Review: SASE Architecture for dummies

Linked in showed some weeks ago the following posting:

So i downloaded the PDF provided by https://www.netskope.com and here my review on this book, which contains an introduction and 5 chapters on 74 pages, which is really more than the typical booklets i reviewed on this blog in the last years. 

The introduction starts with a nice remark: "But security can’t inhibit people’s ability to do their work." - that means, there are new demands from business for apps, services, etc. which does not fit in the traditional castle security approach, because cloud is an environment, which does not fit to the old data center security. The proposal of this book is:

The architecture called secure access service edge (SASE; pronounced
“sassy”) is the proven way forward.  

Chapter one focuses on the vision, how SASE can secure an enterprise. One assumption here is, no enterprise can avoid SaaS apps/services, if you want to be competitive, but old security mechanisms can cope with that challenges. In this chapter the starting building blocks for SASE are enumerated:

• SWGs (Secure web gateways)
• CASBs (Cloud access security brokers)
• ZTNA (Zero trust network access)
• DLP (Data loss prevention)

and then some others are added like FWaaS and RBI (Remote browser isolation). All these tools are summarized under "Security Service Edge" (SSE). The end of the section focuses on the discussion if SSE and SDWAN has to be delivered from one vendor or if a dual vendor approach will work as well. 

The title of chapter 2 is "Bringing SASE to Life with SSE and SDWAN": and the proposal here is, that security and network performance will enhance each other within SASE. The chapter is divided in to parts: looking into the SSE part and the into the networking part. For the SSE part the identity is key and the integration of all the different building blocks (s. enumeration above) with advanced thread protection (ATP). The SDWAN part is from my perspective somehow an advertising of netskope.

Chapter 3 is named "Empowering People through SASE". A summary of this section can be given with the following quote:

But security is also about shielding your staff from themselves —
guarding against the mistakes, temptations, negligence, and errors
of judgment that can do irreparable harm. This is critical in a land-
scape where more than 85 percent to 95 percent of cybersecurity
incidents are attributable to human error, according to research
from Tessian and IBM --- SASE is a powerful tool for navigating these
waters, removing restrictions on your people while empowering
them to work safely in new ways.

Key for empowering SASE is context - every action is examined and based on user behavior activities can be taken to prevent attacks, etc..

"Protecting data and applications" is the fourth chapter of the book. The promise of SASE is, that traffic is not simply blocked or allowed - there a context aware policies possible and there are less tools, which have to be configured and integrated.

Chapter 5 is a 10-step guide, how to implement SASE in your enterprise. These steps vary from "gain awareness" to "optimize network performance". From my perspective a good checklist to start from.

Overall i liked the clear structure of this book. Every section starts with 5 key phrases, what you can learn in that section. There are many comparisons drawn with castles, modern homes or airport security or .... That is really a good idea and makes it much more understandable. Maybe the following snippets shows, why this book was sponsored by netskope:

But that does not matter - if you want to start into SASE: Read this book!
 

 

Review@amazon: AWS for Solutions Architects

 Beginning of 2024 i read the book "AWS for Solutions Architects: The definitive guide to AWS Solutions Architecture for migrating to, building, scaling, and succeeding in the cloud":

The book has 627 pages and consists of 16 chapters.

Due to the number of topics, the author wants to cover (and has to!) the book cannot really go into detail about all the services - but in my opinion that is not necessary. I really liked the network sketches in Chapter 4 and the 6 Pillars in chapter 9. But the rest also fits - there are various keywords or links for each area that provide a good introduction.  

For anyone who knows other hyperscalers and is moving to AWS or is having their first contact with the cloud with AWS, this book should be a must-read. I really liked chapters 9, 14, 15, 16 because they deal with the general topics. Here the author cares more about the reader's knowledge base than about the specific implementation in AWS (and he doesn't leave this out). Absolute reading recommendation!

For more details please read my review at amazon (this time in german only) :)

(But maybe copilot or any other ChatGPT/OpenAI can translate that.

LinkedIn: Lakehouse Analytics - with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks

Today i came across a posting in linkedin.com which points to this nice booklet:

The linkedin posting pointed to site, where you can register for the a PDF, which contains 20 pages and 7 chapters.

