Weeknote 6: User group and MVP events; a new smartwatch; ghost trains; and the start of Christmas (Week 48, 2017)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Milton Keynes – Rochdale – London – Leicester. Not quite New York – London – Paris but those are the towns and cities on my itinerary this week.

Every now and again, I find myself counting down the days to the weekend. This week has been different. It was manic, squeezing work in around lots of other activities but it was mostly enjoyable too.

The week at work

My work week started off with an opportunity to input to a report that I find quite exciting. I can’t say too much at the moment (though it should be released within the next couple of weeks and I’ll be shouting about it then) but it’s one of those activities that makes me think “I’d like to do more of this” (I already get referred to as the extra member of the risual marketing team, which I think they mean as a good thing!).

Bills have to be paid though (i.e. I need to keep my utilisation up!), so I’ve also had some consulting in the mix, writing a strategy for a customer who needs to modernise their datacentre.

On Wednesday evening, I managed to fit in a UK Azure User Group (@UKAzure) meeting in London, with Paul Andrew (@MrPaulAndrew) talking about Azure Data Factory – another opportunity to fill some gaps in my knowledge.

Then, back to work on Thursday, squeezing in a full day’s work before heading to the National Space Centre in Leicester in the afternoon for the UK MVP Community Connection. I’m not an MVP anymore (I haven’t been since 2011) but I am a member of the MVP Reconnect Programme, which means I still get invited to some of the events – and the two I’ve been to so far have been really worthwhile. One of my favourite sessions at the last event was Tony Wells from Resource IT (the guys who create the Microsoft Abbreviation Dictionary) talking about storytelling. This time we had a 3-hour workshop with an opportunity to put some of the techniques into practice.

The evening started with drinks in the space tower, then an IMAX film before dinner (and a quiz) in the Space Centre, surrounded by the exhibits. We returned the next day for a Microsoft business update, talks on ethics and diversity, on extending our audience reach and on mixed reality.

Unfortunately, my Friday afternoon was hijacked by other work… and the work week also spilt over into the weekend – something I generally try to avoid and which took the shine off things somewhat…

Social

I’ve had a full-on week with family too: my eldest son is one of six from Milton Keynes who have been selected to attend the Kandersteg International Scout Centre (KISC) in 2019 and, together with ten more who are off to the World Scout Jamboree in West Virginia, we have a lot of fund-raising to do (about £45,000 in total). That meant selling raffle tickets in the shopping centre for the opportunity to win a car on Monday evening, and a meeting on Tuesday evening to talk about fundraising ideas…

So, that’s out every evening, and a long day every day this week… by Friday I was ready to collapse in a heap.

The weekend

No cyclocross this weekend (well, there was, but it clashed with football), so I was on a different sort of Dad duty, running the line and trying not to anger parents from the other team with my ropey knowledge of the offside rule…

It’s also December now, so my family have declared that Christmas celebrations can begin. Right from the moment I returned home on Friday evening I was accused of not being Christmassy enough and I was forced to listen to “Christmas Music” on the drive to my son’s football match (the compromise was that it could be my Christmas playlist).

Even I was amused to be followed in my car by a certain jolly chap:

My part in decorating the house consists of getting everything down from the loft, putting up the tree and lights, and then finding myself somewhere to hide for a couple of hours until it all looks lovely and sparkly. Unfortunately, the hiding time was actually spent polishing a presentation for Monday and fighting with Concur to complete my expenses… not exactly what I had in mind…

New tech

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that we now have a teenager in the house and my eldest son has managed to save enough birthday money to buy a smartwatch. He was thinking of a Garmin device until I reminded him how bad their software is when we sync our bike computers so he went for a Samsung Gear Sport. It looks pretty good if you have an Android phone. I have an iPhone and an Apple Watch (as you may recall from my recent tales of woe) but if I was an Android guy, I think the Gear Sport would be my choice…

Ghost trains

I forgot to add this tale to last week’s week note but I was travelling back home from Stafford recently when I noticed a re-branded Virgin Pendolino at the platform. My train wasn’t due for another 10 minutes so I didn’t check out where this one was going, so I was a little surprised to pass it again as I arrived in Milton Keynes two hours later, after I’d gone the long way (via Birmingham) and changed trains…

Checking on Realtime Trains showed me that I could have caught a direct train from Stafford, but it wasn’t on the public timetable. Indeed, although it stops at several stations, it’s listed as an empty coaching stock working (which is presumably why it is pathed on the slow lines including the Northampton loop). So, in addition to trains that stop at Milton Keynes only to set down (southbound) or pick up (northbound), it seems that Virgin run “ghost trains” too!

