DEV Community: vishal-servicenow

What Are The Top 10 Myths Regarding Cloud Computing?

vishal-servicenow — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 09:50:50 +0000

Cloud Computing has been the talk of the town for a while. Hence there are bound to be people that have praises for it and others who have complaints. Along with the positives and negatives also come opinions which soon take a form of myths and cloud has many surrounding it. In this article I would be discussing top 10 myths regarding cloud computing. These are the myths we would be focusing on:

Cloud Is One Size Fits All
Virtualization And Cloud Are Same
Cloud Will Lock You In
Cloud Costs Jobs
You Need More Than One Cloud
Cloud Is For The Tech Companies
Cloud Harms Environment
Everything Works Better In The Cloud
Cloud Isn’t Secure
It Is Always Cheaper To Run In The Cloud

So let us get started with this top 10 myths regarding cloud computing:

Cloud Is ‘One Size Fits All’

Many people believe that Cloud Computing is a kind of template solution that meets needs of everyone equally. Cloud does cater needs of different businesses but every business has different requirements and thus the solution for every problem also varies. With Cloud Computing providing solutions like:

Different deployment models
Service models
Operating models for a cloud solution

That means if you need a Cloud solution you will get one but one solution need not fit other problems.

Virtualization And Cloud Are Same

Yes, virtualization is a key technology that enables cloud computing, but virtualization is not the only feature that does justice to Cloud. Virtualization is important for server and workload consolidation, something that helps you optimize infrastructure costs. Cloud is definitely lot more than that. Besides virtualization is more IaaS centric whereas cloud touches up on IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. Hence considering these two approaches as same wont be the best of things.
Cloud Would Lock You In
Cloud Vendors would definitely want to lock you in. But one must not forget the fact that Cloud offers you various customization. Whether it is about:

Deployment
Integration
Industry Standards

All these verticals are handled fairly smooth by cloud vendors with a lot of options to choose from. So better planning would definitely ensure you don’t get locked in.

Cloud Costs Jobs: Top 10 Myths Regarding Cloud Computing

The growth in technology has mostly resulted in people believing that the technology will take away human jobs. And more than often people have realized that it works the other way round. It is no different with cloud computing. People believe Cloud Computing will cost jobs, in fact, it will create more jobs.

The image below should give you a better picture:

The image above makes it very clear that Cloud Computing will create a lot more jobs than the ones it may possibly take.

You Need More Than One Cloud: Top 10 Myths Regarding Cloud Computing

The business that wish to, or are already harnessing Cloud Vendor services may have varying business needs and preferences. Also the vendors the companies rely on are something companies don’t want to let go off. This scenario might force certain companies to choose a different vendor altogether for different sections of their business.

The above claim though true, does not mean it is mandatory to opt for more than one cloud vendors parallely. Vendors these days provide a wide array of services to meet most of you needs under one roof.

Cloud Is For The Tech Companies

Cloud is pre-dominantly used by Tech companies, this claim is understandable because Tech companies do prefer Cloud platforms to host their data and applications. However to claim that it can’t be used by or it is not meant for non tech companies is like shooting arrows at sky. Cloud offers hundred plus services and these services cater needs of different markets. So companies that have data and need someone to manage it, Cloud is open for all such companies.

Cloud Harms Environment

People claim that Cloud data centers consume a lot of power and also harm the environment in the process. Yes, data centers do consume huge amounts of energy. But looking at it from a broader perspective, you will realize that businesses move from on-site facilities to a more compact cloud data center, thus it saves energy and cuts pollution on the longer run.

Everything Works Better In The Cloud

The plethora of services out there ensure Cloud helps you meet most of your requirements. However nothing is full proof. There are many application that where designed keeping in mind traditional methods of computing. So migrating these applications to Cloud may not mean that these applications will work on Cloud as compatibly as they did in your previous environment. Also what about the businesses that follow traditional approach and are doing well. For them migration may not be that smooth.