Chapter one is a very short one (only half of a page): A typical introduction about data, information, analytics and why this is important :)

In chapter 2 the lakehouse architecture is explained. I liked the phrase "It combines [...] traditional data warehouse with the massive scale and flexibility of a data lake". This phrase combined with a very good table of the differences between a data warehouse and a data lake is from my point of view an excellent definition.

"Data management and analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks" is the title of the third chapter. This chapter only emphasizes that Fabris and Databricks can work seamlessly together and Microsoft introduces a OneLake to simplify the integration of these tools.

Chapter 4 i can not really summarize here. But there is really a cool figure in that chapter. Here only a part of that:

The Databricks part is missing and some other parts as well, but in the new Microsoft approach Fabric consists not only of storage - even PowerBI is a part of that new powerful tool. (one subsection is about AI integration)

The next chapter "Code faster with GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code, and Azure Databricks" is about the demonstrating "the power of Azure Databricks as a leading platform for data and AI when combined with developer tools such as Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot". This is like a small walkthrough how to configure Visual Studio Code.

In the seventh chapter a step by step guide is provided for integrating Databricks with OneLake. 

In my eyes chapter 4 is the key of that booklet, for everyone who wants to know, how the terms Fabric, OneLake, Databricks, Lakehouse are related and how the big picture looks like. Anyone who analyzes data with Microsoft should have read this.

Review@amazon: Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture

 This weekend i read the book "Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture"

https://www.packtpub.com/product/microsoft-power-platform-enterprise-architecture/9781800204577

Packt.com says about the book:

For forward-looking architects and decision makers who want to craft complex solutions to serve growing business needs, Microsoft Power Platform Enterprise Architecture offers an array of architectural best practices and techniques. With this book, you’ll learn how to design robust software using the tools available in the Power Platform suite and be able to integrate them seamlessly with various Microsoft 365 and Azure components. Unlike most other resources that are overwhelmingly long and unstructured, this book covers essential concepts using concise yet practical examples to help you save time.[...]

This is something i fully agree with. 

For more details please read my review at amazon :).

Review: Securing containers & cloud for dummies

Securing containers & cloud (provided by sysdig) is a booklet with 42 pages and 7 chapters. Like most of the "for dummies" series the last chapter is a summary with ten considerations.

But let's start from the beginning:
Chapter one "understanding cloud security" is a really nice abstract. Here some of the topic, which you should be aware of: "overprivileged identites", "visibility over cloud assets", "leaving out IT", "former employees, one-time users and guest accounts that are left active", ... With knowing that the following proposal is made: "to dectect and stop cyber threats [..] first step is to see them". Therefore a singe event store should be used and a open-source validation because of validation an transparency.
The second chapter is named "securing infrastructure as code (IaC). The typical arguments for IaC are speed, scalabilty, resilience, reproducibility but what about security? IaC is created by the developers and this code has to be checked as well as the application sources. And even if IaC is checked, configuration templates in  a CI/CD pipeline will suffer from drift. "Policy as code PaC allows you to leverage a shared policy model across multiple IaC, cloud, and Kubernetes environments.  Not only does PaC provide consistency and strengthen security, but also it saves time and allows you to scale faster."
"Preventing Vulnerabilites" is the third chapter. Many images in production contain patchable vulnerabilites, which should be patched. So the selecting of container images from every source (including DockerHub) without scanning them is not a good idea. One subsection here is "Automate vulnerability scanning in the CI/CD pipeline". I think this is something you should read in the booklet in detail.
After scanning for threats, the next chapter is about detecting and responding to threats. This chapter is only about 3 pages and it is more an appetizer for Falco, which is a solution from sysdig.
The sixth chapter is named "Targeting monitoring and troubleshooting issues" is is plea for open source. "Avoiding Vendor Lock-In" is key to success at least from the perspective of the authors.
As in the beginning mentioned the last chapter is a ten point summary of the topic. This is a fast checklist, you can use.
 

All in all a very good high level introduction into "Securing Containers & Cloud". I recommend all DevOps engineers and developers to spend half an hour to read this booklet.

