Getting a new manager? – Updated

After working with one manager in a team, people move to work with another manager in the same organization. You get a new manager. To be honest I would expect my new manager to invite me for such a meeting but they might be too busy to even think about it . What can you do from your side ?

1. Make an appointment to meet your new manager for say 20 minutes. Talk to him and try to understand the person. Remember this is a first meeting for both of you
2. Though I myself do not like the idea, it would be a good idea to share your resume with you new manager. The new manager needs to be made aware of what you bring to the table.
3. Have a couple of meetings with new manager. Take initiative to propose to the new boss what you want to perform in new role. In all interactions with your new manager, be positive and future focused. Stay professional.

Let me write what I perform to bring employees on board in my team? I would share with the the vision of the project . If there is already existing product ask them to go through that and present me with a reverse presentation of their understanding and also provide them with an intial view of what is expected from them and what are the growth opportunities.

For a minute, let us assume I do not do that and a employee performs the above. I can think that he is having a big ego or he is having some hidden intent or he wants to show that he is great. My expectation on the employee grows leaps and bounds and I would start thinking let me see how good this guy is and what is his real worth? This is not good for my team member. Then this is not good to follow when I am team member too.

Effective the communication between manager and the team member should be two way and is going to be a relationship between two people. That means I need to keep in mind the interests and mindset of both of them. Should I keep waiting for the manager to share the vision and not take initiatives? It is really frustrating if you are like me.

I can still take initiative and ask the new boss to articulate her vision, so that I can understand what is needed form my skill set for this vision and articulate only the ones relvant to the vision. Do a couple of reminders and wait with patience for the new manager to come. If not, you need to make a decision whether you need to wait some more time or ask the manager whether he wants to you to do a presentation or ask advice from your old manager what would be the best way to go forward.

Do not expect things to happen as you expect and neither expect that your proposal would be considered. No one can stop you to exhibit positive attitude and take initiative to perform something rather than nothing. After all this, your manager might not still not come back to you as he is looking for the vision from his manager.

During this process, there can be time when team members can be pushed to leaving the manager and at times to leave the organization itself.

Economics of Cloud Development

While learning to build applications with Azure, developers and architects please learn economic of developing and deploying applications on windows Azure and SQL Azure. I see that developers and architects need to be connected to cost. Your manager would be interested in the following costs, but there is more you can help him.
• Number of hours you’ve reserved a virtual machine (VM)
• Number of CPUs in a VM
• Bandwidth, measured per GB in / out
• Amount of GB storage used
• Number of transactions on storage
• Database size on SQL Azure
• Number of connections on Windows Azure platform AppFabric

Effectively if the resources are used well, we save cost. If the resources are not used optimally, then we lose money. How can one take responsibility during application development to optimize Azure costs for deployment?
Azure Compute:
1. Extra Small Windows Azure instance is for the purpose of development and testing.
2. Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed, Partial compute hours are billed as full hours.
3. Large allocation of shared resource helps in higher I/O performance.
4. License for the Windows Server 2008 R2 is covered through the Windows Azure VM Role licensing
5. You can’t change VM Size once you’re running your application
6. Hoe many number of hours of the application translates business?. When one deploys application, performs some operation and forgets to turn them off after use, one is charged for the unused compute power. Please un-deploy the application as soon as possible to stop paying for any inactive applications
7.How to decide the number of web roles and Worker Roles?. One can use one web role and one worker role. When we scale, we need to identify whether we need to decide whether we need to scale as two web role and two worker roles or two web roles and one worker role.

Windows Storage:

If the web role and storage are located in the same region (Both in “North America” for example), there would be no bandwidth bill for communication between Web role and storage.
o Keep Azure services coupled within the same Azure region.
o One can make use of CDN for cost-reduction measure, as it gets cached locally
o Keep in mind that cache expiration time can create challenges

People store session data in Azure blobs and table storage and the storage and transaction of writing and reading impacts the cost of deployment. Hence please separate the structures and data that needs to be placed in the session . Please also look at the article Understanding Windows Azure Storage Billing – Bandwidth, Transactions, and Capacity , Windows Azure Storage Abstractions and their Scalability Targets, How to get most out of Windows Azure Tables

Transactions :Every operation on a storage account is a transaction. Be smart of the operations that count as transaction.When performing an operation such as blob storage, for example, you would first check if the blob container exists. If not, you would have to create it and then store a blob. That’s at least two, possibly three, transactions. The same counts for hosting static content on blob storage. If you have n images to display on page, you can run up to 2n transactions or more. One can reduce to n +1 transaction just by removing the check whether the blob container exists or not to once at startup.

Diagnostics

Writing diagnostics every minute increases storage transaction and extra costs and setting a long time interval to write can make the diagnostics data always old by the time interval.

You need to own the clearing of the old diagnostics data, else you would billed for the storage that does not provide much value.

SQL Azure

Please be aware that it can be more cost-effective to distribute your data across different SQL Azure databases, rather than having one large database

Please check whether Indexes and tables can consume a lot of database storage capacity. Some indexes may consume 0.5 percent of a database and make sure whether they provide needed performance gain to justify the cost of index. Please check this article The real Cost of Indexes

Do you make use of object relational mappers instead of stored procedures to perform a data oriented operations in application logic? If yes, performing data calculations in application might require extra Web Role or Worker Role instance. By performing the same in SQL Azure, you can save some processing of role instances and SQL Azure is not metered on CPU usage and you get free CPU cycles in your database.