by ezs | Sep 6, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Way back in 2015 I passed the 70-534 beta exam “Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions”. As a beta exam, taken internally, there were seemingly hundreds of questions.
Since then, Microsoft changed their certification program, moving to role-based certification (and as an aside moving all certifications to be around cloud solutions).
Time to re-certify.
First up – review the certification path. The Azure Training paths are pretty well called out.
Azure Fundamentals – AZ-900. As a personal stretch I decided to take this exam, not just as a standalone piece of certification, but to prepare for leading a couple of cohorts of colleagues at work through a “minimooc” team led set of training. The exam was relatively simple – but using the experience was helpful in mentoring others across the team to be prepared for and pass this exam. My personal goal is to support some re-skilling and re-certification of the majority of the Infrastructure Services team by year end. The Microsoft Learn site gives much of the content for the exam – but not quite everything.
Next up Azure Solutions Architect. Two exams (AZ-300 and AZ-301, or the newer AZ-303 and AZ-304). I sat both pairs; I learned a heck of a lot about Cosmos DB that I didn’t know a month ago.
Passed and happy for another two years.
by ezs | Aug 31, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – BBC missing again. Labor Day weekend in the US. Another gathering point for family, friends – and another reminder around masks and distancing. 3000 new cases in the UK – some from additional testing. No end in sight for any of the restrictions.
Regular update for the week from The Seattle Times. Second peak is slowing, death rate is dropping. WA DOH continues to not report “total tests” – so there is no indication of positive test rate.
Friday – 6.2M cases in the US. 200k cases per week. 190k deaths. No daily updates from the BBC again
Thursday – “vaccine on its way” says CDC.
Wednesday – Pelosi mask distraction. 185K US deaths.
Tuesday – looks like working from home is in place for maybe six more months. Today school-from-home started. All of us, in the house, in different rooms, having meetings online. US will not work with WHO on vaccine. US is starting to consider herd immunity – which failed in the UK.
Monday – Half a year. Feels like the meta-aggregation diary of Pepys. 25 million global cases, 6M in the US, WH vs Task Force differences. The tone of the news is moving from “hopeful” to a grimmer place; reflecting resurgent infections.
by ezs | Aug 29, 2020 | evilzenscientist
More fun this morning with grappling DAX to pull out the data I need.
We write multiple tags to Azure resources – from the resource group down to anything that takes them. Makes showback, accountability, support so much cleaner.
The tags are returned, in a non deterministic order, via the billing API – and look like this (data cleaned up), a list of tag/values. JSON-like ish kinda.
“application“: “Shared SQL“,”project“: “Shared Database Engineering“,”costcenter“: “1234“,”itowner“: “Buckley, Martin“,”supportgroup“: “Database Engineering“,”businessowner“: “Buckley, Martin“
I was looking at some DAX to pull this apart; PowerBI has a native “extract text between delimiters” function. It’s not going to build a tree of arbitary values; but I can now cleanly extract the tags I need to build this datamodel.
After I get this working, it might be time to pull all of the discrete DAX steps together to make it more efficient against a vast dataset.
Fun times on a Saturday.
Follow up to this. Extracting multiple pieces of insight from the tags – that drive KPIs for service improvement:
– resource groups with no costcenter tag (this is the cardinal sin – no costcenter and showback isn’t there, getting to health on this is easy)
– resource groups where itowner or businessowner don’t meet business rules (ICs can’t be owners)
– resource groups where the supportgroup is not valid (it doesn’t match a ServiceNow Assigment group)
Most of all – I can find everything tagged with “placeholder” or “set by policy” and sweep that broom through the tagging.
All in all – a good few hours of work.
by ezs | Aug 29, 2020 | evilzenscientist
SLES on Azure.
Windows Server 2019.
Nice and easy.
by ezs | Aug 24, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – a handful of confirmed “re-infections” is a worrying sign. Will a vaccine even be effective?
Weekly reminder of the state of the State from The Seattle Times. Plateau – but not safe.
Friday – across Europe travel restrictions are returning – similar to earlier in the year.
Thursday – “undeniable surge” in France, South Korea struggling to contain outbreaks. Second wave? Maybe. How these cases are suppressed is going to be vital learning.
Wednesday – the never ending flood of news is numbing. Trying to sustain empathy with 24M global cases, 5.8M US cases, 820K global deaths and 180k US deaths is hard. US politics are working to suppress the numbers and the news. Meanwhile Italy has surge of cases. Russia approves second vaccine.
Tuesday – Today India, Turkey, Spain again. US back to school is starting to prove a disaster.
Monday – it’s nearly September. Birmingham, UK continues towards lockdown. Boris says “go back to school”. We know how this ends. HK confirms re-infection.
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