Being a coach and a player

January 22, 2021January 22, 2021 Pankaj Garg

This is kind of an off-topic post but something I felt worth sharing. I get asked two questions quite often, so thought to answer them in a broader forum.

Before I discuss these questions, it might be useful to provide context behind these two questions. My job as the engineering leader of Hybrid connectivity for Azure focuses on setting direction for overall Hybrid connectivity business, building a strong, diverse & inclusive team, motivating people to take on bigger challenges, cultivating grassroot innovation, talking to customers, talking to partners, handling escalations, tracking KPIs for our services and all the associated things that most leaders in similar roles do. We build & operate some of the most critical connectivity services for Azure such as ExpressRoute, Azure S2S and Client VPN, Virtual WAN, Bastion etc. I truly enjoy this role and together with my team members and colleagues, in last 5 years, we have grown the business to more than 10x and team from 8 engineers to 80+ engineers.

With this role and a relatively hectic life, people wonder why I do coding or how do I find time for it, and this is what I am going to talk about in this post.

(more…)

Running ASP.NET core web application on Raspberry Pi

January 17, 2021January 17, 2021 Pankaj Garg

I always wanted to get more familiar with Raspberry Pi and Kubernetes. In December during my time off, I finally bought a Pi and experimented few things. One such experiment was to run ASP.NET core web application on Raspberry Pi. This was a fun experiment and I definitely learned more about Raspberry Pi, Kubernetes, ASP.NET core, Traefik, Docker and associated technologies. In this post, I would describe the steps that are required to run ASP.NET web app on Pi.

(more…)

Ethr 1.0 – A comprehensive network measurement and analysis tool

January 6, 2021January 15, 2021 Pankaj Garg

We run some of the most performance critical services in the cloud. These services offer 100s of Gbps bandwidth running via our software components. In the past, I have also built core networking virtualization that runs on every Azure machine. For building these network intensive services and components, it is critical to have tools for network measurements that can help optimize performance, isolate issues and prevent regressions. We use variety of tools to do various types of measurements and tune our software components.

In this post, I talk about an open source tool called Ethr, built as a side project, to provide many such capabilities in a single, easy to use binary. The tool is recently released as v1.0 and supports various types of network measurements such as throughput, packets/s, connections/s, network latency, ICMP & TCP ping, traceroute and MyTraceRoute. This makes it convenient to do various types of measurements without having to download and maintain a multitude of tools.

(more…)

Make a Website Responsive using CSS and HTML

January 2, 2021January 7, 2021 Pankaj Garg

I am going to talk about something different from the regular topics in this post. I recently moved one of my old websites to a different hosting provider. As part of that, I worked to make the website responsive. The whole process turned out to be much easier than I thought, and required just few changes. I thought to put them in a post, so it can help anyone else needing the same. Note: I have only tested this in Chrome and Edge on Windows and Android.

(more…)