RunAs Radio

More questions answered at SQLIntersection! Richard hosts a panel discussion of Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Bob Ward, Brent Ozar and many other SQL speakers from SQLIntersection. The questions are far ranging this time around, talking about business intelligence, data science, reliability approaches and a record-setting answer on data partitioning from You-Know-Who!

More database services in Azure! While at the Build conference, Richard sat down with Jason Anderson and Sunil Kamath to discuss both MySQL and Postgres coming to Azure Database services. Sure, you've been able to run MySQL and Postgres in virtual machines on Azure, but why would you want to maintain an operating system and patching yourself? Jason and Sunil talk about all the cloud aspects of a database service - update policies, resiliency, backup and extension options. There's more coming, but the first versions of MySQL and Postgres available as an Azure Database Service look great!

Azure Stack is coming soon! While at the Build conference in Seattle, Richard sat down with Jeffrey Snover to dig into the latest developments around Azure Stack. If you like cloud architecture but are not prepared to go to the public cloud, Azure Stack offers many of the capabilities of Azure but in a private configuration. Jeffrey talks about the various scenarios that make sense for Azure Stack and how it is likely to be made available through a number of third party providers. Azure Stack will be in GA mid-2017 and the features will just keep coming!

What's the latest on Exchange 2016? Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Mike O'Neill about some the things he's seen lately in Exchange world. Mike talks about the hybrid world of mail these days, with on-premises Exchange servers working alongside of Office 365 Exchange Online. The conversation also digs into the affect that feature testing in the cloud has had on the on-premises edition of Exchange - the quality of updates is better and you can have confidence in doing updates during the day with zero downtime - with caveats of course! This may be the last version of Exchange on-premises, but the features will keep coming!

Why would you run Linux on Hyper-V? Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Kevin Kelling about his experiences working with a customer that had tens of thousands of virtual machines running Hyper-V - enough that the licensing of the VMs became an issue! And since Windows Server Data Center edition allows for unlimited Hyper-V instances, the effort was on to make those Linux-based VMs run well in Hyper-V - and with the right tweaking, they do! Great story about digging deeply into how Hyper-V works!

How do you build sustainable PowerShell? By testing it! Richard talks to Adam Bertram about his work with Pester, the testing library for PowerShell. Adam talks about building mature PowerShell scripts, that is, scripts you're willing to share with others. As those scripts become important parts of your application deployment process, they end up in source control and need to be tested before being run. That's where Pester comes in. And Pester does more than just test your scripts, it can test your infrastructure as well!

How do you get identity into the cloud? Richard talks to Joey Snow about his role helping folks with Azure Active Directory. Azure AD is more than just extending your on-premises Active Directory into the cloud, it provides single-sign-on to a variety of SaaS applications, and not just Microsoft ones either! Joey talks about the different techniques available to get and protect identities with the cloud, including multi-factor authentication, Azure Identity Protection and more. There are lots of options to choose from, but there is an identity solution that will work for you - check it out!

DMA vulnerabilities have been around for ten years - are your machines in danger? Richard talks to Sami Laiho about his experiences trying to close the exploit that is Direct Memory Access. This technology for rapid data transfer has been available for years with FireWire and Thunderbolt, and now exists in USB 3.1 as well. The problem is that it has been two-way memory access, so connecting two machines together via FireWire can allow the attacking machine to steal any memory it wants, like your BitLocker encryption key. Only in Windows 10 are we starting to see protection in place, and there's more to come. Scary stuff!

How can automation help you? Richard chats with Jennelle Crothers about her work automating tasks with Azure. So what does automation mean to you? Jennelle talks about automating the delivery of resources to internal developers - whether that be on-premise or in the cloud. This is part of a DevOps practice, being able to use templates so that development is using resources configured as close to production as possible. Automation also applies to testing, deployment, instrumentation, disaster recovery and more. Will IT ever run out of work? Not a chance - there's always more to do!

Can Group Policy help protect your user's machines? Definitely! Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about his on-going work with group policy, including his cool tool, PolicyPak. Jeremy talks about applying least privilege principles via Group Policy, including a case of a patch from June 2016 that may have broken some of your group policies because the machine that has to apply them doesn't have sufficient privileges! Other important least privilege aspects discussed include better management of local admin accounts, control over who actually makes and changes group policy, and how to deal with users who want to install apps. Lots to learn!

What's the Delivery Pipeline and why should you care? Richard chats with Steven Murawaski about his work at Chef, helping organizations get more effective at delivering software. Steven talks about how the latest generation of platform tools such as containers, that while helping to automate the delivery of software, are not a panacea that eliminates all the challenges of said software. You still have to take the time to get your automation right and deeply understand the value of being able to rapid-fire deploy. When you go faster, things get better!