Listening

I listen to a lot of podcasts when I’m in the car. This week I spent a lot of time in the car. I recommend these two episodes:

Twitter highlights

I’m no GDPR expert but this looked useful:

Company branding is great until it makes the information you give out next-to-useless:

Credit is due to the social media team handling the @PremierInn account for Whitbread, they quickly confirmed that it is a J not an I (though I had worked it out).

@HolidayInn were equally on the ball when I complained about a lack of power sockets (and traffic noise insulation) at their Leicester City Centre hotel. Thankfully they replies were limited to Twitter and email – not midnight calls as my colleague Gavin Morrisson found when he tweeted about another Holiday Inn!

This made me smirk (I haven’t “elevated” my Mac yet…):

If you don’t get the joke, this should provide context.

I like this definition of “digital [transformation]”:

This short video looks at how we need to “debug the gender gap”:

The full film is available to stream/download from various sources… I intend to watch.

And, to wrap up with some humour, I enjoyed Chaz Hutton’s latest Post-it sketch:

(for more like this, check out InstaChaz on Instagram)

Finit

That’s it for now… more next week…

Weeknote 5: Playing with Azure; Black Friday; substandard online deliveries; and the usual tech/cycling/family mix (Week 47, 2017)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This weeknote is a bit of a rush-job – mostly because it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m writing this at the side of a public swimming pool whilst supervising a pool party… it will be late tonight when I get to finish it!

The week

There not a huge amount to say about this week though. It’s been as manic as usual, with a mixture of paid consulting days, pre-sales and time at Microsoft.

The time at Microsoft was excellent though – I spent Tuesday in their London offices, when Daniel Baker (@AzureDan) gave an excellent run through of some of the capabilities in Azure. I like to think I have a reasonable amount of Azure experience and I was really looking to top up my knowledge with recent developments as well as to learn a bit more about using some of the advanced workloads but I learned a lot that day. I think Dan is planning some more videos so watch his Twitter feed but his “Build a Company in a Day” slides are available for download.

On the topic of Azure, I managed to get the sentiment analysis demo I’ve been working on based on a conversation with my colleague Matt Bradley (@MattOnMicrosoft) and Daniel Baker also touched on it in his Build a Company in a Day workshop. It uses an Azure Logic App to:

  1. Monitor Twitter on a given topic;
  2. Detect sentiment with Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics;
  3. Push data into Power BI dataset for visualisation;
  4. Send an email if the sentiment is below a certain value.

It’s a bit rough-and-ready (my Power BI skills are best described as “nascent”) but it’s not a bad demo – and it costs me pennies to run. You can also do something similar with Microsoft Flow instead of an Azure Logic App.

Black Friday

I hate Black Friday. Just an excuse to shift some excess stock onto greedy consumers ahead of Christmas…

…but it didn’t stop me buying things:

  • An Amazon Fire TV Stick to make our TV smart again (it has fewer and fewer apps available because it’s more than 3 years old…). Primarily I was after YouTube but my youngest is very excited about the Manchester City app!
  • Another set of Bluetooth speakers (because the kids keep “borrowing” my Bose Soundlink Mini 2).
  • Some Amazon buttons at a knock-down £1.99 (instead of £4.99) for IoT hacking.
  • A limited edition GCN cycle jersey that can come back to me from my family as a Christmas present!

The weekend

My weekend involved: cycling (my son was racing cyclocross again in the Central CX League); an evening out with my wife (disappointing restaurant in the next town followed by great gin in our local pub); a small hangover; some Zwift (to blow away the cobwebs – and although it was sunny outside, the chances of hitting black ice made the idea of a real road bike ride a bit risky); the pool party I mentioned earlier (belated 13th birthday celebrations for my eldest); 7 adolescent kids eating an enormous quantity of food back at ours; and… relax.