So blindly believing Cloud will always solve all your computing problems may not be true
Cloud Isn’t Secure
Cloud security has always been a topic of debate. There are a lot of reasons people fear data on Cloud may not be safe. Two of those are:

Fear of sharing same data center space

Fear of data loss due to outage

However Cloud ensures that all these fears are taken care of. Clouds these days provision shared security models where both, the vendors and customers have a say in the security compliance. Also introduction of private cloud means you may not always have to share your cloud space.

It Is Always Cheaper To Run In The Cloud

People also believe that Cloud is always cheaper. When used sensibly Cloud Computing will let you reap benefits at an affordable price. However it may not be the case always. Pay As You Go Model is fairly affordable for smaller and short term applications. On the longer run it may not be true for application that require a lot of resources.

That is why it is very important to have architects help you optimize the cost for your infrastructure before you move to Cloud.

Source: Edureka

Azure Boards: How To Get Started With Agile Planning on Azure?

vishal-servicenow — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 06:36:30 +0000

What is Azure Boards?
Well, you can think of it as an interface that lets you you track tasks, features, and even bugs that may be associated with your project. Here you are aided by three work item types:

Epics
Issues
Tasks
Here is the depiction in the form of an image(Image Source: Microsoft.com):

Also as the work gets completed the status gets updated stage by stage from:

To Do
Doing
Done
Here is the image below depicting the same (Image Source: Microsoft.com):

Each time we create or add an issue, task or an epic, it means we are creating a work item. Every work item we create would represent an object. This object is stored in the work item data store. Every item here will have an identifier, assigned to it. These IDs are unique to a particular project.

If you wish to track significant features or requirements you add epics. Issues on the other hand are used to track user stories, bugs, or other smaller items of work. Likewise tasks are meant for tracking little amounts of work. The tracker can be used for both hourly and daily tracking.

Now let us take a look at some of the features of Azure Boards.

Features Of Azure Boards

Kanban Implementation

It is very easy to implement and use Kanban with Azure Boards. It eases up two important tasks, those are:

-Update the status of issues
-Prioritize Your Backlog of Issues

This means assigning work becomes a lot more easier and you can share information better and prioritize your work with drag and drop features provided.

Collaborate using Azure Boards

-The Discussion section lets you collaborate better with the people in your project
-You can create dashboards and track status and trends of the accomplished work. -Get instant alerts for the issues created, changed or resolved
-You can set notifications to get alerted when an issue is created or changed

Flexibility to work in sprints and to implement Scrum

-It becomes easier to plan sprints with proper assignment
-You can use effort estimates to predict work
-It is possible to assign issues or tasks in bulk

Integrate with GitHub

It is easy to connect to GitHub and in turn it means:

-You can perform pull, push and commit requests with ease
-You can link to GitHub commits and pull requests with ease

Let us now move further and see how can we use Azure Boards to carry out some of the features we discussed above.

Demo: Getting Started with Azure Boards

Step1: Start by opening this link in your browser ‘https://aex.dev.azure.com/signup/boards’. You would be re-directed to this page. Click on Continue.

Step2: Next you would be asked to enter the organisation name and the location where you are operating from. Enter those and click on continue.

Step3: Next step is to create a project. Enter the details below and create a project.

Step4: You would be re-directed to following interface, You have four sections. The first one gives you access to all the major tabs of Azure Boards. Second one lets you add items. Third one is for issues and fourth one lets you manage project and project members.

Step5: Let us create an issue, to do that click on issues drop down on top left corner of your screen and select issue.

Step6: Click on Add Item and enter the name of the issue. Once you hit the enter button, the issue tab would appear as below.

Step7: We can change the state to Doing and your item would shift under the column named Doing.

Step8: You can add tasks to the issue. This bit covers what needs to be done. I have added three tasks and I have crossed one suggesting the task was complete.

