AWS vs Azure services offering comparison for Solution Architects

Overview: Microsoft provides a useful list that allows me to know AWS services aligned to Azure Services.  This is pretty useful if you know 1 platform considerably better than another to quickly figure out your options on either AWS or Azure.

My Service comparison notes:

Amazon CloudWatch - same as Azure Monitor.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) – SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostGress and Aurora (Amazon’s proprietary database).  

Azure SQL lines up with Amazon's RDS SQL Server Service.  Although Aurora is probably also worth the comparison as it's AWS's native DB option.

Amazon DynomoDB – Same as CosmosDB – NoSQL database.

AWS API Gateway - Azure API Management

Amazon Redshift is the data warehouse.  Can be encrypted and isolate.  Support Petabytes of data.

Amazon ElastiCache run Redis cache and MemCached (simple cache).

AWS Lamda – Azure Functions. i.e. Serverless.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Platform for deploying and scaling web apps & Services.  Same as Azure App services.

Amazon SNS – Pub/Sub model – Azure Event Grid.

Amazon SQS – Message queue.  Same as Azure Storage Queues and Azure Service Bus.

Amazon Step Functions – Workflow. Same as logic apps

AWS Snowball – Same as Azure Box.  Physically copy and transport to data centre for upload.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – Azure virtual network 

Amazon AppStream - Azure VDI (Virtual desktop) I think.

Amazon QuickSight - Power BI (Tableau Business Intelligence).

AWS CloudFormations - ARM and Bicep

Tip: I am glad that I did the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam as it helped my understand of the AWS offering which has been very useful in large integration projects.  I have worked with AWS IaaS (EC2, API gateway and S3 historically).  Like Azure, there are a lot of Services and features.  Basically, there are equivilant services for Azure & AWS.  It may be a 2-to-1 service offering or it is not something offered by the cloud provider.

AWS vs Azure vs GCP Comparison

Overview:  I predominately use Azure & Microsoft for all my cloud services.  

Source: https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google

I have installed multiple SharePoint farms and setups on AWS EC2 instances and I'm currently preparing for the Cloud Practitioner AWS exam.  I have used Google for authentication, SaaS nut not as a IaaS offering.  I'm also a huge fan of Heroku which is great for PaaS and I used this to host my game built for Facebook games.  I've also seen IBM's cloud offering a few years ago.  For me it is too niche and not as feature rich.  So basically I understand Azure's offering well so I found this comparison pretty useful.

My Thoughts:  The contenders:  I really like Heroku for it's simplicity.  I feel for a small Indie developer or company, Heroku has a good free and cheap simple billing options.  GCP, I really can't comment from a good position of knowledge but from what I've used, I like GCP.  GCP is the third biggest Cloud provider.  As a large organisation, I'd only consider the big three: Microsoft Azure, AWS, and GCP to be our cloud partner.  Multi-cloud partner is a demand from some organisations, it's truely extra expensive.  Azure uses ARM templates and has many options for provisioing the IAAS, PaaS offerings.  If you are thinking multi-cloud consider Terraform by Hashicorp for IaC.  There is also the concept of Click-Ops (sic) which allows you to click thru the UI of the management of the Cloud services to get the the desired architecture, this is fine for simple small architecture but you can't do this at any scale or agility and it's super error prone.  Click-ops is more a joke term for the laziest way to build infrastructure and we need to make it sound modern.  IBM's offering, well if you are a partner, you cloud go with this option but it is aimed more a large business partners.  IBM's cloud is IaaS focused, with some PaaS offerings but once again I'm not an expert.

AWS, has always been really easy to use.  It is big and complex like Azure with many offerings.  Basically, I'd choose AWS if the organisation was already using it and the people in the org know have experience with AWS.  AWS originally was aimed at the B2C/startup market but was first to market at scale.

Azure, so in my world Azure and O365 feel like the dominant player but the diagram below provides a great insight into the relative size of the Cloud infrastructure market.  Azure SaaS offering O365/M365 is also huge and hosted on Azure.   Azure security is well thought out and their thinking on BYOK and geo-location appear to be important.  Microsoft offer Arm templates and DSC for configuring environments, they are also adding Bicep which is an abstract layer that will run ARM templates into Azure.

Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers/

There is good resource CloudWars.co that goes into looking at the various cloud providers.  My current take away is Amazon is the biggest player in the IaaS field.  Azure has IaaS, a large PaaS offering and a massive SaaS (including Dynamics and O365) offering (Amazon has no equivalent).  I am focused on PaaS solutions for my customers so as to remove the infrastructure and process overheads of IaaS.

Off the top of my head reasons for moving and objections I hear for the cloud regardless of platform:

Why Cloud:

1. Save Money
2. More Secure
3. Fast Delivery/More Agile/Easy to scale/Increase business resilience
4. Eco-friendly

Challenges:

1. Lack budget
2. Spiraling costs
3. CAPEX model vs OPEX is business common norm that some business find difficult to switch
4. Resources/Skills
5. Believe security is an issue/Don't trust the Cloud
6. Migrate legacy apps (for me don't move to the cloud unless you get significant advantage)

Onboarding staff and New Starters for SaaS

Overview:  With large SaaS projects, various stakeholders tend to start at different times.  For me it takes a while to get all team members up to speed with: domain knowledge, technical knowledge, our design and big picture, company specifics. 

Thoughts:

In person and Teams/Skype meetings are great for building relationships and getting the most information to the new starter.

Record presentations, then shorten and annotate the presentation to make focused high impact onboarding material that can be reused across various roles.

For each starter, ensure they have an introduction/onboarding plan:  Book meetings, get the people the background, have resources e.g. websites, mp4. glossary of terms ready:

Resources:

List out useful resource specific to the role.  I tend to keep these in SharePoint but as long as content if searchable and consistent and of value, I am in the right place.

