Cloudy mainframes in 2020

So you have a mainframe you want to move to Azure Cloud?

With the new NTT and Microsoft Alliance announced this month, look for interesting things to happen in this space and more in the coming months.  NTT Research opened its Palo Alto offices in July 2019 as a new Silicon Valley Startup.

Some of the initiatives listed in the PR include:

1. Global Digital Fabric.
2. Cybersecurity threat intelligence analytics
3. Social robotics with relational AI for digital companions
4. Digital workpace solutions
5. Knowledge discovery and management.
6. All-photonics networks
7. Digital twin computing
8. Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN)
9. Natural interactions between people, nature and technology.

The NTT DATA Group's 2019 Annual report may shed some light on these initiatives.

The PHI, CIS and MEI Labs within NTT Research are working with universities to research hardware, materials and computational techniques.   See this presentation on Quantum Computing with some of these partners mentioned.

What's Global Digital Fabric?  I don't think it's nanotech shirts, though they sound pretty game-changing for athletes and the medical industry.  According to this announcement, it's combining Microsoft Azure with NTT's "globally-connected ICT infrastructure".

Social robots will be fascinating.  Robot companions could shadow you during sports, at home, in school, at a hospital or at work.  Something as simple as a robot pet or insect gently reminding you about your prescriptions or monitoring your blood sugar could change many people's lives. A physical, interactive robot nagging you about your homework, guiding your studies and providing conversational AI for languages could change the way you learn.

What if we could take a child's stuffed toy and use Relational AI and some motors to turn it into a trusted teaching companion?  Jacqueline Westlund's post on MIT's web site is really fascinating.  There is an open-source MIT AI Ethics Education Curriculum available here.  Human-robot interaction (HRI) will be huge in 2020.

All-photonics networks will accomodate "petabit-class scalable optical networks".  I can see AI & ML playing a big part in reducing noise and improving performance across large ranges.  Intel, Sony and NTT announced an "innovation forum" called the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IWN) Global Forum to accelerate R&D in this space.

Speaking of noise reduction, I hope we see noise reduction home "appliances" emerge in 2020.  Perhaps some active acoustic soundproofing foam which uses noise cancellation on a room-scale.  Having that soundproof tunnel at home would be great for relaxation, concentration.  Being able to cheaply control the acoustic properties of a room using some fabric or foam would be great for musicians and music aficionados.

The topic of natural interactions between people, nature and technology is super-broad and could apply to many areas of study.   The NTT DATA Group's AI Guidelines provide some guidelines for transparency and understanding in AI.  The NTT DATA Technology Foresight 2019 highlights predictions in areas such as XR Space (AR/VR/MR), brain tech, social and digital divides and many other topics.  A great read towards 2020 tech.

A 2018 presentation on "corevo" from NTT identifies 4 types of AI: Agent, Ambient, Heart-Touching, Network.

It's the Heart-Touching AI's which excites me in 2020.  Analyzing people's minds and bodies to understand their deep psyche, their intellect, and their instincts.  Tech such as mind and body reading and bidirectional mind communication, emotional and tactile feedback loops will bring us closer to natural interactions with AI devices.

Now back to old school computing, AzureCAT has you covered on the mainframe front with Deploying NTT Data UniKix in Azure.  

Part 1 Deploying the VM
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/AzureCAT/Deploying-NTT-Data-UniKix-in-Azure-Part-1-Deploying-the-VM/ba-p/775840

Part 2 - Configure TPE and compile the ACCT Application
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/AzureCAT/Deploying-NTT-Data-UniKix-in-Azure-Part-2-Configure-TPE-and/ba-p/779142

Open Mainframe Project
https://github.com/openmainframeproject
https://landscape.openmainframeproject.org/

x3270 terminal emulator
http://x3270.bgp.nu/

I truly hope I am not on any Cobol projects in 2020.

Useful DOS commands

From the 80s to 2020, I find myself living more and more in DOS, Windows, Powershell, Bash/Zsh, Kube and Cloud shells, and looking forward to leveraging the new Windows Terminal once my work laptop gets upgraded.

I appreciate the complexity and flexibility that Zsh has vs. DOS, and miss a lot of the features.

Sometimes though, there are some interesting tricks I forget about when using DOS/Windows/Powershell.

Grab the history to a file.  I always hit F7, and would appreciate having my session's file around for a basic command window.

doskey /HISTORY > history.txt
https://www.howtogeek.com/298163/how-to-use-your-command-history-in-the-windows-command-prompt/

Also see Start Transcript
https://4sysops.com/archives/powershell-transcript-record-a-session-to-a-text-file/

Pipe a python script's output and stderr output
python -m myscript.py &2>1

Teeing Objects
https://adamtheautomator.com/tee-object-powershell/

Ascii Doom
https://dario-zubovic.itch.io/1337-doom

Last one should be cross-platform!

Common Kubernetes Commands

The Kubernetes Client kubectl recently became an independent tool outside of the main Kubernetes repo.