So guys this was about adding a simple issue to your Azure boards. There is a lot that can be done with Azure boards. You are free to explore Azure Boards. As far as this article is concerned. I would be resting it here.

Source : Edureka

Azure IoT: Learn How To Create IoT Hub on Azure

vishal-servicenow — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 07:01:13 +0000

Society connects living beings and gives them the feel of being together and connected. What if we could connect inanimate things to each other and have a meaningful barter relationship? Well internet does that for you and this process is known as Internet of Things(IoT). This article on Azure IoT will help you understand IoT in more depth and tell you how to use it on Azure Cloud platform.

This article will focus on following pointers:

What Is IoT?
What Is Azure?
Azure IoT
Demo: Creating An Azure IoT Hub
So let us get started,

What is IoT?

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of devices connected over the internet which can sense, accumulate and transfer without any intervention by human beings.

Let us start this discussion with question as in what makes human beings feel alive? It is their ability to sense and communicate with each other. What if I say we could give this ability to inanimate objects to sense and interact with each other without any human intervention. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, this is what Internet of things lets you do and this very much forms the base for the same.

The fact that we have moved from traditional person to person communication to modern day ways of social media and Internet, we see a lot of data being generated these days. This means people have less time to attend this data resulting in lesser accuracy in handling and capturing this data. What if we had machines to do this for us and we could focus only tracking this data? This will surely reduce the effort and cost for the same. This approach is what eventually gave birth to Internet of Things.

So we know now what Internet of things (IoT) is? Let us move further and understand Azure and how Azure IoT makes sense.

What is Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a Microsoft cloud computing platform. It provides various cloud computing services that are highly scalable and dynamic in nature.

So what is so special about these services? Well to keep it simple. Instead of building a software from scratch where you are supposed manage and configure all the needed resources that are needed, what if you could just outsource the job of configuring your resources and also end up renting the required resources at a more affordable and optimised price, wouldn’t that be a pretty picture?

Well Microsoft Azure works like that, it is like, Power Consumption where you consume electricity and pay only for the electricity you have consumed and also let the suppliers worry about configuration and supply.

Azure IoT

By now we know what IoT is and also what Azure is? The question that lies ahead is why use Azure IoT together and what makes them a good combo. Azure provides you with productive and scalable IoT solutions. It serves the needs of both an experienced cloud developer or someone just getting started with IoT. Azure has powerful services and tools to help you develop next-generation IoT solutions.

Here is the list for the same:

To Customize solution templates for common IoT scenarios - Azure IoT solution accelerators

To Extend intelligence from the cloud to your edge devices - Azure IoT Edge

To Connect, monitor and control billions of IoT assets - Azure IoT Hub

To Create a digital model of your physical space or assets - Azure Digital Twins

To Gain insights from time-series IoT data in real time - Azure Time Series Insights

To Build and connect highly secure MCU-powered devices - Azure Sphere

To location APIs provide geospatial context to data - Azure Maps

The services mentioned above touch up on almost all the aspect that are important for implementing IoT using a cloud platform and thus is a major reason as to why Azure IoT is good and healthy IoT option.

Demo: Create An Azure IoT Hub

Before we begin, first you may want to know about Azure IoT Hub,

IoT Hub is a managed service, hosted in the cloud, that acts as a central message hub for bi-directional communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. You can use Azure IoT Hub to build IoT solutions with reliable and secure communications between millions of IoT devices and a cloud-hosted solution backend. You can connect virtually any device to IoT Hub.

Now, let us try and create one.

Step1: For starters you need Azure free tier account. Please create one if you don’t have any.

Step2: Login to it and you would be taken to this page shown below,

Step3: Click on create a resource, go to Internet of Things and select IoT hub.

