Is it possible to learn Azure practical skills without paying or providing my card info?
I found out about the https://portal.azure.com/. And about the modular tutorials https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/browse/?products=azure. But I am not sure whether or not it will be feasible for me to cover all important for the commercial development topics with just the free resources above.
Maybe there are other ways to learn Azure profoundly without paying or providing my card info? It is an important question for me, because I really want to learn Azure a lot, but if there is no free plan to learn it, then I will have to pick something else (e.g. AWS or Heroku).
Here learning Azure implies being able to access theoretical knowledge base and documentation (both of which I am sure are present) and also being able to use a fully free (and without any card info) sandbox environment. And the question is a doubt that such a free sandbox environment exists.
The Microsoft Learn resource is very good and free. I use it all the time. However, not every learning module is free. Some require an account. This might be around 5% that require your own Azure account.
Can you learn Azure for free with Microsoft Learn? Absolutely YES. There are almost 1,000 modules on the site to choose from. I recommend this site even for very experienced Azure developers. For example, the VPN Gateway modules are free to practice with.
Microsoft Learn
After a while I was able to come over the Azure sandboxes. And that is what I was looking for in the question. E.g. this article explains how to use them.
Related
Made a rather complex Asp.Net Core (2) App for a NGO, deployed on Azure, do we need WAF?
Thanks for your answer(s).
(Got the idea that most providers offer it for free. Money is a bit of an issue for the NGO).
I'm afraid that your question is not suitable for asking on StackOverflow, which seems to be not a technical issue about coding as my view. Infomation Security forum is more suited to ask for your needs, I think so.
However, Considering for reducing the cost for using some specifical secure services or features, such as WAF, you can directly realize some simple features by using Filters in ASP.NET Core as a simple secure middleware for your app, or search on GitHub to find some opensource components that features could satisfy your needs to integrate into your app.
As references, there are two GitHub repos which you can refer to.
dustinmoris/Firewall
saineshwar/Secure-ASP.NET-Core-MVC-Application
Hope it helps.
Will CKAN be the best solution for a portal like asiapacificenergy.org?
If yes, can you provide an estimate of how much effort, time and developers would be required?
Any tips or best practices you can share for an inexperienced team? Any pitfalls to avoid?
Thank you very much.
Any help would be highly appreciated!
Kind of hard to say. Depends exactly what you want to do exactly.
From ckan.org:
CKAN, the world’s leading Open Source data portal platform CKAN is a powerful data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data.
CKAN is like wordpress but instead of blog posts its datasets. It helps manage and inventory datasets for an organization. It has other cool and powerful features too but that site you mentioned reminds me of ArcGIS kind of. There is also Socrata or many other vendor offerings. I prefer CKAN though.
There is a demo site (demo.ckan.org) you can play with, add and remove stuff from, etc to get a feel for it.
They have decent documentation as well that you can follow https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.8/user-guide.html . You could setup a local version to get a feel for how hard or easy it is. https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.8/maintaining/installing/install-from-source.html
I'd say you need someone with python and server experience to get you setup and then basic usage and administration can be delegated. But it can be learnt.
Gov.uk uses ckan for their data catalogue and have some helpful docs available as well. https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/data-gov-uk-supporting-ckan.html
am working on a project and don't have experience with developing applications, I want like the BEST and EASY way to build cloud based SaaS product.
Can anyone tell which tech stack I should use, which backend lang/framework, db, which cloud company etc? I know only php in backend as of now but am thinking to first learn js and then nodeJS and then use it for backend and for db am thinking to use mysql.
There's something which might affect your answer, am actually not expecting much traffic on it not even in future. Please tell considering both the scenarios, application with very low traffic expectation and application with high traffic.
I would say the best way is to sit down and write out exactly what product you want to build - what's it's audience, it's purpose, what are your requirements around security, availability, etc, what kind of information is it going to process, how is this information gathered and retrieved - and then look at what skills you have access to, or could acquire easily. That will determine what technology stack would work for you. I'm sure folks on Slack will be happy to help with that once it's clearer what you're trying to achieve.
If you don't want to put details of your product design on Stack, get advice from someone offline.
In terms of cloud hosting, for a small-scale project they're probably all going to be just fine, but the technology stack you choose would help determine which might work best.
I am looking for simple analogies to explain windows azure, app fabric, etc to students or layman person. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
Thanks
N
Well, first I would try and talk about how we used to build and maintain things. Buying our own hardware, building it, programming it, and connecting it to the internet. That's the old way. Then, I would pivot into what cloud service providers are. In a nutshell, they are just somebody else's servers. Usually Amazons, Microsoft's or Googles servers. AWS/Azure/GCP.
Here is a quick youtube video explaining it in layman's terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ERdeg8Sfv4
Cloud service providers offer web portal, a website, where folks can click and build services like storage, backup, DNS, database, more websites, load balancing, and - maybe the most popular - virtual machine hosting.
What makes CSPs so successful is economies of scale. CSPs will build huge data centers and engineer them to provide the kind of services that most businesses need. COntrast that to if every business were to build their own from scratch. There are however lots of challenges to these CSPs, like needing a lot more spare capacity and having to build something that fits everyone as opposed to something that fits a particular user. So, for a small business, whether they save money depends on their use case. You might save more building from scratch, but then you'd have to train and pay folks to maintain your own servers.
One of the most revolutionary benefits that cloud service providers brought into the market is that purchasing additional capacity is much easier and faster. You might have taken weeks to buy hardware and install it at your location. Or if you are renting though traditional suppliers you might take a few hours to let them manually reconfigure things. However they now make everything automatic so you can get a new server within seconds. This have allowed businesses to build their applications to allow them to scale on demand. This means that they pay different amount of money for the services depending on how much they use. This have the ability to reduce costs but it again require more time to develop and maintain the more complex applications.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.