Review: Mastering Azure Machine Learning

Last week i stumbled upon this book and this weekend there was enough time to walk through it:

 

The book contains 14 chapters on 409 pages - but due to the layout, i think it can fit on 200 pages on a book with "default rendering".
The book is in addition divided in 4 sections: 1 - Azure Machine Learning / 2 - Experimentation and Data Preperation / 3 - Training Machine Learning Models / 4 Optimization and Deployment of Machine Learning Models

Chapter 1 is named "Building an end-to-end machine learning pipeline in Azure". I struggled with this title, but in the first section it is explained: "You can see it as an overview of the book". The subsections cover data exploration, data preparation, choosing the model, optimization and deploying/operating models. The chapter is a teaser with many graphs, examples, stragetgies - a fast end-to-end walk through.

"Choosing a machine learning service in Azure" is the title of the second chapter. Here is everything discussed about ML vs. AI and the Azure services, which provide these techniques (e.g. Data Science Virtual Machine, Azure Batch, Azure Databricks, Azure Functions, Azure IoT Edge, Custom Vision, Azure Machine Learning Designer, Machine Learning Studio,  ...). This chapter contains many screenshots and code snippets - from my point of view to much at this point.

In chapter three (Data experimentation and visualization using Azure) it is shown how to setup your environment via Azure CLI, so that you are able to perform these steps again and again for new projects. In addition it is presented how to run everything on the local machine and track the metrics and artifacts to the Azure workspace. After that visualization is explained including code examples. Pairplots, principal component analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, stochastic neighbor embedding - Really cool.

Chapter 4 is about "ELT, data preparation and feature extraction". Here are some nice commands with Azure CLI provided: How to batch upload data up to the Azure storage accounts and attaching them to the ML workspace. And how to access this data via python.

Chapter 5 "Azure Machine Learning Pipelines" is about to make the content of chapter 4 reusable. I think nothing to note here - a nice reference for the python code which is needed.

"Advanced feature extraction with NLP" is chapter 6. NLP = natural language processing. Nothing more to say here.

The chaper 7 to 9 are about training machine learning models. I think i will not describe each of them. But here a short summary: It starts with decision trees as explanation and then does a deep dive in how to use LightGBM including the python code. Then the same for convolutional neural networks (CNN): explanation/motivation + coding. This is followed by the description of Azure Hyperdrive: tuning and optimizing the machine learning process. The concept of hyperparameters (e.g. number of neurons in a layer)  is introduced and how to choose them with grid sampling on an elastic cloud infrastructure. And last but not least: it is described how Azure provides "a service to users that automatically preprocesses your data, selects an ML model, and trains and optimizes the model to optimally fit your training data [...]".

Chapter 10 is about using clusters. This is a nice introduction about partitioning data, workloads and synchronizing worker nodes.
"Building a recommendation engine in Azure" is the title of chapter 11. Just some catchwords from the content: non-personalized, contentbased, rating-based, hybrid recommendations. After this chapter you will know, why amazons recommendations are like they are ;-)

In chapter 11 & 12 it is described, how to register, deploy and operate a recommendation engine or machine learning model up to MLOps.

The book closes with chapter 14 "What's next?". Most important point like everywhere: Automation...

Summary: I liked this book very much, because every topic starts with an excellent introduction and there are many code examples, so that you can us this book as reference as well. The basic understanding of the author is best described with the following quote:
"the most important tasks [are]: Data acquisition,  Data cleansing, Data labeling, Selecting an error metric. We don't want to blame anyone, but some machine learning engineers love to simply skip these topics and dive right into the fun parts, namely feature engineering, model selection, parameterization, and tuning." 

That hits the bull's eye.

(The review can be found on amazon as well)

Review: Intent based networking for dummies

I found the book intent-based networking on linkedin posted by juniper:

The book contains 5 chapters on 44 pages.

Chapter one (expressing intent and seeing the basics of IBN) tries to give a motivation for intent based networking. And the story goes like this: "humans are slow, expensive, error prone, and inconsistent. [...] the systems are vulerable to small mistakes that can have enormous costs to business."
In addition we have "inadequate automation", "data overload", and "stale documentation". (At this point i think we are generally doomed and should stop networking at all).
BUT with IBN "you can manage what requires auto- mation, make your system standardized and reliable, and ensure you’re free to move and adjust heading into the future." The promise of IBN is to do a change from node-to-node management to an autonomic system. "The sys tem self-operates, self-adjusts, and self-corrects within the parameters of your expressed technical objectives."
So everthing should work like this: you express your intent - this intent is translated and then orchestration configuration will roll out the changes onto your network.
I think on good phrase for IBN is: "You say what, it says how"

The second chapter is named "Looking at the characteristics of IBN. This chapter does not give any helpful information at all. One nice concept is mentionend here: "Simple Pane of Glass": "t’s an important concept and a valuable benefit of having a single source of truth: You can see your entire network from a single, consistent perspective." But is think this is not possible for networks. Depending on your perspective (ethernet, vlans, ips, mpls, ...) the view is completely different. Just think about hardware ports vs virtual ports...
 