Step 4: Following window will open, fill in the details and you have an IoT hub ready to use

Source : Edureka

Azure DevOps Tutorial : Why Should You Use DevOps On Azure?

vishal-servicenow — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 09:39:13 +0000

DevOps is the need of the hour and many organisations are wanting to incorporate this approach to make their businesses function better. Azure is one of the leading cloud service providers and supports a powerful set of DevOps services. This article on Azure DevOps helps you unravel implementation of DevOps using Azure.

What is Azure?

A company that provides different services to cater Cloud Computing needs, is known as a cloud service provider. Amongst the various cloud service providers or vendors is Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure is a platform for Cloud Computing which is created by developers and IT professionals at Microsoft. It lets you build, deploy and manage applications through their globally owned network of data centers.

These are some of the core service domains that Microsoft Azure impacts. Those are:

Compute
Storage
Networking
Databases
Monitoring

What is DevOps?

Going by the definition,

DevOps is the process of integrating Developer and Operation teams in order to improve collaborations and productivity. This is done by automating workflows and productivity for continuous measurement of application performance.

This definition might seem ambiguous to beginners because there are a lot of unexplained terms there, let us try and understand those first.

Faster delivery of software deployment has become the need of the hour. Because the software market these days is volatile and you need to stay updated and ensure you deliver the best and the latest software and this can be achieved by continuous delivery and integration. This is where roles of software developers and system administrators become very important.

A software developer is the one who develops the software. They have to ensure a software has following parameters taken care of:

New features
Security Upgrades
Bug Fixes
A developer however has to take ‘time to market’ under consideration and the time constraint forces him to re-adjust his activities like:

Pending code
Old code
New products
New features
And this is what happens when the product is put into the production environment, it may exhibit some unforeseen errors. This is because the code written in the development environment which can be different from the production environment.

Now let us see the same scenario from the operators perspective:

This team looks after the maintenance to ensure appropriate up time of the software to the production environment. With the growing software development needs, administrators or operators are forced to take care of many servers in parallel.

Now, the tools that were used to manage the earlier amount of servers may not be sufficient to manage the growing number of servers. The operations team makes minor changes to the code so that it can fit into the production environment equally well as it did in the developer environment. Thus these deployments need to be scheduled properly to avoid delays.

When the code is deployed the responsibility of an operator increases even further, they are required to manage code changes and errors if any. At times it may seem like developers have forced their responsibilities to the operations side. This is where the problem lies and if these teams could work together a lot problems would be solved like they:

could break down silos
share responsibilities
start thinking alike
work as a team

This is what DevOps does, it bring in these two teams under one roof. Now I believe the definition we saw at the beginning of the section, makes a lot more sense.

Now let us see what makes Azure a good fit to use DevOps and what makes Azure DevOps a good choice?

Why go for Azure DevOps?

We all know Azure is a leading cloud service provider and is definitely the need of the hour. Following features by Azure ensure DevOps is implemented in the best possible way:

Catalyze cloud development

You can now worry less about creating pipelines and focus on software development. Whether it is about dealing with pipelines, creating new ones or managing the existing ones, Azure provides end to end solution for the same and thus speeds up the process of software development.

Better Reliability and Continuous Integration

Now you don’t have to worry about managing security and infrastructures and you can focus more on developing innovative solutions. With Azure and CI/CD it supports, you can harness and use infrastructure as code which boasts of tools like Azure Resource manager or Terraform—that help you create repeatable deployments which also meet compliance standards.

Freedom Of Customization

With Azure providing end to end solutions for your software development you have the freedom of using the tools of your choice as Azure readily incorporates with most of the market tools out there thus making customization and experimentation easier.

Above reasons make Azure a highly compatible and preferable option for DevOps. Let us now understand what are the components that make Azure DevOps a good combination.

Components of Azure DevOps

Following are the Azure DevOps Components:

Pipelines
Boards
Artifacts
Repos
Test Plans

Let us understand them one by one:

Azure Pipelines

So what is an Azure Pipeline? Well in simple words it is a pipeline supported by Azure platform where you can build, test and deploy applications continuously.

