In Azure, every VM has a persistent OS Disk that is used for booting the VM and contains the operating system. In addition to an OS disk, each VM also has a temporary disk that is present on the compute cluster hosting your VM. Why is my OS disk not @ /dev/sda? In most cases the OS disk is /dev/sda but in some odd cases it is not. This is not an Azure specific issue but a default Linux behavior. The ordering in which Linux enumerates SCSI devices is nondeterministic. It scans SCSI devices in the order they appear on the PCI Bus. Therefore, whichever disk is enumerated first is /dev/sda. ...

It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs (no, not that one! We’re never going to be able to decide that one!). GIFs take up a massive amount of space (often multiple megabytes!) and if you’re a web developer, then that’s completely against your ethos! As a web developer, you want to minimize the bits your users need to download so that your website loads fast. That’s why you minify javascript, optimize PNGs, JPEGs and sometimes turn JPEGs to WebPs as well. But then what about the venerable GIF? ...

Azure Video Indexer is one of my favorite services! It provides some amazing features such as: Identify faces and celebrities Extract text and objects (e.g. cat, table, car etc.) Detect scenes and shots Emotion and sentiment detection Audio effects such as clapping, silence & speech The full list of features can be viewed at https://vi.microsoft.com/en-us/ Get the credits rolling! Recently, Video Indexer announced they’ve added the capability to detect rolling credits in the videos. One of the key scenarios enabled by this feature is the ability for video owners to identify a natural point in the video where they can recommend the next episode or show aka Netflix autoplay experience as shown below: ...

We’re living in a golden age of web browser choice. But before I begin this story, I need to take you back to 2006. You see back in 2006 as a young technologist, my choices of a web browser were limited. It was either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. But then one day while browsing through PC World magazine, I discovered an alternate option – Opera. Opera had many differentiated features such as a customizable streamlined user interface as well as being more memory efficient and faster than Firefox. There were many other features that made Opera my go-to browser but the most important for my browsing on a 256 Kbps turned out to be the “Instant-back”. Normally, when you press the back button in a browser, it will try to reload the page but in Opera the page loaded from cache, so the back action was instant! ...

When you need to create a lot of instances from a custom VM image, VM Scale Sets and Shared Image Gallery are the services you need to use. In this session we walk through how to combine the power of VM Scale Sets & Shared Image Gallery to build infrastructure at scale.

Managed Disks make the managedment of disks a breeze in Azure. In this session I talk about the updates we’ve introduced to Managed Disks since Ignite 2017.

Azure Resource Manager stack has been released for almost three years now. In those three years many features have been added that are exclusive to Azure Resource Manager. In this session, I demonstrate the process of migrating your existing infrastructure to Azure Resource Manager without downtime. See a list of all the benefits here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/migrate-iaas-to-azure-resource-manager.

Sharing custom images within an organization to different subscriptions globally has been a long standing ask from Azure customers. With Shared Image Gallery we’re making this dream a reality! Read more about Shared Image Gallery https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/shared-image-gallery-now-in-limited-public-preview/ In this session, I present how customers can get started with Shared Image Gallery.

Video encoding has always been a fairly compute intensive task. With every new generation of video encoders, more computational power has been required to achieve the compression benefits. HEVC/H.265 is the latest state of the art video compression standard with x265 being the most popular open-source encoder used for encoding into the HEVC/H.265 format. In comparison to AVC/H.264 (the previous state of the art encoding format), HEVC offers about double the data compression ratio at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. ...

Often when I’m working on this blog, I work over multiple days and end up working on multiple devices. The blog is written in markdown and tracked in a Git repo on Azure Devops. The other day a scenario arose where I was customizing the theme of the blog but not getting anywhere. I decided to have another go at the customization few days later but this time on another device. Luckily, I was able to make progress and achieve the style I was looking for. ...