"Detailing the IBN architecture" is the titel of chapter 3. This chapter is with 9 pages the biggest chapter inside the booklet. In this chapter an example is drilled through: The intent "I want a VLAN connecting servers A, B, C, and D." is analyzed and the steps from define, translate, verify, deploy and monitor are shown.
In addition there are some subsection where the reference design, abstractions, inventory are put into relation to each other. This is illustrated with very nice figures. Really a good chapter!
 

In chapter four the book moves forward from fulfillment to assurance. "This chapter shows you why your IBN system (IBNS) requires sophisticated, deep analytics that can detect when a deployed service is drifting out of spec and either automatically make the adjustments to bring it back into compliance or alert you to the problem."
It starts with differentiating uncontrolled changes from controlled changes. This is nothing special to IBN. I think this is useful for any kind of operation in IT.
 

Chapter 5 is as always in this "dummmies" series a recap of the chapters before.


All in all a nice booklet which introduces very well in this new kind of network management system. But if IBN can keep the promises - let's see...
 

Review: Kafka: The Definitive Guide

Last week i read the book "Kafka: The Definitive Guide" with the subtitle "Real-Time Data and Stream Processing at Scale" which was provided by confluent.io:

The book contains 11 chapters on 288 pages - let's take look on the content:

Chapter 1 "meet Kafka" start with a motivation, why moving data is important and why you should not spend your effort not into moving but into your business. In addition an introduction to the messaging concepts like publish/subscribe, queues, messages, batches, schemas, topics, partitions, ... Many technical terms are defined there, but some are specific to Kafka and some are more general definitions. One additional info: Kafka was built by linkedin - the complete story told in the last section of this chapter.

The second chapter is about installing Kafka. Nothing special. OS, Java, Zookeeper (if clustered), Kafka.

Chapter 3 is called "Kafka producers: Writing messages to Kafka". Like the title indicates: all configuration details about sending messages are listed and explained. 

Chapter 4 is the same as the previous chapter but for reading messages. Both chapters contain many java example listings.

Chapters 5 & 6 are about clusters and reliability. Here are the nifty details explained like high water marks, message replication, timeouts, indices, ... If you want to run a high available Kafka system, you should read that and in case of failures you will know what to do.

Chapter 7 introduces Kafka Connect. Here a citation, when you should use Connect (it is not possible to summarize this):

You will use Connect to connect Kafka to datastores that you did not write and whose code you cannot or will not modify. Connect will be used to pull data from the external datastore into Kafka or push data from Kafka to an external store. For datastores where a connector already exists, Connect can be used by nondevelopers, who will only need to configure the connectors.

"Cross data cluster mirroring" is the title of chapter 8 - i do not understand why this chapter is not placed before chapter 7...

In chapter 9 and 10 administration and monitoring is explained. Very impressive is the amount of CLI examples. If you have a question: here you will find the CLI command, which provides the answer.

The last chapter "stream processing" is one of the longest chapters (>40 pages).  Here two APIs are presented to do some processing based on the messages. One example is, a stream which processes stock quotes. With stream processing it is possible to calculate the number of trades for every five-second window or the average ask price for every five-second window. Of course this chapter shows much more, but i think this gives the best impression ;-)

All in all a excellent book - even if you are not implementing Kafka ;-)

 

Review: AIOPS for dummies - the newest buzzword in town...

 Today i ran over an article in linkedin, where this book was announced:

The next big thing behind DevOps is AIOps?

Moogsoft says about themselves: "Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world's most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps platform helps the world's top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives...."

So let's take a look inside this book with 43 pages and 7 chapters:

Chapter one start with the declaration of the problem: DevOps & reliability need improvements in incident resolution, meeting SLAs and accelerating digital transformation. Very nice is the short case study, which is provided there.

The beginning of chapter 2 starts with this setence: "AI is technology used to create machines that imitate intelligent human behaviour." YES! They are not talking over the almighty AI - this sounds very promising. AI is for moogsoft statistics, probabilites, calculations and algebra - as physicist i strongly agree with that "legacy" approach. Then this book covers very brief the ai learning techniques.

In chapter 3 the AIOps workflow is presented. Without going into any details here: Moogsoft uses a very nice iconic design, which explains their procedure well. At this point i would recommend you, to take a look on that...

Chapter 4 provides some more use cases for AIOps. Nice - but nothing really new.

Chapter 5 claims, that AIOps is providing a unified view for monitoring, observability and change data. Sounds good - but i think digging into details will show limits of the promise. But page 32 shows a list of systems which are already integrated - this is really a very impressive list.

In chapter 6 moogsoft advertise their small entry solution "moogsoft express".  

The last chapter closes with the typical "ten tips".

 

All in all a nice idea and let's see how this solution performs on the market!

Review: Terraform Up & Running

Because of doing many project in the cloud, terraform is the tool which i use regularly. And to get better, i decided to read this book:

If you are working with a cloud of one of the hyperscalers, the you should take a look at terraform and perhaps you should read this book ;-)

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de (like all my reviews: written in german ;-).

Review: Container Storage for Dummies

After reading Running Containers in Production for Dummies this book fell into my hands:

 
 

Container Storage for Dummies is promoted by RedHat and consists of 5 chapters with 35 pages. 

The first chapter gives a short summary about containers. I liked this statement very much: "For example, a VM is like a heavy hammer. It assumes you’re running a server and that the server can host multiple applications. [...] And the container can run just about anywhere, even on a bare metal machine or in a VM — the container doesn’t care." The chapter ends with a motivation why containers need persistent storage: ephemeral containers are transient....
Chapter 2 has the title "Looking at Storage for and in Containers". The key argument here is: "Software-defined storage (SDS) separates storage hardware from storage controller software, enabling seamless portability across multiple forms of storage hardware. You can’t slice and dice storage using appliances or typical SAN/NAS as easily, readily, or quickly as you can with SDS." Both terms (Storage for Containers + Storage in Containers) are given a defintion (just take a look inside the book ;-)).
In chapter 3 the authors want to convince the reader about the coolness of container-native storage with phrases like "Container-Native Storage Is the Next Sliced Bread". I think the main argument in this section is, that RedHat contributes a substantial parts to open source Kubernetes so that RedHats Openshift container storage fits easily in there. And this is done by introducing the Container Storage Interface which can be used by all storage providers.
Chapter 4 motivates why developers like Container-Native storage: because it can be easily managed without SAN administrators....
The last chapter closes with ten reasons to move to Cantainer-Native storage: simplified management, more automation, scalibility, ....

As summary i think, this book is a nice starting point about the problems and possible solutions with storage for containers. It is a little bit disappointing, that openshift is not really explained - but within only 35 pages this is really impossible.
If you are working or starting to work with containers i require you to read this booklet - it is a good start into the container world!

Review: Running Containers in Production for dummies

 Last evening i read the following booklet:

Here my review:

Chapter one gives within 7 pages an excellent introduction into "Containers & Orchestration Platforms". From Kubernetes over Openshift/Docker Swarm up to Amazon EKS - many services are described. In my opinion Azure AKS is missing, but it is clear, that every hyperscaler will provide you its managed Kubernetes environment. At the end even Apache Mesos is listed - which is out of scope for the most of us. 

Building & Deploying Containers is the headline of chapter 2 and a brief, solid description of these topics is given. If you want to know what all the buzzwords like CI/CD/CS, Pipelines, Container Registries are about: Read that chapter and you have a good starting point.

Nearly 33% of the book(let) is abount Monitoring Containers (chapter 3). This points in to the right directions. You have to know what your containers are doing and what you have to change with continuous delivery and continuous deployment. If you are running tens or hundreds of containers, the monitoring has to be  automatic as well - or you are lost. "A best practice for using containers is to isolate workloads by running only a single process per container.  Placing a monitoring agent — which amounts to a second process or service — in each container to get visibility risks destroying a key value of containers: simplicity." - So building up a monitoring is not such easy, as is was on full-stack servers...