How do you get started in data science? Richard chats with long time data scientist Rafal Lukawiecki about practical data science. Rafal starts out focusing on the most common data science scenarios - understanding your customer and their needs. This goal is more complicated than it appears, often the questions first asked are not the questions you'll actually need answers to. But asking them is important since it leads to information that will influence the next round of questions. The cloud has made it easier than ever to dive into data science, but the principals are still the same: This is a science, after all!

Johan is back, and still doing deployment right! Richard talks to Johan Arwidmark about best practices and clear thinking around deployment. Johsan starts out with the idea that with the speed of updates coming these days, you really need to have a good lab. While it's awesome to test on native client hardware, it's not always possible - but testing in VMs is still a good idea! The conversation also goes to the need for caching of updates with WSUS and Configuration Manager - the network is the constrained resource and updates are only getting larger!

The oil and gas industry is in the cloud! Richard chats with John Paul Cook about his work bringing various Azure technologies to bear on the oil and gas industry. Contrary to popular belief, the oil and gas industry loves software and has embraced the cloud to increase efficiency. John talks about utilizing various Azure products to do data collection, including the IoT Hub. But the fun really starts when you get into the analysis side, using stream analytics to capture data in real time and react to it, as well as analysis tools to understand the data more deeply. Cool stuff!

Stephen Rose is back and in a new role! Richard chats with Stephen about his work on OneDrive for Business, which is one of the great cloud-enabling products out there today. Stephen talks about the automation in OneDrive for Business with Office 365 that gets rid of big email attachments, instead automatically embedding a link to the file into the email - the file itself lives in OneDrive for Business the whole time! The conversation also turns to the sophisticated security models available through the cloud with OneDrive for Business, that focus on preventative behaviors, not just reactionary. File storage has never been more interesting!

PowerShell? On Linux? Why would you DO that? Richard chats with Tim Warner about the recent announcements around making PowerShell open source and available on Linux and Mac OS. What does this mean? The Linux world has been script-driven since it was Unix, so does PowerShell make any sense? Tim talks about coming up with common ways to manage both Windows and Linux machines, and where PowerShell adds some interesting capabilities by being far more object-oriented than text-file-oriented. It's still early days, and there's only an alpha version on GitHub to experiment with, but it looks to be interesting times in the future!

It's 2017, do you know where your config manager is? Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Steven Rachui about his experiences helping companies manage substantial System Center Configuration Manager infrastructure. With the 2016 edition, the ability to handle rapid updates to Windows 10 is key and introduces the concept of Current Branch, as opposed to going with a more conservative stable edition of Windows. The conversation around non-Windows mobile device management focuses on using a hybrid mode to work with Microsoft InTune, but there does look to be a future of on-premise solutions as well. Lots to think about!

Are your noSQL stores safe? While at NDC London, Richard chatted with Niall Merrigan about the latest wave of exploits targeting MongoDB, ElasticSearch and others. As Niall explains, the challenge is that the default security models for many of these products leaves them vulnerable to outside attack. As these attacks have progressed, they have presented themselves as ransomware - data is removed and a bitcoin account offered up to restore the data. However, to date, even when the ransoms are paid, no data is restored. Apparently there is no honor among thieves. Now is a great time to review your security vulnerabilities, and Niall suggests looking at your systems the same way hackers do, through tools like Shodan. Give yourself a security checkup!

Of course you can scale in the cloud - but exactly how? Richard chats with Corey Sanders who goes on a whirlwind tour of the many options in Azure to help your applications be reliable and scalable. First up is a discussion on Virtual Machines and Scale Sets - rather than making separate VMs for every instance of your application, you can build them in blocks up to a thousand! After discussing the kind of problems that need a thousand of anything, Corey dives into Service Fabric and Containers, getting more fine-grained and lighter weight so that you can scale faster. And it works with existing applications as well, opening the door to moving what you have today to the cloud!

JSON for IT folks? Yes! Richard talks to Aidan Finn about his experiences actually getting into configuration-as-code. Aidan talks about discovering the Azure Quickstart Templates as a starting point to automating setting up test and training labs. JSON is a simple file format but takes a little getting used to, and with Azure you can specify virtually every aspect of a virtual machine so that it can be created on-demand. And there are great tools available to make it easier to build and maintain these configuration files. Ultimately, if you are creating anything in Azure more than once, you need to get up to speed on this kind of automation - it's the future!

