growth in personal resilience. Once you’ve met and achieved one challenge you become pretty keen to take on many more.

It was fun to tackle circuit challenges of the bootcamp and see what I could do with practice, learn new exercises I’d never heard of before and I’m sure my legs wish I never did — such as seemingly endless, team relay laps of a fast paced frog-crawl — and watch as I became a better version of myself for it.

Tech bootcamps are very similar in that respect. Much like the weekly 1 hour jam-packed fitness bootcamps. You learn so much in a short space of time and it can get pretty intense, especially if like me you are also working full time and life events continue to happen regardless.

However, you are exposed to so much and your mind and capabilities are sharpened because of it. You pass your first professional tech certification, just as I have achieved my AZ-900 Microsoft Fundamentals. You become amazed by how much new knowledge you have retained in such a short space of time. Now you can understand and explain several tech processes which were previously a mystery. Such as how to develop, deploy and implement a variety of Azure storage, security and compute solutions, and identify which solution is appropriate and when. How to monitor, troubleshoot and optimise cloud solutions and which Azure tools are suitable for different scenarios. How to connect to and consume both Azure and third party services. Knowledge of Azure key concepts, architecture, management and governance, and Azures almost limitless capabilities and services. You become enthused, sharpened and primed for the next challenge! Which in my case will be AZ-204 Microsoft Developer Associate and then programming language Python!

AZ-900 Badge

You’ll meet and network with some pretty amazing people who will help shape and invigorate your journey. You’ll be able to envision a life, community and version of you never conceived before, all while shaping and honing it. A more agile, laser-focused you with increased capabilities, technical know-how and the thirst and capacity to learn and do more — continuously improving, while rising to one challenge after the next and enjoying every step of the way!

Considering Data Redundancy Solutions as Hospital Computers Meltdown During Heatwave!

Head in The Clouds Blog — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 17:30:06 +0000

There are many things we take for granted in this one life and that includes the reliability of our hospitals and of course their IT systems! In the West, especially in the UK’s capital city of London, we have become accustomed to a fast, reliable, accurate and attentive service from our hospitals. Especially from the renowned Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, a centre of excellence, and one of the UK’s leading providers of hospital and community-based healthcare, research, and education.

Imagine my shock and dismay then, when taking a loved one to an outpatient appointment on the Monday, to be informed that we would not receive the results of the medical tests that day, due to the hospitals computer systems being down since Friday! Not the past 10 or 30 minutes, hour or day, which would have been bad enough, but over an entire weekend!

We were some of the lucky ones though, as we were only awaiting routine test results. Usually highly competent hospital staff, were now rendered helpless and frustrated at being unable to access or read any of their patients medical records. As a result the hospital fell into complete chaos. At least one cancer patient and possibly serveral more were almost given the wrong medication, which would have had hazardous and possibly fatal results:

_“On two occasions I was confused for being another patient. Once in the middle of the night a nurse woke me up to try and give me medication I had never heard of.

“After quite a long argument with this nurse it transpired she was standing with a different patient’s paper record.

“Another occasion a surgeon burst into my room to tell me he had been in my operation and that my appendix had ruptured.

“Again after another slightly long argument it transpired he had got the wrong person and was very apologetic.” — Jennifer, Cancer Patient, Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, (Source: BBC News).
_

Mind Blown!

A copious number of other unlucky patients had to have their operations and procedures cancelled due to the hospitals IT servers failing in the heat. Its common knowledge that waiting lists for such operations and procedures are climbing. So imagine then the frustration, and disastrous impact on personal wellbeing of having to wait several months, possibly years, for an operation, only for it to be cancelled at the last minute, due to the heat! Plus if this is how one of the leading hospitals were coping, what then of other less resourced hospitals?

Something seemingly so innocuous as the weather, having the power to take down entire IT systems of the city’s most vital services, is a sure sign of global warming as discussed in my last blog post. It also emphasises the need to consider more effective data and storage redundancy solutions.

Upon learning of the hospitals failing systems, my mind instantly went to a cloud concept I had learnt while studying for and passing the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 Exam. That of both data and storage redundancy.

Azure, is Microsofts Cloud computing solution, and cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services over the internet (the cloud). These computing services include: databases, storage, servers, software, networking, analytics, and intelligence. Cloud computing offers faster, and more reliable, agile, elastic and scalable services at lower cost due to its pay as you go model. Reliability is achieved through data and/ storage redundancy.

So what is data and/ storage redundancy and how could it have helped in this situation?

Let’s first start with redundancy. Redundancy refers to duplicating your system and having a backup system in a slightly different location. This ensures that this back-up system can kick into gear in the event that your primary system fails, just as the IT servers failed in the Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, example above.

How effective this redundancy is depends on the geographical location of your back-up system. Redundancy options include Availability Zones and Region Pairs.