Other stuff

My eldest son discovered that the pressure washer can make bicycle bar tape white again! (I wrote a few years back about using baby wipes to clean bar tape but cyclocross mud goes way beyond even their magical properties.)

After posting my 7 days 7 photos efforts last week, I saw this:

I’ll get my coat.

I also learned a new term: “bikeshedding” (nothing to do with cycling… or smoking… or other teenage activities…):

It’s scary to see how much we’re cluttering space – not just our planet:

There’s a new DNS service in town:

I’ve switched the home connection from OpenDNS (now owned by Cisco) to 9.9.9.9 and will report back in a while…

This ad tells a great story:

Curve is now available to ordinary employees and not just business-people!

We recently switched back to Tesco for our online grocery shopping (we left years ago because it seemed someone was taking one or two items from every order, hoping we wouldn’t notice). Well, it seems things have improved in some ways, but not in others…

On the subject of less-than-wonderful online shopping experiences, after I criticised John Lewis for limiting website functionality instead of bursting to the cloud:

It seems they got their own back by shipping my wife’s Christmas present with Hermes, who dumped it on the front doorstep (outside the notified delivery timeframe) and left a card to say it had been delivered to a secure location:

It may be silly but this made me laugh:

Finally, for this week, I borrowed my son’s wireless charger to top up my iPhone. Charging devices without cables – it’s witchcraft, I tell you! Witchcraft!

Next week, I’ll be back with my customer in Rochdale, consulting on what risual calls the “Optimised Service Vision” so it was interesting to see Matt Ballantine’s slides on Bringing Service Design to IT Service. I haven’t seen Matt present these but it looks like our thinking is quite closely aligned…

That’s all folks!

That’s all for this week. I’m off to watch some more Halt and Catch Fire before I get some sleep in preparation for what looks like a busy week…

Weeknote 4: music; teenagers; creating a chatbot; tech, more tech and tech TV; 7 day photo challenge; and cycling (Week 46, 2017)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Another week, another weeknote…

There’s not much to say about work this week – I’ve mostly been writing documentation. I did spend a good chunk of Monday booking hotels and travel, only to find 12 days of consulting drop out of my diary again on Friday (cue hotel cancellations, etc.) but I guess that’s just life!

Family life: grime, rap and teens!

Outside work, it’s been good to be close to home and get involved in family life again.

I had the amusement of my 11 year-old and his friends rapping to their grime music on my car on the way to/from football training this week (we’re at the age where it’s “Dad, can we have my music on please?”) but there’s only so much Big Shaq I can take so I played some Eminem on the way back. It was quite endearing to hear my son say “I didn’t know you knew about Eminem!” after I dropped his mates off. I should make the most of these moments as the adulation is dropping off now he approaches his teens!

Talking of teens, my eldest turned 13 this week, which was a big day in the Wilson household:

 

I’m not sure how this little fella grew into this strong chap (or where the time in between has gone) but we introduced him to the Harry Enfield “Kevin the teenager” videos a few months ago. I thought they were funny when I was younger but couldn’t believe how accurate they are now I’m a parent. Our boys clearly understood the message too and looked a bit sheepish!

Tech

I did play with some tech this week – and I managed to create my very own chatbot without writing any code:

Virtual Mark (MarkBot1) uses the Microsoft QnA Maker and runs in Microsoft Azure. The process is described in James Marshall’s blog post and it’s very straightforward. I’m using Azure Functions and so far this serverless solution has cost me absolutely nothing to run!

It’s also interesting reading some of the queries that the bot has been asked, which have led to me extending its knowledge base a few times now. A question and answer chatbot is probably more suited to a set of tightly bounded questions on a topic (the things people can ask about me is pretty broad) but it’s a nice demo…

I also upgraded my work PC to the latest Windows 10 and Office builds (1709 and 1710 respectively), which gave me the ability to use a digital pen as a presentation clicker, which is nice, in a geek-novelty kind of way:

Tech TV

I have an Amazon Prime membership, which includes access to Amazon Prime Instant Video – including several TV shows that would otherwise only be available in the US. One I enjoy is Mr Robot – which although completely weird at times is also strangely addictive – and this week’s episode was particularly good (scoring 9.9 on IMDB). Whilst I was waiting for the next episode to come around, I found that I’d missed a whole season of Halt and Catch Fire too (I binge-watched the first three after they were recommended to me by Howard van Rooijen/@HowardvRooijen). Series 4 is the final one and that’s what presently keeping me from my sleep… but it’s really good!

I don’t have Netflix, but Silicon Cowboys has been recommended to me by Derek Goodridge (@workerthread). Just like the first series of Halt and Catch Fire, it’s the story of the original IBM PC clone manufacturers – Compaq – but in documentary format, rather than as a drama series.

iPhone images

Regular readers may recall that a few weeks ago I found myself needing to buy a new iPhone after I fell into the sea with my iPhone in my pocket, twisting my ankle in the process…

People have been telling me for ages that “the latest iPhone has a great camera” and, in daylight, I’m really impressed by the clarity and also the bokeh effect. It’s still a mobile phone camera with a tiny sensor though and that means it’s still really poor at night. If a full-frame DSLR struggles at times, an iPhone will be challenged I guess – but I’m still finding that I’m inspired to use the camera more.

7 Days 7 Photos

Last week, I mentioned the 7 days, 7 photos challenge. I’ve completed mine now and they are supposed to be without explanation but, now I have a set of 7 photos, I thought I would explain what and why I used these ones. I get the feeling that some people are just posting 7 pictures, one a day, but these really do relate to what I was doing each day – and I tried to nominate people for the challenge each day based on their relevance to the subject…

Day 1

7 Days 7 Photos Day 1

I spotted this pub as I walked to Farringdon station. I wondered if “the clerk and well” was the origin of the name for “Clerkenwell” and it turns out that it is. Anyway, I liked the view of the traditional London pub (I was on my way home from another one!) and challenged my brother, who’s a publican…

Day 2

7 Days 7 Photos Day 2

I liked the form in this photograph of my son’s CX bike on the roof of my car. It didn’t look so clean when we got back from cyclocross training though! I challenged my friend Andy, whose 40th birthday was the reason for my ride from London to Paris a few years ago…

Day 3

7 Days 7 Photos Day 3

Not technically a single photo – lets’ call it a triptych, I used the Diptic app (as recommended by Ben Seymour/@bseymour) to create this collage. I felt it was a little too personal to nominate my friend Kieran, whose medals are in the lower left image, so I nominated my friend James, who was leading the Scouts in our local remembrance day parade.

Day 4

7 Days 7 Photos Day 4

I found some failed backups on my Synology NAS this week. For some reason, Hyper Backup complained it didn’t have enough storage (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Azure that ran out of space!) so I ran several backups, each one adding another folder until I had all of my new photos in the backup set. I felt the need to challenge a friend who works in IT – so I challenged my friend Stuart.

Day 5

7 Days 7 Photos Day 5

My son was cake-baking, for Children in Need, I think – or maybe it was my other son, baking his birthday cake. I can’t really remember. I challenged a friend who runs a local cafe and regularly bakes muffins…

Day 6

7 Days 7 Photos Day 6

Self-explanatory. My son’s own creation for his birthday. I challenged my wife for this one.

Day 7

7 Days 7 Photos Day 7

The last image is following an evening helping out at Scouts. Images of attempts to purify water through distillation were not that great, so I took a picture of the Scout Badge, and nominated my friend Phil, who’s another one of the local Scout leaders.

(All seven of these pictures were taken on an iPhone 8 Plus using the native camera app, then edited in Snapseed and uploaded to Flickr)

Other stuff

I like this:

And I remember shelves of tapes like these (though mine were all very neatly written, or computer-generated, even back in the 1980s):

On the topic of music, look up Master Boot Record on Spotify:

And this “Soundtrack for Coding” is pretty good for writing documentation too…

I added second-factor authentication to my WordPress blog this week. I couldn’t find anything that uses the Microsoft Authenticator, but this 2FA WordPress plugin from miniOrange uses Google Authenticator and was very easy to set up.

Some UK libraries have started loaning BBC Microbits but unfortunately not yet in my manor:

Being at home all week meant I went to see my GP about my twisted ankle (from the falling-into-the-sea incident). One referral later and I was able to see a physio… who’s already working wonders on helping to repair my damaged ligaments. And he says I can ride my bike too… so I’ll be back on Zwift even if cyclocross racing is out for the rest of the season.

Cycling

On the subject of Zwift, they announced a price rise this week. I understand that these things happen but it’s gone up 50% in the US (and slightly more than that here in the UK). All that really does is drive me to use Zwift in the winter and to cancel my membership in the summer. A more reasonable monthly fee might make me more inclined to sign up for 12 months at a time and create a recurring revenue for Zwift. Very strange business model, IMHO.

I particularly liked the last line of this article:

“Five minutes after the race
That was sooo fun! When can I do it again?!”

I may not have been riding cyclocross this weekend, but my son was, and Sunday was the popular Central Cyclocross League race at RAF Halton. With mud, sand, gravel and steep banks, long woodland sections and more, it looked epic. Maybe I’ll get to ride next year!

I did get to play with one of the RAF’s cranes (attached to a flatbed truck) though – amazing how much control there is – and had a go on the road safety rig too.

And of course, what else to eat at a cyclocross event but Belgian fries, mayo and waffles!

Finally, my friends at Kids Racing (@kidsracing) have some new kit in. Check out the video they filmed at the MK Bowl a couple of weeks back – and if you have kids in need of new cycling kit, maybe head over to HUP CC.

Wrap-up

That’s it for this week. Next week I have a bit more variation in my work (including another Microsoft event – Azure Ready in the UK) and I’m hoping to actually get some blog posts written… see you on the other side!

Adopting cloud services means being ready for constant change

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

There’s a news story today about how Microsoft may be repositioning some (or all) of Skype for Business as Microsoft Teams (the collaborative group-based chat service built on various Office 365 services but Skype for Business in particular).

The details of that story are kind of irrelevant to this post; it’s the reaction I got on Twitter that I felt the need to comment on (when I hit 5 tweeted replies I thought a blog post might be more appropriate).

Change is part of consuming cloud services. There’s a service agreement and a subscription/licensing agreement – customers consume the service as the provider defines it. The service provider will generally give notice of change but you normally have to accept it (or leave). There is no option to stay on legacy versions of software for months or years at a time because you’re not ready to update your ways of working or other connected systems.

That is a big shift and many IT departments have not adjusted their thinking to adopt this new way of working.

I’ve seen many organisations moving to cloud services (mostly Office 365 and Azure) and stick with their current approach. They do things like try to map drive letters to OneDrive because that’s what users are used to, instead of showing them new (and often better) ways of working. They try to use old versions of Office with the latest services and wonder why the user experience is degraded. They think about the on-premises workloads (Exchange, Lync/Skype for Business, SharePoint) instead of the potential provided by the whole productivity platform that they have bought licences to use. They try to turn parts of the service off or hide them from users.

My former colleague Steve Harwood (@SteeveeH) did some work with one of risual’s customers to define a governance structure for Office 365. It’s great work – and maybe I’ll blog about it separately – but the point is that organisations need to think differently for the cloud.

Buying services from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, et al is not like buying them from the managed services provider that does its best to maintain a steady state and avoid change at all costs (or often at great cost!). Moving to the cloud means constant change. You may not have servers to keep up to date once your apps are sold on an “evergreen” subscription basis but you will need to keep client software up to date – not just traditional installed apps but mobile apps and browsers too. And when the service gains a new feature, it’s there for adoption. You may have the ability to hide it but that’s just a sticking plaster solution.

Often the cry is “but we need to train the users”. Do you really? Many of today’s business end users have grown up with technology. They are familiar with using services at home far more advanced than those provided by many workplaces. Intuitive user interfaces can go a long way and there’s no need to provide formal training for many IT changes. Instead, keep abreast of the advertised changes from your service provider (for example the Message Center in Office 365) and decide what the impact is of each new feature. Very few will need a full training package! Some well-written communications, combined with self-help forums and updated FAQs at the Service Desk will often be enough but there’s also the opportunity to offer access to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) where training needs are more extensive.

There are, of course, examples of where service providers have rolled out new features with inadequate testing, or with too little notice but these are edge cases and generally there’s time to react. The problem comes when organisations stick their proverbial heads in the sand and try to ignore the inevitable change.

Do we need another as-a-service to describe functions?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week saw quarterly earnings reports for major cloud vendors and this tweet caught my eye:

You see, despite Azure growing by 93%, this suggests that Amazon has the cloud market sewn up. Except I’m not sure they do…

I think it would be interesting to see this separated into infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS). I suggest that would present three very different stories. And I’d expect that Amazon would only really be way out front for IaaS.

My friend and former colleague, Garry Martin (@GarryMartin) questioned the relevance of those “legacy” distinctions but I think they still have value today.

In the early days of what we now recognise as cloud computing, every vendor was applying their own brand of cloud-washing. It still happens today, with vendors claiming to offer IaaS when really they have a hosted service and a traditional delivery model.

Back in 2011, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defined cloud computing, including the service models of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Those service models, along with the (also abused) deployment models (public cloud, private cloud, etc.) have served us well but are they really legacy?

I don’t think they are. Six years is a long time in IT, let alone the cloud but I think IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are as relevant today as they were when NIST wrote their definition.

When asked how “serverless” technologies like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions fit in, I say they’re just PaaS. Done right.

Some people want to add another service model/definition for Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). But why? What value does it add? Functions are just PaaS but we’ve finally evolved to a place where we are moving past the point of caring about what the code runs on and letting the cloud manage that for us. That’s what PaaS has supposed to have been doing for years (after all, should I really need to define a number of instances to run my web application – that all sounds a bit like virtual machines to me…)

To my mind, “serverless” is just the ultimate platform as a service and we really don’t need another service model to describe it.

To quote a haiku from Onsi Fakhouri (@onsijoe):

“Here is my code
Run it in the cloud for me
I don’t care how”

Or, as Simon Wardley (@swardley) “fixed” this Cloud Foundry diagram:

Designing for failure does not necessarily mean multi-cloud

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage service suffered an outage that affected many websites (including popular sites to check if a website is down for everyone or just you!).

Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of discussion about designing for failure – or not, it would seem in many cases, including the architecture behind Amazon’s own status pages:

The Amazon and Azure models are slightly different but in the past we’ve seen outages to the Azure identity system (for example) impact on other Microsoft services (Office 365). When that happened, Microsoft’s Office 365 status page didn’t update because of a caching/CDN issue. It seems Amazon didn’t learn from Microsoft’s mistakes!

Randy Bias (@RandyBias) is a former Director at OpenStack and a respected expert on many cloud concepts. Randy and I exchanged many tweets on the topic of the AWS outage but, after multiple replies, I thought a blog post might be more appropriate. You see, I hold the view that not all systems need to be highly available. Sometimes, failure is OK. It all comes down to requirements:

And, as my colleague Tim Siddle highlighted:

I agree. 100%.

So, what does that architecture look like? Well, it will vary according to the provider:

So, if we want to make sure our application can survive a region failure, there are ways to design around this. Just be ready for the solution we sold to the business based on using commodity cloud services to start to look rather expensive. Whereas on-premises we typically have two datacentres with resilient connections, then we’ll want to do the same in the cloud. But, just as not all systems are in all datacentres on-premises, that might also be the case in the cloud. If it’s a service for which some downtime can be tolerated, then we might not need to worry about a multi-region architecture. In cases where we’re not at all concerned about downtime we might not even use an availability set…

Other times – i.e. if the application is a web service for which an outage would cause reputational or financial damage – we may have a requirement for higher availability.  That’s where so many of the services impacted by Tuesday’s AWS outage went wrong:

Of course, we might spread resources around regions for other reasons too – like placing them closer to users – but that comes back to my point about requirements. If there’s a requirement for fast, low-latency access then we need to design in the dedicated links (e.g. AWS Direct Connect or Azure ExpressRoute) and we’ll probably have more than one of them too, each terminating in a different region, with load balancers and all sorts of other considerations.