Some common Kubernetes kubectl commands.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/overview/
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubectl/
https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/

Get the current cluster / namespace context

kubectl config get-context

Use the specified cluster context
kubectl config use-context my-cluster-name

Which cluster am I on
kubectl cluster-info

Create my service/deployment/secret/configmap/replicationcontroller/pod/job
kubectl apply -f myyaml.yaml

Delete the applied object(s)
kubectl delete -f myyaml.yaml

Delete a pod
kubectl delete -n dev mydevpod

Get a list of pods for all namespaces
kubectl get pods -A

Get the logs for a pod
kubectl logs -n dev mydevpod-abcde

kubectl get internals
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/pkg/kubectl/cmd/get/get.go

Copy files to a pod
kubectl cp /tmp/foo_dir <some-pod>:/tmp/bar_dir

Other commands
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/pkg/kubectl/cmd/cmd.go

get, describe, delete, label, edit, patch, annotate, expose, scale, autoscale, taint, rollout, logs, exec, rolling-update, cordon, config use-context, config delete-cluster, cp

kubectl get namespace
kubectl config get-context
kubectl config get-clusters
kubectl config get-users

Microsoft Learning Resources and Restructuring Big Data

Microsoft has recently disrupted their learning paths and retired a number of exams.  I am happy to have passed AZ-102 - Microsoft Azure Admin Certification Transition last year, while it was in beta. 

A number of exams have been retired recently or are set to retire.
https://buildazure.com/2018/12/21/microsoft-exams-scheduled-to-retire-in-early-2019/

Microsoft is leveraging edX for its Microsoft Professional and Capstone tracks.  Pick a topic and go.

Microsoft Virtual Academy is going away and being replaced with Microsoft Learn.  What's great about learn is that it provides a no-cost sandbox in Azure for learning, directly in the labs!  Microsoft is pursuing developer adoption, and developers have concerns with their credit cards and cloud services.  A former colleague of mine rang up a large bill in Amazon after leaving on some Hadoop clusters he was using for training.  This fear of costs and the pay-as-you-go model will continue to limit the cloud experience for entry-level developers.

Speaking of cost containment, it is 2019 and we still can't pause HDInsight clusters.... I think that this feature alone would "Spark" increased growth of Hadoop on Azure.  Azure Databricks and its job-based cluster model seems to have the right approach, and the friction of spinning up and pausing clusters is much less than in HDInsight. 

With Databricks being the fastest growing company in North America, I see adoption of Cloudera (+ the former Hortonworks) and HDInsight in the cloud continuing to increase.  The vast zoo of services between Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) being combined and deprecated will make for an interesting gene pool.

And all will sit on Azure Data Lake Gen2 Blob Storage?  Microsoft marketing needs a better name than hierarchial namespace for their game-changing big-data filesystem....

When Apache and Microsoft worlds collide - there are some amazing code reviews coming out of those JIRA tickets where companies such as Microsoft enter the open-source arena.

Microsoft Azure HDInsight Big Data Analyst

Azure CosmosDB Resources

A few links to assist with CosmosDB

CosmosDB Indexes

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/08/logical-index-organization-in-cosmos-db.html?utm_content=78727690&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

CosmosDB Cheat Sheets
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/query-cheat-sheet?WT.mc_id=twitter&utm_content=78509449&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

CosmosDB Like A Pro
https://medium.com/@david.nissimoff/azure-cosmos-db-like-a-pro-minimize-cost-maximize-productivity-24dfee205c0

CosmosDB Ignite 2018 Sessions
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmamF3YkHLoLkL4Q-fRgbG8URj503ZMgd

Durable Functions goes GA

Azure Durable Functions is an extension of Azure Functions and Azure WebJobs for managing state, checkpoints, and restarts.

• They can checkpoint on await and maintain state
• They can orchestrate other functions
• They define workflows as code. 

There are some complex problems that can be solved by leveraging durable functions, including processes requiring manual intervention.

Be sure to view the release notes and open issues to make sure durable extensions will work in your scenario.

https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-durable-extension/releases/tag/v1.4.0https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-durable-extension/issues

 

Azure DocumentDB Emulator Released

Azure DocumentDB Emulator was released late last year.  It provides an on-premise way of testing DocumentDB databases without spinning up a DocumentDB service in Azure.  Based on the comments thread it is a bit unstable, yet there is still plenty of interest.

Most enterprise organizations and developers doing testing against cloud services require on-premise versions of those services.  This simplifies development, reduces latency instead of connecting to cloud resources, and reduces costs. For customers using on-premise builds, it is vital to making sure that all builds and tests are contained in their own silo.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/documentdb-nosql-local-emulator

Comparison of HBase, MongoDB and DocumentDB
http://db-engines.com/en/system/HBase%3BMicrosoft+Azure+DocumentDB%3BMongoDB

DocumentDB provides protocol support for any apps written to use MongoDB to convert MongoDB servers to a PaaS Azure model.  Some features such as aggregation pipelines are not yet available.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/documentdb-protocol-mongodb

DocumentDB has been around since 2014, however MongoDB is still the beast in its category.
http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/document+store

An intro to DocumentDB
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/documentdb-introduction

Analyze data with HDInsight and DocumentDB
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/documentdb-run-hadoop-with-hdinsight

The MongoDB Spark Connector
https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-spark

DocumentDB as a device registration store for Azure IoT Hub
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-suite/iot-suite-what-are-preconfigured-solutions

I'm still looking for a good way to do on-premise Azure Data Factory tests for simulating pipelines.... just upvoted Support MSBuild...

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/270578-azure-data-factory?filter=new&page=4