An Azure Availability Zone refers to having physically separate datacenters within the same Azure region, as illustrated by the diagram below. The diagram below displays three (the minimum required) separate availability zones, in one shared geographical region. So in three separate buildings in the same city or borough for example. Each availability zone comprises of one or more datacenters, equipped with an independent source of power, cooling and networking. This is to ensure that in the event of an incident knocking out the power, cooling and / or networking at one availability zone (site), then the back-up systems at either of the other two availability zones are ready to take over. This ensures minimum outtage and downtime. An example of an incident taking down one availability zone maybe a virus on a local network or lightning striking the building of that availability zone.

Each availability zone is set up to be an isolation boundary, ensuring that no other clients/organisations on the public cloud can access or compromise another clients data.

The availability zones are connected via high-speed, private and diverse fiber-optic networks.

In terms of storage for items such as patient records, you have two main options: Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) and Zone-redundant Storage(ZRS) as depicted in the illustration below.

Locally Redundant Storage(LRS): refers to the solution where your data is copied three times, synchronously within a single physical location in the primary region. Naturally, LRS is the least expensive option as it only requires a single physical location. However, this option is not suitable for applications requiring high availability or durability, such as patient records.

Zone-redundant Storage (ZRS): Refers to the solution where your data is copied synchronously across three Azure availabilty zones in the same primary region, as in the illustrated example above.

Yet what if disaster (such as a heatwave in the real life example above) affects the entire region? This is where a region pair provides even greater redundancy, is highly recommended by Microsoft, and an option, that most organisations adopt. Organisations can use a combination of LRS and ZRS in different region pairs. So it is highly likely that the hospital would have also had a region pair. That is of course if the hospital has been able to adopt cloud technology in the first instance.

A Region Pair is where each Azure region is paired with another region within the same geography, but at least 300 miles away. If one of the region pair is afflicted by a natural disaster, the failing services there would automatically failover to the other region in its region pair, as illustrated in the diagram below. The region pair are directly connected yet far enough apart to be isolated from regional disasters, such as heatwaves, floods, storms and terrorist attacks. This ensures reliable services and data redundancy.

Planned Azure updates are rolled out to paired regions, one region at a time, to minimize downtime, and mitigate risk of application outtage. With the exception of “Brazil South”, data continues to reside within the same geographic boundary, in-line with tax and law enforcement jurisdiction requirements.

In terms of region pair storage, Azure offers two solutions. Geo-redundant Storage(GRS) and Geo-zone redundant storage (GZRS).

Geo-redundant storage (GRS): This is the solution where your data is copied sychronously three times within a single physical location, within the primary region, using the LRS method. The data is then also copied asynchronously, to a single physical location within the secondary region. Within that secondary region your data is also copied three times sychronously, using LRS, just as in the primary region.

Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS): Is where your data is copied synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region, employing ZRS. Your data is then copied asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region. Within that secondary region, your data is then copied synchronously three times employing LRS. The GZRS solution provides the highest availability and most durability as illustrated below:

When selecting the appropriate cloud service, for their needs, organisations also need to choose between the public, private or hybrid cloud. The private cloud, is where organisations purchase and maintain their own hardware, retaining complete control over their resources and security. If the hospital has adopted cloud services, this could be the model chosen, to avoid the governance issues associated with the public cloud.

However, drawbacks to the private cloud comprise of high capital costs and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), including IT overheads, and wastage. This is because you are paying for resources, which become outdated and run out of compute memory very quickly. You also cannot scale out, adding more resources as demand for capacity increases and scale in, offloading resources and associated costs as demand falls, as quickly and efficiently as you can, with the public cloud.

A solution may be to move towards a hybrid cloud to obtain the best of both worlds, including manageable security and greater resilience to outtages (as compute maintainance is outsourced and managed using the latests security solutions, such as DDoS/Distributed-Denial-of-Service prevention), however this brings with it its own compatibility issues and complexities.

In conclusion, the solution would be for entities such as Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, to move towards adopting Hybrid Cloud based technologies such as Azure, if they have not done so already. Within the Azure data and storage options, the GZRS solution, with its optimal levels of IT service availability and durability, would be the ideal solution for clients such as Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, for whom the reliance on such systems is often a matter of life and death. However, such solutions are often the most expensive, and in an economy of public sector cuts, primary services are seeing their budgets slashed, often with catastrophic consequences. Plus with heat waves becoming more global rather than regional, such solutions are also being pushed to their limits.

Perhaps then, future solutions will also have to consider not only how we distribute and back-up power, compute and networking services, but also alternative forms of (renewable) power itself, using sustainable technologies which work with the earths changing temperatures rather than succumbing to it.

If You Saw A Heatwave… Would You Wave Back?