Chapter 4 is about Security. This focuses on the following topics: Implementing container limits against resource abuse, how to avoid outdated container images, management of secrets and image authenticity.

The last chapter closes with "Ten Container Takeaways".

 

Within 43 pages a really nice starting point to learn about the world of docker and container orchestration.

Review: Blockchain for dummies

The book "blockchain for dummies" provided by IBM contains 6 chapters on 41 pages. (Download from IBM)

The chapters 1 & 2 describe the basic of blockchain technology.
From my point of view, this part is a bit too shallow, because there is no single formular inside this book ;-)
But there are some nice illustrations given:

and the differences between a public blockchain and corporate blockchains are good explained including their  consequences.

Chapter 3 is about where companies can use blockchains. This chapter i did not understand. It is all about frictions which companies have to overcome. But these frictions are not special to blockchain (like "innovation restrictions").

In chapter 4 some examples are shown. These examples are very universal examples, which are too abstract in my eyes.

Chapter 5 contains information about a project of the Linux Foundation: Hyperledger.
This is very nice opening for https://www.hyperledger.org/.

Chapter 6 comes up with ten steps to your first blockchain application.
Skippable.

My conclusion: a very nice book and really ok for free. But I wouldn't spend any money on it...

Review @amazon: Skalierbare Container-Infrastrukturen: Das Handbuch für Administratoren und DevOps-Teams. Inkl. Container-Orchestrierung mit Docker, Rocket, Kubernetes, Rancher & Co.

 Last week a read 

Skalierbare Container-Infrastrukturen: Das Handbuch für Administratoren und DevOps-Teams. Inkl. Container-Orchestrierung mit Docker, Rocket, Kubernetes, Rancher & Co.

 

This book offers an all-round look at really all topics: From Docker (300 pages) to registries to alternative container platforms. Then to container clusters (including Pacemaker setups) and via Docker-Swarm to the popular topic Kubernetes (also 300 pages). Finally there is Rancher, Mesosphere and Ceph. The sections on Docker and Kubernetes could each be separated out as separate books, as the descriptions are so extensive and worth knowing.

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de (like all my reviews: written in german ;-).

Review at amazon: SAP Cloud Platform

Last week i read this book:

Before starting with the Oracle Cloud i wanted to read something other than AWS or Microsoft Azure. I was surprised at the completely different target of this cloud in respect to AWS and Azure. It is much more focused on business and business value - which is clearly one core domains of SAP.

This book contains a very well written introduction into cloud services - many other books could take this as an example. Very impressing are the over 120 mainly conceptional pictures - they make it much easier to understand the SAP Cloud Platform.

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de (like all my reviews: written in german ;-).

review at amazon: Azure for Architects

This weekend i read "Azure for Architects - Implementing cloud design, DevOps, containers, IoT and serverless solutions on your public cloud".

After i had some trouble to publish my review on amazon.de and i put in onto my blog (take a look here), i wrote a smaller review only about 2 chapters. And this worked...

One statement i liked, was:

This is not only true for security, but sometimes it is important to state the obvious.

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de (like all my reviews: written in german ;-).

review: architecting microsoft azure solutions

Last week i read the exam ref "architecting microsoft azure solutions"

The book cover states

Designed for architects and other cloud professionals ready to advance their status, Exam Ref focuses on the critical thinking and decision-making acumen needed for success at the MCSA level.

The book "Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions" comes with 320 pages and 6 chapters. The claim of the book: "This book teaches you how to design and architect secure, highly-available, performant, monitored and resilient solutions on Azure".

The first chapter is "Design compute infrastructure". The beginning is clearly structured: Fault Domains, Availabilty Sets and Update Domains. Unfortunately, when listing the VM types, thera are various letters shown, but an explanation of the abbreviations of that letters is missing.
The sub-chapter Migration contains only many URLs. Helpful examples are not provided. The next subchapters serverless computing and microservices are not worth reading. It is not at all clear which requirements have to be met in order to build an application serverless or in a container. But there are many comparisons when serverless computing fits better than microservices.
The subchapter "Design Web Applications" loses itself in general considerations regarding availability and description of REST.
The biggest problem with Chapter 1 is that there is a lack of examples that allow the topics to be played through once. Also missing at the end of the chapter of the typical question catalog, with which one could prepare for an exam.