Possible Technical Roadmap and thoughts on a startup

Overview:  A friend of mine's son has recently built a web site, and it looks impressive, and we started discussing his project, this turned into a detailed technical conversation to everyone's horror at a BBQ.  This chap is 14, and all I can say is wow.  All hosted and built without spending any money.  I interview many developers, and his knowledge is outstanding.  

I've drawn his architectural explanation below, added a few items to check and what my next piece would be.

Clarification of High Level Design

Thoughts:

1. Build the Native mobile apps, getting users buy-in with a Native App will be considerably higher.  As you have used React, use React Native (React is separate to React Native, a completely new codebase).
2. Cordova/PhoneGap is a wrapper that would allow you to keep a single code base and merely inject the existing code into Native wrappers for iPhone and Android.  As your app is HTML 5, and already looks like a modern mobile app, I'd use PhoneGap.  At least try it out and see if it fits.  You'd then only have to deal with a single code base to update all the platforms.  You could always use Google's Flutter if you wanted a single code base for the web site and Mobile native apps. 
3. Ensure your API's are OpenAPI/Swagger
4. Security - the API already has some protection.  Ensure the database is protected/secured.

Revenue model:  Ads (Gambling Ads pay well). Make a premium-paid for service (keep end-user usage/sign-up free).  Sign-up and collection of money while not directly applicable to this venture, can be done and kept dead simple using Shopify.

Shopify - Add optional installation on the cart for shoppers

Problem:  On my Shopify shopping cart, if a buyer is checking out and they have plants/flowers in their cart, I need to offer them the ability to have someone plant for them.

This could have various options such as in furniture, you could offer an assembly service.

Initial Hypothesis: Shopify use Liquid as it's scripting language.  Liquid allows us to combine Liquid with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to get the desired page behavior.  Below is my User Story:

As a shopper I want to be able to add labor to allow me to have my flowers/plants installed/planted so that I know an expert has got my flowers in correctly.

I also need to add the appropriate amount of labor, so if less than 3 plants charge for 1 hr  otherwise charge for 2 hrs.  Shopify has variants allowing me to have a labor product for 1 or 2 hrs.

Resolution:  Amend the cart.liquid cart summary page to allow for Labor to plant for the Shopper to easily be added.

Desired Behavior: 

Add a button to add installation

The optional installation cost for 1 hr is added to the store

Steps to Implement: 
1. Create a new Product in Shopify "Plant for me please".  Add it to a unique collection, mine was "Last Minute Checkout Items".  Add a couple of variants for time/cost as shown below:

2. Go to the Product page and append .xml to the end of the page e.g., https://nurserynearby.co.za/collections/last-minute-checkout-items/products/would-you-like-someone-to-plant-your-plants.xml and get the Variant_Id's, we need these to add the correct amount of labor cost later.
3. Open the cart.liquid file and add the  following logic:

Shopify thoughts

Overview:  Recently, I had two requests for some work around shopping carts/auctions.  I dismissed the first request as it is not what I specialize in.  On the second request, I decided to take the project on at a hugely discounted rate as I felt I did not have expertise in the field.

Shopify: Shopify is an amazing product and eco system, and I have build a great shop on the SaaS Shopify platform in record time.  There are great plug-ins to add functionality such as gift registry's, and Mobile add integration.  I have now been playing with the product, deliver solutions, worked with app vendors, reviewed competitor's, had help from Shopify support and I can honestly say that it is awesome.

Program-ability:

• There are simple API's that are well documents.  
• The internal language is Liquid which is basically a UI scripting language.
• Shopify SaaS has add ins and templates, so look before developing

Liquid:

In the code snippet above I am building custom functionality int he cart checkout to add specific products to allow more sales on the store depending on custom rules provided by the customer.

Mobile:
The templates OOTB or that shop admins can purchase follow responsive design as one would expect.  There are add-ons for iOS and Droid to make native apps, very well priced with good functionality changed on a monthly reoccurring basis (circ $40-100/month).  I need a custom mobile app for both platforms so I'm between choosing to build with Flutter or Blazor.

Power Apps Tracing to App Insights Not Working in edit mode

Overview: Power Apps integrates to directly log to App insights.  This post looks at the issues around Tracing in App insights.

Setup & Verify:

App Insights instance Instrument Key Required, Config you Power App to Trace to App Insights, and create a button to test.

The Monitor Tool is fantastic for tracing all outbound traffic, you no longer need to go to the service and check if Power Apps is reaching.  For example I use to have to look at the APIM Azure App logs for custom Connectors.

I can see all my interactions in Power Apps and travelling out.  This is a massive win for Power Apps so giving Tracing from the front end.

Greg Lindhorst, wrote a post on using the Power Apps Monitor Tool for debugging and performance improvement.

Note: Traces written to App Insights don't work in preview.  Verify, see below.

Problem: It normally takes a few minutes (like 2 minutes) to show up in App Insights, it is not showing up after 15 minutes.  Let's see, I've drop the Power Apps team a message and i think it's a bug that has crept in recently.  Today is 10 July 2020.  I've also notice that none of my Session page tracing is showing up in App Insights.

Update: 11 July 2020, the Power Apps behaviour has been on my mind.  I'm in edit mode, and when I publish the app and use it, App Insights logs perfectly.  When in edit mode running the app, even direct traces, no logging into Power Apps.  I did not realise this, but it kind of makes sense.

Resolution: Publish & Run the app, and the Tracing and Power App session tracing shows up in App Insights.

Only when I Run the Published App to my Page Views and Custom Traces get logged in App Insights.