How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language

15th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Since bots are evolving, you need a mechanism to better understand what user wants from his/her language and take actions or respond to user queries appropriately. In the days of increasing automation, bots can certainly help provided they are backed by tools to understand user language both naturally and contextually.
Azure Cognitive Services has an API that can help to identify what user wants, extracts concepts and entities from a sentence (user input) using an intelligent service name Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS).… [Keep reading] “How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language”

Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell

14th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

A couple of weeks back I was messing around with the Azure Key Vault looking to centralise a bunch of credentials for my ever-growing list of Azure Functions that are automating numerous tasks. What I found was getting an Azure Key Vault setup and getting credentials in and out was a little more cumbersome than what I thought it should be. At that same point via Twitter this tweet appeared in my timeline from a retweet.… [Keep reading] “Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell”

Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 2

10th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
In my last blog, we configured the backend systems necessary for accomplishing the task of asking Google Home “OK Google Email me the status of all vms” and it sending us an email to that effect. If you haven’t finished doing that, please refer back to my last blog and get that done before continuing.
In this blog, we will configure Google Home.
Google Home uses Google Assistant to do all the smarts.… [Keep reading] “Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 2”

Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 1

10th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
Technology is evolving at a breathtaking pace. For instance, the phone in your pocket has more grunt than the desktop computers of 10 years ago!
One of the upcoming areas in Computing Science is Artificial Intelligence. What seemed science fiction in the days of Isaac Asimov, when he penned I, Robot seems closer to reality now.
Lately the market is popping up with virtual assistants from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google.… [Keep reading] “Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 1”

Monitoring Azure Storage Queues with Application Insights and Azure Monitor

7th of September, 2017 / / 9 Comments

Azure Queues provides an easy queuing system for cloud-based applications. Queues allow for loose coupling between application components, and applications that use queues can take advantage of features like peek-locking and multiple retry attempts to enable application resiliency and high availability. Additionally, when Azure Queues are used with Azure Functions or Azure WebJobs, the built-in poison queue support allows for messages that repeatedly fail processing attempts to be moved to a dedicated queue for later inspection.… [Keep reading] “Monitoring Azure Storage Queues with Application Insights and Azure Monitor”

Building websites with Ionic Framework, Angular and Microsoft Azure App Services

4th of September, 2017 / / 5 Comments

The Ionic Framework (https://ionicframework.com/) is an angular 4 based framework that is designed to build beautiful applications quickly and easily that can be targeted to native platforms as well as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).  In this blog post, I’ll walk through the steps to start your own Ionic PWA hosted on Azure App Services, which will then serve your application.

What is Microsoft Azure App Services?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that allows you to host server workloads that you’d previously host locally in a data centre or on a server somewhere to be hosted in an environment where massive scale and availability becomes available at an hourly rate.… [Keep reading] “Building websites with Ionic Framework, Angular and Microsoft Azure App Services”

Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services

22nd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Similar to other cloud platforms, Azure is starting to leverage containers to provide flexible managed environments for us to run Applications. The App Service on Linux being such a case, allows us to bring in our own home-baked Docker images containing all the tools we need to make our Apps work.
This service is still in preview and obviously has a few limitations:

… [Keep reading] “Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services”

Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair

21st of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Container security is (or should be) a concern to anyone running software on Docker Containers. Gone are the days when running random Images found on the internet was common place. Security guides for Containers are common now: examples from Microsoft and others can be found easily online.
The two leading Container Orchestrators also offer their own security guides: Kubernetes Security Best Practices and Docker security.

Container Image Origin

One of the single biggest factors in Container security is determined by the origin of container Images:

  1. It is recommended to run your own private Registry to distribute Images
  2. It is recommended to scan these Images against known vulnerabilities.
… [Keep reading] “Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair”