Sitecore Content Hub

Sitecore announced the acquisition of Stylelabs in 2018 Symposium conference, later introduced a new product as the Sitecore Content Hub. Sitecore Content Hub is a marketing tool that gives users the ability to manage the entire content lifecycle in one place. Every aspect from planning, authoring and collaboration, through to management and curation, publication, personalization and feedback of analytics can be managed within Content Hub.
This product is still relatively unknown within the marketplace. So let’s discuss some components of Content Hub.

Content Crisis:

The situation of content crisis can be defined in the below problems:

• Unable to deliver right content to right people on right time through right channels.
• Lack of collaboration
• Unable to reuse & lot of duplicate content
• Most of the time spending on content finding

To mitigate this issue, Sitecore introduced Content Hub which is a complete SaaS solution, to do 360 degree Marketing Content Management. It includes several modules such as a PIM module, Content module, Project module and has Print & DRM capabilities/modules.

Content hub covers the entire content life cycle and manage every aspect of your marketing content for all your channels with a single, integrated solution. It presents four main capabilities:

1. Digital Asset Management
2. Content Marketing Platform
3. Marketing Resource Management
4. Product Content Management

Components

Digital Asset Management:

• Solution of storage, management, distribution & control of digital assets.
• Machine learning helps to tag your content
• Search & find your assets quickly & easily.
• Includes integrated Digital rights management to ensure full compliance
• Handle any media type from photos, videos, source files, diagrams and more.

Content Marketing Platform

• Effectively plan, manage & collaborate on content strategy.
• Optimize content usage and distribute to target audiences across channels
• Workflow process is available
• Provides overall view of all content & how it is performing

Marketing Resource Management

• Manage, budget, & control every phase of marketing project
• Marketers can define and structure projects, campaigns, allocate budget & assign to stakeholders
• Stakeholders can participate in process of content creating, reviewing, proofing & approving
• Steer teams to achieve production targets on time with intuitive collaboration, review & approval tools

Product Content Management

• Stores information related to products and manages your product marketing lifecycle
• Centralise & automate all maintenace & management of product related content
• Leverage existing product content as part of your processes for creating new content

For more detailed information related to Content Hub, refer the below articles:

• Sitecore Content Hub documentation portal
• Sitecore Content Hub product
• What is Sitecore Content Hub
• SITECORE CONTENT HUB – MORE THAN JUST A DAM

In next article, we will discuss more on Content hub connectors & integration.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam is all about the types of tasks an administrator might need to perform as part of their job. It will involve more than just creating and destroying pods and their associated objects, and so the exam questions cover more than just YAML and kubectl. I consider myself lucky because for the past one & half years, I had the chance to work on Kubernetes in one of my projects. I regularly worked on improving my skills and studied for the exam, as it is one of the toughest and practical based exam.

This is one of the most difficult certifications that I have ever done. CKA exam is one of its kind with very rich content and about everything hands-on. The exam itself felt fair in terms of complexity and difficulty. You should know where to look in the Kubernetes docs to help you on more complex tasks and I mean knowing exactly where to look.

Preparation:

Firstly, I would advise you to download the exam study handbook and get an understanding of what is required of you. The structure of the exam is given below:

1. 3 hours

2. 24 questions

3. Pass mark of 74%

4. Remotely proctored

5. Chrome browser plus an extension

6. Government-issued non-expired ID

7. Webcam and microphone

8. Steady internet, preferably 5MB up/down.

9. Exam Cost: $300 and includes one free retake.

10.Ubuntu machines

You may refer the below clusters to practice:               

1. Katacoda’s Kubernetes Playground

2. Minikube

3. Google Kubernetes Enginer (GKE)

Some additional useful links:

https://medium.com/bb-tutorials-and-thoughts/practice-enough-with-these-questions-for-the-ckad-exam-2f42d1228552 

https://github.com/walidshaari/Kubernetes-Certified-Administrator

https://github.com/krzko/awesome-cka

https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises

https://github.com/stretchcloud/cka-lab-practice

https://github.com/David-VTUK/CKA-StudyGuide

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests

Exam Day:

You must meet all the requirements as mentioned in the exam handbook. Before starting the exam a proctor will ask to confirm your identity & will validate whether your working surface is clean (nothing around that can help).

