Azure Key Vault – Step by Step

Azure Key Vault is an Azure packaged service allowing you to encrypt keys and small secrets (e.g. passwords, SAS) and manage them in a secure fashion.  Azure Key Vault actually allows you to store cryptographic keys and do operations with them (e.g. encrypt data) without revealing the key, which is pretty cool.  Check it out.

A typical problem...

Azure Key Vault

Has somebody been peeking on my X-mas list?

Indeed, one of the weakness of the current Azure Paas solution I pointed out last year was that on non-trivial solutions you end up with plenty of secrets (e.g. user-name / password, SAS, account keys, etc.) stored insecurely in your web.config (or similar store).

I was suggesting, as a solution, to...

50 Popular Business Books Summarized In One Sentence Each

Here is an excellent reading list of business books from Business Insider.

Each book is summarised in one snappy sentence that makes it for quick reference.

The list contains both books about how to succeed as a business or an individual in the business world.

Twenty Years of Machine Learning at Microsoft

Machine Learning is the new kid on the block.

This is of special interest to me since I specialized in that field 15 years ago to "unspecialized" three years later after being discouraged by the lack of real market of the discipline. Back then (early 2000's) ML applications were always academically inspired with little true business value delivered....

The limits of DocumentDB Preview Release

I was looking for the limits of DocumentDB Standard Tier, the only tier available during the preview release.  It wasn’t all too trivial to find so here it is:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/documentdb-limits/

Among the limits that may constrain your solution:

• Only 3 collections per Capacity Unit (but 100 Databases, the container of collections, per account)
...