After chapter 1 I did not want to read any further - that would have been a mistake. For all who buy this book: skip Chapter 1!

The chapters 2 and 3 (Storage & Networking) are really good. They provide brief explanations and for every use case detailed instructions for the Azure command line or the portal including screenshots are presented. Both chapters are very well written and give an overview of the respective topics. Here is a list for the storage chapter: Blob Storage, Azure Files, Azure Disks, Azure Data Catalog, Azure Data Factory, SQL Data Warehouse, Data Lake Analytics, Analysis Services, HDInsight, SQL Database, SQL Server Stretch Database, MySQL, Postgresql , Redis Cache, Data Lake, Azure Search, Azure Time Series, Comsmos DB, MongoDB. There is no topic left open. The same applies to the network chapter.

Chapter 4 "Design security and identity solutions" is very well structured. All terms are introduced at the beginning and then various options with sequence diagrams are played through. Subsequently, the appropriate services such as Azure Active Directoy are introduced. Very nice here is the representation of the integration possibilities with ASP.Net. Otherwise, topics such as integration with Office 365 (calendar access) or key management in the cloud are highlighted.

The fifth chapter is, in my view, more an outlook: "Design solutions by using platform service". Here are the topics like AI, IoT, streaming treated. Here you can take with you, what is possible and what building blocks Azure provides.

The final chapter "Design for operations" deals with cross-functionalities such as monitoring and alarming. A wrapper for the following services will be delivered: Azure Monitor, Azure Advisor, Azure Service Health, Azure Activity Log, Azure Dashboard, Azure Metrics Explorer, Azure Alerts, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Application Insights. Almost every topic has an example including configuration via the Azure portal.

Conclusion: Except for the first chapter a very good book to get started. It is not good for exam preparation, as no questionnaires / multiple choice lists are included. It is a pity that the subchapters have no numbering and you have to navigate with the font sizes. Nevertheless, you will hardly find a faster entry into Azure.

Review: eBook: Saas for Dummies

As i wrote some days ago, Oracle provided this book as free download:

Here my review:

The book starts with the chapter "recognizing modern business challenges and opportunities". The author comes up with things like "business transformation starts with digital transformation" or "businesses will need to rethink every element of their business". It contains a typical opening for this topic.

The next chapter has the title "Empowering Business Managers with SaaS Solutions". The focus here lies on how to use the cloud for your sales process. One short citation: "Robust  sales  cloud  solutions  are  so  much more  than  contact  lists,  schedules,  and sources of prospects." Another focus are the advantages for HR professionals to finding and retaining top talents with the help of SaaS. For further information the following link is provided:  www.oracle.com/goto/mit-tech-review

At page 35 of 68 chapter 3 starts. "Transforming you Business with SaaS". There are given some helpful links like "www.oracle.com/cloud/saas-scalability.html" or "www.oracle.com/cloudtco" and some others.

Chapter 4 ("Choosing Your Path to the Cloud") talks about building hybrid
environments and extending apps with social, mobile and process capabilites. I think without some additional links, this is much to short.

By far the best chapter is chapter 5: "Ten (or so) Important Questions to Ask you SaaS Provider". I will not reveal these questions (and answers) on this blog - but this is really helpful. Nevertheless the answers are sometime too short.

From page 57 up to 61 a glossary is provided.

My conclusion on this book: This is a really good quickstart into SaaS but not a deep dive into this topic. Thanks to Oracle to provide it as free download.

eBook: Saas for Dummies: free download from oracle.com

If you visited oracle.com today you hit the following landing page:

And if you are interested in that book, just hit the "get saas for dummies" button and after a few clicks, you have downloaded this ebook:

68 pages is not so much - i will try to read it and give a review in a later posting.

Review at amazon: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Official Study Guide

This weekend i read this book:

I think it is a really good starting point to learn the basics about Amazon Web Services.
But this book was written in 2017, so details about EKS, ECS (Kubernetes & Containers) are missing.

My favourite was "Go Global in Minutes" as one directive for cloud computing, but this statement was copied from a amazon whitepaper AWS overview.

If you are interested, take a look at my review at amazon.de (like all my reviews: written in german ;-).