We continue with a detailed study of Microsoft Azure stack as inferred from an introduction of Azure by Microsoft. We reviewed some more features of Azure networking.  We discussed global DNS, dual stacks for IPV4 and IPV6, and load balancers.Azure load balancer services come at different levels.- cross region, in-region, application gateway and individual vms.
Application Gateway can manage backend with rich diagnostics including access and performance logs, VM scale set support and custom health probes.
The Web Application Firewall security protects applications from web based intrusions and is built using ModSecurity and CoreRule set. It is highly available and fully managed. 
Microsoft Azure has way more express route locations than any other public cloud.Microsoft Azure has deeper insights into our network regardless of whether it is ExpressRoute, VirtualNetwork or ApplicationGateway 
We now review Azure storage stack.  The IaaS offerings from Azure storage services include disks and files where as the PaaS offerings from Azure storage services include objects, tables and queues. The storage offerings are built on a unified distributed storage system with guarantees for durability, encryption at Rest, strongly consistent replication, fault tolerance and auto load balancing.  The IaaS is made up of storage arrays, virtual machines and networking. The PaaS is made up of existing frameworks, web and mobile, microservices and serverless compute. 
Disks are of two types in Azure  - Premium disks (SSD) and Standard Disks (HDD) and are backed by page blobs in Azure storage.  Their capabilities are not diminished and offer high i/o performance and low latency > 80000 iops and > 2000 MB/sec disk throughput per VM.  Disks are offered out of about 26 Azure regions with server side encryption at rest and Azure disk encryption with BitLocker/DMCrypt. In addition, disks come with blob cache technology, enterprise grade durability with three replicas, snapshot for backup, ability to expand disks, and REST interface for developers. Azure has additionally released features called Azure Backup support, Encryption at Rest, Azure Site Recovery Preview and Incremental Snapshot Copy. In the future, it plans to expand on disk sizes and disk analytics enhancement. 
Azure files is a fully managed cloud file storage for use with IaaS and on-premise instances. The scenarios covered lift and shift, host high availability workload data and enables backup and disaster recovery. The Azure files support multiple protocols and operating systems. It has support for SMB 2.1 and 3.0  The files are globally accessible from both On Premise and IaaS instances. They are available in all Azure regions. There's high availability and durability for these files.
Azure files will support snapshots, AD integration, increase scale limits, larger share size, encryption at rest and Backup integration.  
Azure blobs are of three types - Block blobs, Append blobs, Page blobs. Block blobs are used for document, images, video etc. Append blobs are used for multi-writer append only scenarios such as logging and big data analytics output. Page blobs are used for page aligned random reads and writes IaaS disks, Event Hub, Block level backup.
#codingexercise
Convert a BST into a Min Heap
Node ToMinHeap(Node root)
{
if (root == null) return null;
var sorted = ToInOrderList(root);
var heap = ToMinHeap(sorted);
return heap;
} 
https://1drv.ms/w/s!Ashlm-Nw-wnWrwTmE6AXT0d_sX3k