Because a cloud provider could be one of those single points of failure, many people are advocating multi-cloud architectures. But, if you think multi-region is expensive, get ready for some seriously complex architecture and associated costs in a multi-cloud environment. Just as in the on-premises world, many enterprises use a single managed services provider (albeit with multiple datacentres), in the cloud many of us will continue to use a single cloud provider.  Designing for failure does not necessarily mean multi-cloud.

Of course, a single-cloud solution has its risks. Randy is absolutely spot on in his reply below:

It could be argued that one man’s “lock-in” is another’s “making the most of our existing technology investments”. If I have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, I want to make sure that I use the software and services that I’m paying for. And running a parallel infrastructure on another cloud is probably not doing that. Not unless I can justify to the CFO why I’m running redundant systems just in case one goes down for a few hours.

That doesn’t mean we can avoid designing with the future in mind. We must always have an exit strategy and, where possible, think about designing systems with a level of abstraction to make them cloud-agnostic.

Ultimately though it all comes back to requirements – and the ability to pay. We might like an Aston Martin but if the budget is more BMW then we’ll need to make some compromises – with an associated risk, signed off by senior management, of course.

[Updated 2 March 2017 16:15 to include the Mark Twomey tweet that I missed out in the original edit]

Playing around with Azure Cognitive Services

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently getting more familiar with some of the advanced workloads in Microsoft Azure. After all, infrastructure as a service is commodity, so I’m looking at services that can be used to drive real value for my customers (more on that in another post…).

Yesterday, was our team meeting – with all but one of the risual Architects getting together, including some coaching from Microsoft around data and intelligence services. I was particularly taken with some of the demonstrations of Cognitive Services, so I set about getting some sample code to work for me…

Building the Intelligent Kiosk sample application

First up, I needed to install Visual Studio 2015 (Community Edition is fine) – it took a while, and needed admin credentials (so a visit to our support team) but eventually it installed on my PC.

Then, I downloaded the sample code for the “Intelligent Kiosk” from Github. F5 to build the solution told me that:

A project with an Output Type of Class Library cannot be started directly.

In order to debug this project, add an executable project to this solution which references the library project. Set the executable project as the startup project.

The Intelligent Kiosk sample code is a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app, so I ignored that message, continued with the build, and tracked down the resulting IntelligentKioskSample.exe file. Trying to run that told me:

This application can only run in the context of an app container.

And StackOverflow told me that I need to sideload the app onto my PC, by creating a package to use locally.

Installing the Intelligent Kiosk sample application

The application package comes with a PowerShell script to install it (Add-AppDevPackage.ps1), but I found I needed to follow these steps:

  1. Enable developer mode in Windows 10 Settings
  2. Restart the PC
  3. Open a PowerShell session as an Administrator and run:

Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration

Get-WindowsDeveloperLicense

Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted

.\Add-AppDevPackage.ps1

Now the app is ready and available via the Start Menu…

Running the Intelligent Kiosk sample application

  1. Get some API keys (for free) from the Microsoft Cognitive Services site.
  2. Run the Intelligent Kiosk app.
  3. Go to settings and paste in your API keys.
  4. Have some fun with the demos!
Demos in the Azure Cognitive Services Sample app
Intelligent Kiosk Demos
Azure Cognitive Services Emotion Detection
Emotion detection (web image)
Azure Cognitive Services Emotion Detection
Emotion detection (live image)
Azure Cognitive Services Face Detection
Face Detection
Azure Cognitive Services Mall Kiosk
Detect age and gender, recommend a product!

Further Reading

Why are the Microsoft Azure datacentre regions in Europe named as they are?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’m often asked why Microsoft’s datacentre regions for Azure in Europe are named as they are:

  • The Netherlands is “West Europe”
  • Ireland is “North Europe”
  • (then there’s country-specific regions in UK and Germany too…)

But Ireland and the Netherlands are (sort of) on the same latitude. So how does that work?

MVP Martina Grom explains it like this:

I suspect the backstory behind the naming is more down to the way that the United Nations divides Europe up for statistical purposes [source: Wikipedia article on Northern Europe]:

Europe subregion map UN geoscheme

On this map, North Europe is the dark blue area (including the UK and Ireland), whilst West Europe is the cyan area from France across to Austria and Germany (including the Benelux countries).

It makes more sense when you see it like this!

Image credit: Kolja21 via Wikipedia (used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence).

Migrating Azure virtual machines from ASM (Classic) to ARM (Resource Manager)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I was recently discussing Azure infrastructure services with a customer who has implemented a solution based on Azure Service Manager (ASM – also known as classic mode) but is now looking to move to Azure Resource Manager (ARM).

Moving to ARM has some significant benefits. For a start, we move to declarative, template-driven deployment (infrastructure as code). Under ASM we had programmatic infrastructure deployment where we wrote scripts to say “Dear Azure, here’s a list of everything I want you to do, in excruciating detail“ and deployment ran in serial. With ARM we say “Dear Azure, here’s what I want my environment to look like – go and make it happen” and, because Azure knows the dependencies (they are defined in the template), it can deploy resources in parallel:

  • If a resource is not present, it will be created.
  • If a resource is present but has a different configuration, it will be adjusted.
  • If a resource is present and correctly configured, it will be used.

ASM is not deprecated, but new features are coming to ARM and they won’t be back-ported. Even Azure AD now runs under ARM (one of the last services to come across), so there really is very little reason to use ASM.

But what if you already have an ASM infrastructure – how do you move to ARM? Christos Matskas (@christosmatskas) has a great post on options for migrating Azure VMs from ASM (v1) to ARM (v2) which talks about four methods, each with its own pros and cons:

  • ASM2ARM script (only one VM at a time; requires downtime)
  • Azure PowerShell and/or CLI (can be scripted and can roll-back; caveats and limitations around migrating whole vNets)
  • MigAz tool (comprehensive option that exports JSON templates too; some downtime required)
  • Azure Site Recovery (straightforward, good management; vs. setup time and downtime to migrate)

Full details are in Christos’ post, which is a great starting point for planning Azure VM migrations.

Short takes: what to do when Outlook won’t open HTTP(S) links; how to disable Outlook Clutter; and don’t run externally-facing mail servers in Azure!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Once again, my PC is running out of memory because of the number of open browser tabs, so I’ll convert some into a mini-blog post…

Outlook forgets how to open HTTP(S) links

I recently found that Outlook 2016 had “forgotten” what to do with HTTP(S) links – complaining that:

Something unexpected went wrong with this URL: […] Class not registered.

The fix was to reset my default browser in Windows. Even though I hadn’t changed it away from Edge, a Windows Update (I expect) had changed something and Edge needed to be reset as the default browser, after which Outlook was happy to open links to websites again.

Globally disable Outlook Clutter

I had a customer who moved to Exchange Online and then wanted to turn off the Clutter feature, because “people were complaining some of their email was being moved”.

Unfortunately, Clutter is set with a per-mailbox setting so to globally disable it you’ll need something like this:

get-mailbox | set-clutter -enable $false

That will work for existing mailboxes but what about new ones? Well, if you want to do make sure that Clutter remains “off”, then you’ll need a script to run on a regular basis and turn off Clutter for any new users that have been created – maybe using Azure Automation with Office 365?

Alternatively, you can create a transport rule to bypass Clutter.

Personally, I think this is the wrong choice – the answer isn’t to make software work the way we used to – it’s to lead the cultural change to start using new features and functionality to help us become more productive. Regardless, Clutter will soon be replaced by the Focused Inbox (as in the Outlook mobile app).

Don’t run externally-facing mail servers in Azure

I recently came across a problem when running an Exchange Hybrid server on a VM in Azure. Whilst sending mail directly outbound (i.e. not via Office 365 and hence Exchange Online Protection), consumer ISPs like Talk Talk were refusing our email.  I tried adding PTR records in DNS for the mail server but then I found the real issue – Azure adds it’s IP addresses to public block lists in order to protect against abuse.

It turns out that Microsoft’s documentation on sending e-mail from Azure compute resource to external domains is very clear:

“[…] the Azure compute IP address blocks are added to public block lists (such as the Spamhaus PBL).  There are no exceptions to this policy”

and the recommended approach is to use a mail relay – such as Exchange Online Protection or a third party service like SendGrid. Full details can be found in the Microsoft link above.