The CKA is an exam that is kind of an open book test. You are allowed to have a single tab open to anything in the *.kubernetes.io or github.com/kubernetes. When you are solving a question and need a reference or an example, search for it in the documentation. Kubernetes.io has a great search function & you can refer to examples, copy-paste YAML text and commands.

There is a built-in notepad in the exam interface which might be handy since you\’re not allowed to write on paper during the exam.

Try to focus on the questions & read it very carefully in order to understand the requirements. Some questions are tricky in context therefore try to stay calm and avoid typing mistakes. I took around 2:30 hours to complete my exam.

So, practice, practice, and practice. This is a practical exam, no multiple-choice questions here.

Result:

In my case, I got results within 30 hours via an email after the completion of the exam. You will also receive an official email at the end of the exam informing you that the result will be declared within 36 hours.

I hope this article would be useful for you and please let me know in the comments if it somehow helped you to pass the exam.

Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Synapse is an analytics service that combines analytics and data warehousing to create what the company calls “the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse.” You can login to your Azure Portal and search Azure Synapse & you will see “Azure Synapse Analytics (workspaces preview)”. Choose it and create Synapse workspace. Make sure before creating it, you need to register “Microsoft.Synapse” in your subscription.

Features of Azure Synapse Analytics:

Limitless scale	GA	Preview
Provisioned compute (data warehouse)	Available	NA
Materialized views & result-set cache	Available	NA
Workload importance	Available	NA
Workload isolation	Available	NA
Serverless data lake exploration	NA	Available
Powerful insights
Power BI integration	NA	Available
Azure Machine Learning integration	NA	Available
Streaming analytics (data warehouse)	NA	Available
Apache Spark integration	NA	Available
Unified experience
Hybrid data ingestion	NA	Available
Azure Synapse Studio	NA	Available
Instant Clarity
Azure Synapse Link	NA	Available
Unmatched security
Column- and row-level security	Available	NA
Dynamic data masking	Available	NA
Private endpoints	Available	NA

The predictive analytics using AI and machine learning is a critical element in every enterprise customer digital transformation journey. Current solutions involve creating ETL pipelines which are extremely complex, very expensive and challenging to maintain. These pipelines often got significant delay of hours, days, or even weeks, resulting in decisions being made on still data. The barrier between operational databases and analytical systems has been difficult to all come.

Microsoft announced Synapse Link in Microsoft Build 2020 which is an industry\’s first Cloud native implementation of hybrid transaction analytical processing. It reduces the complexity of building and operating end-to-end analytical solutions by enabling a simple, intuitive, visual, no code experience.

Synapse Link is removing the barriers between Azure’s operational databases and Synapse Analytics, so enterprises can immediately get value from the data in those databases without going through a data warehouse first.

Image Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azure-synapse-analytics-first-impression-part-1-yogesh-kumar/

It allows you to take your Azure Synapse Analytics and point it directly at your operational database and do T-SQL queries against it without having to copy the data to Synapse. This means you can do real-time analytics without impacting your online or operational systems. This is especially important when you are talking about lots of data at big scale.

Currently, Synapse Link is only available with Microsoft’s Cosmos DB but Microsoft is planning to add support for available in Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL  and Azure Database for MySQL in the future.

Read Microsoft documentation of Azure Synapse Analytics : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/overview-what-is

Mitigate 5XX error using Auto heal feature

Http 5xx error are common errors in Azure App services. There are several reasons that can lead to 5xx response. Some of them are:

1. Requests take long time to execute.

2. Application is experiencing high CPU and memory consumption.

3. Related to Application code issue.

4. Azure platform performed Infrastructure or File server upgrade in the instance.

Considering the HTTP 503 response issue can be mitigated by restarting the App Service to force the initialized behavior, so I think you can consider using the “Auto-Heal” feature:

1. Go to the “Diagnose and solve problems” à  “Diagnostic Tools”

             

2. Select Auto Heal:

3. Enable and set up a rule as illustrated below:

4. Choose the operation as “Recycle process”, then the platform will help to restart the App Service if there are more than 10 HTTP 503 response within 1 minute: