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Interesting (infrastructure) tidbits about Microsoft Azure

I attended a session organized by aditi regarding Microsoft Azure and Windows 8, called “Go Cloud 8” today. One of the speakers in the event was Deepak Rao, Microsoft’ Director of Cloud Computing. He shared some interesting numbers about the infrastructure running Microsoft Azure

  • 8 carrier grade data centers around the world. “Carrier” grade because of the sheer size of them.
  • The data center in Chicago houses more than 350,000 servers and is supported by only 30 FTEs (which makes me think about the number of contractors they have there 🙂 )
  • 1 in 4 x86 servers produced were bought by Microsoft. Not sure if it was in 2011 or 2012!!

Deepak also gave an real world example of how one of their customers used Azure.

BPro Inc provides software to counties and states for helping report election results. They run their backend on the Azure platform. During normal periods, they run ~10 instances of compute nodes. But during the election day (11/6) this week, BPro spun up 8600 compute nodes in less than 15 minutes at 4:00 PM EST, to help support the load created by the demand for election results and than again shutdown all of them at around 1:00 AM EST when the demand decreased. Using the “list” pricing of $0.12/hr/compute node, that massive increase in capacity cost them ~$8K!!.

That is pretty impressive and I usually don’t use the work impressive in the same sentence as Microsoft 🙂

November 8, 2012 by Technology Uncategorized Web Windows 1

For loop in Windows command shell

For my records, syntax for running a simple for loop in command prompt

[code]for %i in (SERVER1 SERVER2) do nslookup %i [/code]

note :

  • Looks like the variable can only be single characters. i.e you cannot name the variable %server
  • For using the same syntax in a batch file, you have to add another % to the variable. i.e. %i becomes %%i
November 5, 2012 by Programming Technology Uncategorized Windows 0

And she kicks my arse again

Jhanvi and I ran the 2012 Chicago Hot Chocolate 15K today. This was the first race in the city after we officially became “suburbanites” last week. And let me tell you, that one needs to be highly (HIGHLY) motivated to haul themselves all the way to the city to run a race. And the fact that it was freezing didn’t help.

While the race it self was fun, I think the organizers did a terrible job with the package pickup expo and the post race party. It looks like they didn’t know what 40K people getting together in one place looks like. The expo tent could barely fit a 1000 people and folks had to stand ~2 hours in line to pick up the package in cold weather. And let me not tell you about the post race snack!!. Hopefully they will learn from this and make it a better event next year. Chocolate seems to motivate a whole lot of people (including me 🙂 ).

And in other news, Jhanvi kicked my butt as usual and finished a whole 10 minutes earlier..

Jhanvi’s Results 

My results 

Us After the race 

 

The only thing that was abundant at the race 🙂 

November 5, 2012 by Running Uncategorized 0

SNL hacked

Screenshot of NBC’ hacked website (in particular the Saturday Night Live section). Link to Hacker News discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4740312

I found it interesting that the site was not fixed for several hours even after it was reported on major news outlets. Ironical that NBC itself is a major news outlet :).  It would be great if NBC publishes a follow up on how the server(s) were compromised so that the rest of the world can learn from this incident.

p.s : Nice blog post by my one time colleague, Ed Bellis, on how the security industry should be sharing more information so that we can improve the state of security across the board.

November 5, 2012 by security Technology Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Download SSL certificate using openssl and importing it into a keystore

Following up on my earlier post about using keytool to import and export certificates into a keystore. Here is some more information on using openssl to download the certificate from a remote server and then using keytool to import it into the keystore.

keytool needs the certificate to be in X509 format, so we will use sed to format the certificate.

[code]echo -n | openssl s_client -connect HOST:PORTNUMBER | sed -ne ‘/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p’ > /tmp/$SERVERNAME.cert [/code]

breaking down the command

[code]echo -n[/code]

send an end of line signal to openssl. This allows openssl (or rather the server it is trying to connect to) to disconnect the session

[code]openssl s_client -connect HOST:PORTNUMBER[/code]

asks openssl to act as a client and connect to the HOST on the specificed PORTNUMBER

[code]sed -ne ‘/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p’ [/code]

asks sed to take the input from openssl and only output the content between BEGIN CERTIFICATE and END CERTIFICATE.

NOTE: If you get an error like “SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert unexpected message”, it means the server doesn’t support SSL negotation. Using the command option -no_tls1 helps work around this error. This option will tell openssl to disable TLS1 negotiation.

October 15, 2012 by HOWTO Technology Uncategorized Web 0

2012 Half Marathons : An update

Quick update on the races Jhanvi and I ran so far this year. And yes, she kicked my butt in all of them as usual 🙂

2012 Rock and Roll Chicago Half Marathon

Showing off our medals in the train back home.. It was painful 🙂 

Endomondo’s view of how I ran 

2012 Northface Challenge : Madison

This is the third time, I am running this trail half marathon. And for the first time, I actually did better than the last race. And it was mainly due to Jhanvi encouraging me to practice. Not my best time, but better than last year 🙂

October 4, 2012 by 2012 : Half Marathons Running Uncategorized 4

HOW TO : Compare two directories in Linux

Quick post on using diff to compare two directories in Linux. This will show the list of files and subdirectories that are different in either directories

[code]diff /PATH_TO_FIRST_DIRECTORY /PATH_TO_SECOND_DIRECTORY -r –brief  [/code]

Options used

  • r : Searched recursively through the directory
  • –brief : Only shows the names of the files that differ. If you want details of the content that differs, remove this option
September 11, 2012 by HOWTO Linux Uncategorized 2