Articles

Common Data Models – Defining an initial structure for Americas University

Couple months ago I started a new series of posts here about Common Data Models (CDM). The idea with that was to starting some exploration around this new technology brought by Microsoft into the market throughout its data services in Azure, and where the benefits of it resides. The first post that introduces the concept of CDM and does suggest a fictitious scenario for us to land down the concepts related to it overtime, can Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Common Data Models – An initial view

Integration isn’t a simple topic to talk about. This is because, over the years, different methodologies and technologies were made available in the market to bring some sort of facilitation to a, by nature, very complex task – make systems talk to each other. While REST APIs has been establishing itself as the “most appropriate way” to integrate applications, there are some scenarios (legacy applications, for instance) where moving data around would be more appropriate Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Azure Web Apps, Private Endpoint and APIM to host APIs privately

If I could elect a top ask from my clients when designing a new architecture that envisions a new environment in the public cloud, that would be “I need to keep my entire set of data, APIs and underlying applications private”. We all know that this is a valid concern, as security becomes, every day, more critical to companies all around the World. That’s why I’ve decided to put together some articles that circle-back those Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Protecting APIs with API Management and Application Gateway

Most of the modern web applications out there are API-based, right? Americas University (AU) is not an exception to that. There are, at least, dozens of applications under their current environment nowadays which rely on different types of APIs to properly work. It turns out that, over time, Americas University’s technical teams have been able to get themselves up-skilled on Azure, which enabled them to get things done on Microsoft’s cloud platform quicker than never before. As Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Copying data from AWS RDS MySQL into Azure through Data Factory Integration Runtime

One of the key needs of customers implementing analytics solutions in the cloud is to move data between clouds. Indeed, most of the customers I’ve been working with after knowing Azure’s capabilities for data and analytics want to bring data from their current data provider (regardless it is a public cloud provider, such AWS or an on-prem datacenter) into Azure’s services to see how it works. This post intends to explore a solution related to Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Building a Content Tracker with Azure Cognitive Search and Video Indexer API

Recently, I was invited by a customer (Americas University) to be part of a discussion around “how to build a content tracker solution” to address a specific need they have. A couple of weeks later, we came up with the solution which I’m going to guide you throughout this post. Scenario Over the past years, Americas University has been acquiring several other educational institutes, incorporating both students, physical units and digital content produced by those. Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Creating an automated video processing flow in Azure

Processing video is that kind of scenario that fits perfectly for cloud computing, right? I mean, it usually requires a certain power of processing (video is usually a heavy kind of workload) available, it does require a considerable amount of storage, it usually needs to be high-scalable (depending on the volume of videos being processed), so on so forth. In education (a industry which I have been working very closely for a long time), especially Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Azure Lab Services webinar for Brazilian market

On September 19, 2019 I had the chance to present a webinar about Azure Lab Services to Brazilian customers. Dozens of customers joined the call, and together we had the chance to dig into both concepts and practical aspects of service usage. Below you can find the deck presented at that opportunity and also, some useful links related to Lab Services in Azure. Azure Lab Services from Fabrício Lopes Sanchez In addition to the deck, Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Orchestrating containers with Docker Swarm – Part 2

Docker Swarm is the containers orchestration solution built from the ground up and maintained by Docker. Through an additional layer on top of the Docker Engine and taking advantage of a subset of built-in commands, Swarm does provides to developers and infrastructure professionals a simplified way to accomplish something non-trivial at all – orchestrating containers within an actual cluster. In the last post I wrote in here (on the blog, I mean), I discussed in-depth Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago

Orchestrating containers with Docker Swarm – Part 1

Containers appeared on the market of technology as “the next big step” on the evolutionary scale of application servers. However, for a while, doing something really serious (productive environments that needed scaling, and such) with containers was virtually impossible, even relying on the power of the public cloud. The reason for that was apparent: at that time, there was no technology associated with them that would allow us to perform some classic operations already trivial Read more…

By Fabricio Sanchez, ago