https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-t73d8-ac0f38
AI / Machine Learning pioneer Andre Magni visits the pod to talk computer intelligence; from Microsoft’s AI mission (to amplify human ingenuity with intelligent technology) to data-curation gotchas and modelling pitfalls to identifying dead bodies using AI. We even talks about our “AI Moms” and Andre’s world-champion lure-coursing Pharaoh dogs. Continue reading
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-dh33z-aac044
AzureABILITY host Louis Berman talks Azure with Bentley Systems‘ Kevin Boland—an Enterprise Cloud Architect who manages one of the largest and most complex set of Azure deployments on the planet. The pair of friends talk a good deal of tech, but along the way they also ruminate on the joys of raising Boxers (no, not the underwear!) as well as the pleasures and perils of being a robotics dweeb. Continue reading
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-srzes-aa4137
In this episode, Louis Berman discusses how to get started in Azure with his fellow Cloud Solutions Architect, Srini Ambati. Listen in as Louis and Srini give you a leg up into the cloud. Continue reading
Tis the season for peregrination, la de dah de dah, de dah, de dah. For a start I’m off to a fun-filled family reunion in sweltering San Diego (in Ramona, CA, if I’m being particular; to get that gen-u-ine desert during prolonged drought experience!) followed by two back-to-back weeklong internal Microsoft conferences in Seattle. Yes, the joys of professional development know no bounds, but if that wasn’t enough, I also get to attend a three day team offsite in Baltimore a couple of days after I get back home to Philly.
Anyway, I’m complaining overmuch because for a start (a) I love my family and (b) I’ve heard mention that this time around I get to ride my brother-in-law’s newish 1937 tractor on his “gentleman-farmer” farm, whooping it up and bellowing my trademark “Yowza” at the top of my lungs as the barely motile beast tops an eye-watering 10mph. To be sure, life doesn’t get any better!
A poison message, for the uninformed, is a “queued” message that can’t be processed for one technical reason or another. Doesn’t sound like much of a bother, but due to the way that queues operate, they can muck up the works if left unhandled.
Azure WebJobs does a decent job of handling poison messages out of the box. Basically, you’re given five tries (by default) to process a given message. If, for instance, the database you’re trying to write to is unreachable or maybe the instructions embodied in an message were somehow malformed then the message would be automagically moved to a “poison” queue for further processing; but only after five failed attempts. As to any further handling, it’d be up to you.
Once again, with the new formed buds of spring a-budding, it only natural for a young man’s thoughts turn to . . . WebJobs. OK, probably not. But this (not quite young!) man has a good reason to be thinking of such things: I’m giving a WebJobs presentation at Philly Code Camp 2016.1 later today. The session will be more than a little hands-on, but I also have a smallish deck, with a number of highlights and resource links, that you can download: Batch Processing with Azure WebJobs.
For the uninitiated, WebJobs can be thought of the newish Azure tech that (most usefully!) enables workflow for the modern web. Think image processing, shopping carts, database administration, Monte Carlo simulations, app “glue,” process control, AI, custom testing, IoT facilitation, site scraping, backups, pipelining, log ingestion and more. Even better, WebJobs are super-simple. You can be up and running in minutes, but more importantly, the “hard” stuff rarely takes more than hours.
If you work with the cloud: run, don’t walk.
The Microsoft folks continue to beaver away in PaaS-land, serving up new Platform as a Service offerings on a seemingly weekly basis. One of the best of these is the new pay-as-you-go DocumentDB service; a fully managed, highly-scalable NoSQL (JSON) document database service that provides:
DocumentDB should be thought of as a complement to SQL Server, Table Storage, Blobs, etc.; not a replacement. It’s a pretty new offering, but even so, there’s a fair amount of related documentation around on the net:
If you’re one of my fellow Neudesic-ies, I’ll be giving an in-depth DPG Presentation on the topic on Friday afternoon, at 1:00PM EST. Please feel free to download my deck or clone the GitHub repository that contains the DpgDocDbDemo code that I’ll be showing in my talk.
Squid Eyes 