Head in The Clouds Blog — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 17:01:00 +0000

If there’s one thing the UK is famed for it is its often temperamental weather. This usually settles somewhere on the spectrum between cold, damp and grey, or bright, and almost warm with sporadic showers. Yet last week saw temperatures skyrocket in London to a sizzling 40.2ºC(104.36ºF). When you consider that the average London temparature for July is usually around 22ºC (71.6ºF), then the term heatwave is an understatement.

The UK was not the only region to see temperatures rise to unprecedented levels so dramatically. In fact almost the entire northern hemisphere, including many other parts of Europe, China, North Africa and the United States succumbed to extreme heat. This fueled catastrophic events all around the world. Some UK airports were forced to close due to melting tarmac, hospital computer systems crashed, fires broke out all over London, France and Greece, with many having to flee their homes. On one day alone, Portugal and Spain reported in excess of 1000 heat-related deaths (Source:World Economic Forum 22 Jul 2022).

With such global heatwaves predicted to become a more frequent norm, as temperatures continue to rise, there is nolonger any denying that climate change is in fact very real, can be cruelly fatal and is happening right here, right now. For decades, feverish warnings from eminent scientist and infamous climate activists, have been met with the type of nonchalance or denial satirised in the comedy, Dont Look Up. In which a comet threatening an extinction level event, can clearly be seen in the sky, hurtling towards Earth, yet instead of trying to stop it, the global response is simply to “Dont Look Up”. For looking up would mean taking action. Taking action would mean huge monetary investment and making unpopular changes to the often profligate lifestyles we have come to enjoy.

However, attitudes are finally beginning to change on mass. Global warming is no longer something on our great great great grandchildrens horizons, as we have witnessed over the last few days, it is happening now. The past 7 years have been the hottest since records began.

As such, governments and corporations are increasingly turning to sustainable technology to literally save our world. This has borne not only hope, but many fascinating innovations which have me in awe.

For example Swiss Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a technology which can make jet fuel from sunlight and air! The process creates a renewable and carbon-neutral form of kerosene which when burned would only release Co2 back into the air which was extracted from it in the first instance. So thats literally making fuel out of thin air!

Portugal has built an enormous floating solar park, the size of 4 football pitches, containing 12,000 solar panels. The solar park is moored on Portugals Alqueva reservoir, which happens to be Western Europes largest artificial lake,. The solar park will generate 7.5 gigawatt hours of electricity each year, which is enough to power 1,500 homes, at one third of the expense of a gas-fired plant. Similar floating parks have ben built all over the world, including China and Germany, in a bid to reduce reliance on environmentally destructive, fossil fuels.

Drone technology is being used to scale reforestation efforts. A devastating number of forests are lost to bush fires caused by climate change. Along with the loss of these vital lungs of the Earth is the beautiful biodiversity which supports our ecosystem. Drones are able to replant forests at a scale, speed, accuracy, and efficiency which cannot be achieved by human effort alone, helping to reverse much of the damage caused by global warming. As time is the crucial factor here, technology being used in this way is phenomenal:

Seemingly straight out of a science fiction novel, ELSA-d, a miniture satellite equipped with a powerful magnet is being used to clean-up pollution from space:

MIT scientist are ambitiously hoping to completely reverse climate change. Robots will be used to create giant bubbles which are then clumped together to form a raft the size of Brazil, then deployed into space. This raft will form a shield which reflects a significant amount of the suns heat away from Earth:

This creative innovation is exactly what I love about technology. The possibilities are almost limitless and when used for good can have a tremendous real world impact, preserving life as we know it.

Life as a Bootcamper!

Head in The Clouds Blog — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 16:56:00 +0000

AZ-900 Badge

A Bit About Me…

Head in The Clouds Blog — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 16:36:00 +0000

Hello Dear Reader! Welcome to my Blog!

A bit about me: I am a Software Engineer Trainee currently learning Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing and Python. I am also knowledgeable of JavaScript, HTML and CSS, as such I am career switching, pivoting and piroueeting into the world of Tech! 🩰

Its an exciting place to be! Think James Webb telescope and the beautiful breath arresting photos it was able to capture from space. With that many galaxies, there just may be life out there after all! 👽 😉 Think the metaverse where people will be able to create their own worlds, universes and multiverses (yes I’m a Marvel fan! How could you not be?! 🎞 ) just like they did on the holideck in Star-Trek!!!

Thats what I love about tech — if you can conceive it you can eventually create it! We are now practically living in the future envisioned by sci-fi movies! Thats the great thing about interdisciplinary collaboration and the cross fertilisation of ideas! So many great innovations are rescued from the confines of our imaginations and brought screamingly to life !!!

Pleased to meet you! Welcome to my blog — welcome to my world! You can also connect with me here: linktr.ee/marshacastello