VPNs don't have to suck! Richard chats with Richard Hicks about the latest in DirectAccess, Microsoft's built in VPN technology that makes maintaining a secure connection for a remote PC a bit less painful. Richard talks about how the server-side of DirectAccess being pretty solid for Server 2012R2 and 2016. But the big improvement comes from deploying Windows 10 Enterprise - bringing key features like multi-homing so that remote PCs can choose from a variety of geographically dispersed data centers. The conversation also goes to the mobile device management side of things, since DirectAccess requires a domain-joined version of Windows, it's not for everything. What are the alternatives?

Have you used WireShark? Richard chats with Tim Warner of Pluralsight about his experiences working with this super-powerful open source network inspection tool. The conversation dives into the challenges of understanding what's going on with your network, both wired and wireless. WireShark gathers up traffic coming and going from a machine and analyzes it to identify what its for and where it's from. Tim talks about the challenges of seeing the network as a whole when it comes to Layer 3 routing, but there are tools to help. There are many reasons to want to understand your network traffic, but there are privacy challenges also - know the rules for your world!

The cloud is secure, right? Richard chats with J Peter Bruzzese about Office 365 Security - focusing primarily on Exchange Online. The social engineering of email is hitting new highs, with ransomware, wire transfers and other approaches to exploiting people. Is the only solution education of the user? While an important part of the equation, J Peter also talks about building a robust email infrastructure that fights back from various attacks.

Microsoft had a pretty good year in 2016 - or did it? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about his impressions on Microsoft in the past year with an eye to the future. And while there have been some successes, there have also been some duds in 2016 too. Looking at you, Windows Phone! Paul talks about Microsoft's battles with hardware, from the killing of Band to the problems with Microsoft Surface Book. At the same time, he still loves his Book and is in awe of the Surface Studio. There's lots of great things going on at Microsoft and more to come - have a listen and a great 2017!

Still have applications that depend on Internet Explorer? Richard talks to Fred Pullen from the Edge team about IE Enterprise Mode, allowing IT folks to strictly control what sites run in IE11, and what sites can run in Edge. The Edge browser breaks with the legacy of Internet Explorer, making it smaller, faster and more secure. But IE has a 20+ year history and there are plenty of apps, especially internal apps, that still depend on it. Fred talks about using Enterprise Mode to specify exactly what apps run in IE11 and what ones can run in Edge - and automating the switching between browsers so that users don't have to think about it at all.

SQL Server 2016 SP1 has shipped - what's new? Richard chats with Bob Ward about the latest in SQL Server, some of which was announced at the Connect event in New York. Huge on the list was the addition of many more of what was once enterprise-only features on the Standard and Express editions of the database. Bob discusses architectural changes that have come to SQL Server 2016 to better reflect the latest hardware, which has resulted in the same workloads on the same hardware actually running faster just by upgrading the database to the latest version. Finally, there's a discussion of migration and the tools available today to help you test your workloads to see any variation in behaviour for your application from one version to the next. Check it out!

The DevOps Handbook is finally released! Richard chats with the one-and-only Gene Kim about the five years of effort that have gone into making the DevOps handbook. Gene talks about how the Handbook was supposed to come out before the Phoenix project, but as the scope of the book grew, they realized it needed more time. The benefit of time has been a ton of case studies and great detailed evidence of how automating workflows, instrumenting systems deeply and a culture of experimentation leads to better applications, happier employees and customers, and a better business all around. You need to read this book!

What does it take to make Azure networking actually work? Richard chats with Microsoft VP Albert Greenberg about the whole of Azure networking. The conversation starts out talking about the complexity of building massive virtual networks for Azure so that every customer has their own private space to work in, while not impacting or being impacting by any of the other customers. Albert talks about the need for no central point of focus when scaling to public cloud sizes when it comes to network - there's no hardware available at this size!

How does your Active Directory data look? Richard chats with Chris Johnson of Hyperfish about how important AD personnel data is, and the terrible condition that most organizations leave it in. Chris talks about how the point of Active Directory was to be the authoritative source of personnel information in an organization - but most companies just use it for login credentials! It was Microsoft Exchange that first took on AD for all its user information, and more systems are doing so. The challenge is finding efficient ways to allow users to keep their data up to date and accurate.

Ready for Nano Server? Richard chats with Andrew Mason, one of the folks at Microsoft responsible for creating Nano Server. The conversation dives into the distinctions between Nano Server and Server Core - Core is still around, but Nano is substantially smaller. How much smaller? Less than half a gig! Andrew digs into what Nano Server can and can't do in this version, but don't worry, more is coming and user voice is being used (check the links) if you want to make suggestions to the team. If you're looking for the lightest footprint for Windows Server, you want Nano!

Once again into the breach of answering questions about SQL Server! Richard hosts the open Q and A session with Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Bob Ward and a number of other talented SQL folks fielding questions from an engaged and fun audience at SQL Intersection. Lots of questions around SQL Server 2016 which shipped back in June, and explorations about the best way to deal with very large scale systems and transactional velocities. And listen at the end of the show for a question to Richard!

PowerShell is ten years old! How did that happen! Richard chats with Don Jones about his on-going enthusiasm for PowerShell creating the awesome PowerShell.org website and summit. The conversation turns to what PowerShell is like today - a mature product that is well supported throughout the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond. Don discusses the excitement around building your own automation in ways that help you deeply understand your infrastructure. Today the young product in the suite of tools is Desired State Configuration (DSC), which got a minor update in Server 2016, but can still do more. Don is building Tug, an open source pull service for DSC that can put even more control in your hands. Check it out!

Microsoft Ignite was huge! What's an Exchange admin to do? Richard chats Gareth Gudger about his favorite sessions from Ignite in Atlanta that focused on Exchange. The conversation roams over classic sessions around migration and living in a hybrid world (forever) to the more leading edge features of Office 365 including Groups and Planner. Gareth talks about how effective some of the Q and A sessions were, where great panelists interacted with the audience to explore subjects in a way that makes them much more real to the average Exchange admin. Lots of good stuff happened at Ignite - have a listen!

The BIOS has evolved, and we need to take advantage of it! While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Mark Minasi to talk about UEFI and SecureBoot. The conversation starts out with a bit of a history lesson about BIOS, ROM and booting up a computer. Mark tells the story of how EFI started with Intel's Itanium, and eventually appeared everywhere. UEFI is effectively an operating system in its own right, with drivers and it's own set of security risks. This leads to a conversation around SecureBoot, dealing with the challenges of resisting security exploits from startup onward. It's easy enough to get SecureBoot running, it's what happens when it's triggered that gets complicated.

What does it take to make your applications work in Windows 10? While at Ignite, Richard sat down with Chris Jackson to talk about what's hard and what's easy. Of course, it comes down to what you've done before - if you implemented Vista and/or Windows 7 by turning off User Access Control, you're going to have a surprise. While you can turn UAC off in Windows 10, it's not considered a supported configuration. Time to do some testing! Chris talks about how UAC limits access even for administrator accounts so that you know when you're actually using admin privileges. The conversation also goes to security baselines and how to test your apps cost effectively by knowing the price of failure!

How does data analytics fit into your business intelligence strategy? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jen Stirrup to discuss her experiences helping companies really take advantage of the data they have to understand how their businesses are doing, and what they could be doing better. The conversation starts out with a discussion on data warehousing, which is still valuable in this day and age. Jen talks about how the ETL process sometimes "shaved off the corners" of important data, and that new data analytics strategies are better at avoiding that behaviour. The discussion also turns to R and the statistical analysis approaches available today to really understand data. It's a brave new data world!

Holy smokes, 500 episodes! Richard brings in Carl Franklin to do hosting duties while guest stars on his own show - taking a look at the changes to the IT landscape in the past nearly 10 years. Back in April 2007, Vista was brand new (and not doing well), PowerShell was new also, Cloud was just starting out and DevOps didn't even really exist. 64 bit computing was something that was going to be important and smartphones were just starting to take off. Amazing what can happen in 500 shows... and now on to the next 500!

How granular can mobile application management be? Richard talks to Mike Crowley about the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, and it's ability to allow Bring-Your-Own-Device to work effectively without taking over the device. Mike focuses in on three key aspects in the suite, starting with identity - being able to identify users through Azure Active Directory. From there, the next aspect is application management, controlling what capabilities certain applications have on the device. And finally, there is document rights management so that you can protect docs on the device. This works, check it out!

What can App Service do for you? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jeremy Thake to talk about his new role with the Azure team, working with App Service. The conversation starts out focused on the truth that App Service is for operations folks, not developers. App Service is a set of tools for managing applications in the cloud effectively, being able to measure their health, scale instances, restart, reconfigure, and so on. Jeremy also talks about the role App Service takes in deploying your cloud applications at scale for testing and pre-production reasons, as well as out in the production space. No matter how you use Azure, App Service can help!

Is your IT group in the dark? Richard chats with Mattias Karlsson about his experiences as a consultant coming into companies where IT really doesn't know how well their infrastructure is operating - place where the mantra is "if no one is complaining, we're fine." But life can be better than that! Mattias talks about deploying an instrumentation solution like PRTG to start getting insight on whether or not applications and infrastructure are healthy and in use. You can't get better if you don't know what is going well and what isn't, so you need to do measurements. It starts out knowing what normal looks like, and then trying to do better. You need instrumentation to know if you're improving!

