I try to avoid writing blog posts that I like to call “hot takes”—quick crappy opinions on the news of the day, but this is a topic I feel particularly strongly about. I’m not sure how many of you were using Microsoft’s Azure Hadoop offering HDInsight, when it debuted in the 2012-13 timeframe, but it […]
I was going to New York last weekend from my home of Philadelphia. We were running late for the train, and for the first time ever, I had a booked an award ticket on Amtrak. For reasons unbeknownst to me, you can not make changes to an award ticket on their app (I didn’t try […]
Recently I’ve run into a couple of situations where customers had lost key business data due to several factors. Whether it is ransomware, a virus, or just hardware failure, it doesn’t really matter how you lose your data, it just matters that your data is lost, and your business is now in a really bad […]
I don’t typically blog about network engineering here. However, in the last few weeks I’ve seen several major companies get hit with ransomware attacks. While this isn’t an uncommon thing in 2019, it is uncommon that their entire environments were taken offline because of it. So with that, let’s talk about how these attacks can […]
Recently, I learned something new about Azure Automation–that you could execute tasks inside of a VM. I haven’t dealt with this situation before–typically, any tasks I want to execute inside of a VM, I execute using a scheduler like SQL Agent, or the Windows scheduler. However, in this situation, we were trying to reduce costs, […]
This thread on Twitter last night really piqued my interest: Looking for your Ideas – The biggest challenge at the moment is explain to traditional #ITPro audiences why upskilling in the cloud is important. How are you communicating this message w/o alienating them? Discuss. — Michael Bender (@MichaelBender) April 10, 2019 It really made […]
Yesterday, I wrote my monthly column for Redmond Magazine about dealing with situations where your management doesn’t want to invest in the resources to provide reliability for your hardware and software environment. Whether its redundant hardware and even offsite backups, many IT organizations fail at these basic tasks, because the business side of the organization […]
For a long time, CPUs and memory got faster, but we were stuck with spinning disks that topped out at 15,000 RPM. We got SSDs which were orders of magnitude faster, but we were still ultimately limited by controller throughput. NVME changes all of that. Do you know what NVME storage is? If you don’t, […]
My wife is a Type 1 diabetic, and uses a Medtronic insulin pump to maintain her blood sugar at healthy levels. While the device performs its job adequately, the surrounding software has always been a total disaster. Whether it’s requiring outdated operating systems or browsers, or the use of Java, Kelly has always had great […]
One of the cool feature additions to Azure SQL Database is Azure SQL Analytics, an additional feature that connects your Azure SQL Database to Azure Log Analytics. You can use this in conjunction with Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools. Once this is configured you can see all […]