Azure Boards

If you have multiple teams working on a project, those teams need to communicate better. Azure Boards ensure better work tracking. Lets you deal with backlogs and also ensure creation great custom reports.

Azure Artifacts

Azure enables you to create, host, and also share packages among your team. Artifacts in Azure ensure your pipelines have fully integrated package management. This can achieved with a mere click. You can also create Maven, npm, and NuGet packages. Here the team size does not matter.

Azure Repos

Think of it as a home or a storage for repositories. It provides you with unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repositories. You can pull, push and commit your changes to these repositories.

Azure Test Plans

It provides you with a complete toolkit to perform end to end, manual and exploratory testing ensuring your software functions just fine.

Azure Pipelines : Learn How To Create Azure Pipelines

vishal-servicenow — Tue, 21 May 2019 05:56:28 +0000

The ascendance of both Azure and DevOps is new to none, such has been the growth of these technologies. This article on Azure Pipelines will help you gain all the information that revolves around Azure DevOps and by the time we are done, you would have created a full fledged Azure Pipeline.

Why Is Azure DevOps?

If you have gone through my previous article on Azure DevOps then by now you know Azure is one of the leading cloud service vendors. Likewise DevOps is an approach which has taken current software industry by storm, as it very easily helps bridge the gap between the developer and operation teams.

So many wondered if it was possible to carry out DevOps practices on Azure Cloud. And the introduction of DevOps services ensured that it becomes very much possible. With different services introduced by Azure did help the following:

Boost Cloud Development With Azure Pipelines

Azure makes it very easy to create pipelines so the focus can shift to software development. Because Azure provides end to end solution for creating and managing pipelines.

Better Continuous Integration and Deployment

With Continuous Integration and Delivery on Azure you can harness and also use infrastructure as code with tools like Azure Resource Manager or Terraform you create repeatable deployments which also meet compliance standards.

Liberty To Customize

Azure being a Microsoft product, it readily integrates with almost all the Microsoft stack of products. Also Azure has made huge progress when it comes to integration with open source tools. This means we have more options to customize.

I believe these are enough reasons to put our faith in Azure DevOps. Let us now try and understand what is Azure Pipelines service.

What is Azure Pipelines?

Azure Pipelines is a service that caters the need for creating pipelines on Azure Cloud Platform. It lets you build, test and deploy application Azure cloud and other supported platforms. You can also create pipelines on Windows, Linux and Mac Operating systems. You can even create up to ten parallel jobs for free.

Since you can automate your builds and deployments with Pipelines, you end up spending less time on your fixing minor issues with your applications and can focus more on creative aspect of the same.

Now let us move further and take a look at some of the features of Azure components.

Features Of Azure Pipelines

Let us take a look at some of the important features of Azure Pipelines and why is it so convenient to use.

Platform and language Independent

As mentioned previously, you can use the Operating System of your choice and you can also decide what to use to build your applications, whether it is Python, Java, NodeJS, Ruby etc.

Freedom to work with Containers

Since pipelines ease the process of building applications, it becomes easier to push your applications to containers like Docker, Kubernetes and even Azure Container Registry.

Available Extenions

Azure pipeline also gives you excess to many community built tasks for better customization and thus help you build, test and deploy these tasks.

Supports Deployment to other cloud vendors

Azure Pipelines service, provides you freedom to deploy your application to different cloud platforms like AWS , GCP etc.

Open Source

With fast paced continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines now you can deliver most of the open source projects.

Workflows

If You have to build chaining and multi-phased builds at your disposal then there is support for YAML, test integration, release gates, reporting etc.

These features make Azure Pipelines an important service in Azure’s DevOps Scheme of things. If you are interested in creating CI/CD pipelines then please checkout the video below.

So guys this was about Azure Pipelines. There is a lot that can be done with this Azure Service. You are free to explore this service. As far as this article is concerned. I would be resting it here.

Source: Edureka