How do Small Business Server and Windows 10 get along? Richard chats with Susan Bradley about her experiences continuing to support Small Business Server and Server Essentials even though the products aren't available for the latest builds of Windows Server. There are some challenges working with Windows 10 as security and access rules continue to evolve. The conversation also digs into the move to the cloud for small businesses - where it works for an organization, there are some significant advantages, but it isn't always an option. And who knows what will happen with Server 2016!

IPv6 continues to gain traction! Richard talks to Ed Horley about the progress of IPv6, including the recent announcement by Microsoft at the Ignite conference in Atlanta that virtually all of Azure would now support IPv6. That's a lot of new IPv6 traffic added to the internet at large! Ed discusses the big penetration points of IPv6, including mobile networks (there are a lot of smartphones out there), some consumer ISPs and now the public cloud. Where is IPv6 not happening much? Big enterprises. Adoption in some countries (including the US) are well past 25% - IPv6 is becoming mainstream!

Ready to move your PBX to the cloud? Richard chats with Avrohom Gottheil about this fundamental shift in telephony. Once upon a time there were analog phone systems, then everything went digital. But now, the location of your phones and phone system is almost irrelevant! Avrohom talks about being able to create unified communications solutions where email, telephony and presence all work together. But how do you get past your old PBX approach? It takes new phones, a careful look at your networking and thinking through what's possible when location and connectivity aren't tied together.

Have you heard about Azure Stack? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jeffrey Snover to discuss the Azure Stack announcements. Azure Stack is all about bringing Azure architecture to your data center, or the data center of your preferred service provider. The concept is more about architecture than implementation, although as Jeffrey explains, you won't be running Azure Stack on your existing hardware. The hardware and configuration requirements for Azure Stack are very specific, look at this as more of a partnership with Microsoft doing a fair bit to maintain your new Azure Stack infrastructure - perhaps even more than you do! This is a new kind of on-premises solution and bears careful study!

If you could make storage super fast, how much better would things be? Richard chats with Alan Sugano about his discovery of Simplivity, a card added on to certain Dell, Lenovo and Cisco storage arrays to do inline de-duplication so fast that the iOPs load drops massively. And how many problems does that solve? Alan talks about how improving storage performance changed the way he thinks about hyperconvergence. Different kinds of VMs and roles living together on these high-performance devices makes your private cloud solution so much simpler!

What can Azure Site Recovery do for you? Richard chats with Nicolas Blank about his experiences backing up on-premise systems with Azure Site Recovery, including tricky products like Exchange and SQL Server. You may not be ready to move your on-premise systems into the cloud, but often disaster recovery is more acceptable, if for no other reason than it is far less expensive than maintaining a separate data center. The question is, can you test it properly? Just because you've taken backups doesn't mean you can restore them. Nicolas talks through the fine details about being able to organize and test disaster recovery with Azure Site Migration.

Ready to move to Exchange 2016? Richard chats with Paul Cunningham about the latest version of Exchange and what it takes to move up to it. The older your version of Exchange, the harder it is to upgrade - as Paul says, moving from 2013 is the least painful. And if you're still on 2007, well, you have to migrate to 2013 first. The conversation dives into the typical problems that are revealed when you start looking at a migration - issues around namespaces, certificates and third party tools. And speaking of tools, Microsoft provides the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant to help you started on your own migration!

VMWare and PowerShell together? Of course! Regardless of the recent excitement around PowerShell going open source, third party companies have been supporting PowerShell for years, and VMWare is no exception. Chris tells his story of building out a set of PowerShell scripts for automating configuration of the company demo and operations VMWare environments. The conversation also digs into the logical line between automation and control, as well as better source management and testing for PowerShell scripts. Check out Chris' open source project called Vester that can help you manage your VMWare environment with PowerShell!

Is there a science to DevOps? Richard talks to Dr. Nicole Forsgren, who has a PhD in Information Management about her work with the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization. Nicole is one of the key people behind the State of DevOps report (published by Puppet). The conversation digs into some of the findings in that report, including the proof that stability and speed are not mutually exclusive - you can bring new features and products to market quickly while keeping your systems stable. Have a listen and a read!

How does the cloud shape your infrastructure? Richard talks with web pioneer and CEO Jon Mittelhauser about the on-going evolution of infrastructure architecture to something more closely resembling the cloud. You might not use public cloud infrastructure, but getting your virtual machines able to be created and destroyed on demand is certainly reflective of cloud architecture. The challenges come in the networking and mixing of the models. In the future, cloud architecture will be the norm - the question is, how long will it take you to get there?