RunAs Radio

What's a data lake and why do you need one? Richard chats with Stacia Varga about the evolving landscape of data analytics - focusing on how the cloud is changing the way a company can gather, store and analyze data. This leads to a conversation about the role of the data lake, a place where raw data can arrive and then be processed on-demand for analytics. The cloud provides the elasticity and scaling to be able to analyze data quickly on demand - you just need to take advantage of it!

WIndows Server 2019 has been out since November 2018 - is it time to install it? Richard talks to Jason Helmick about how the creation of Windows has evolved and how Microsoft's new practices around building Windows has affected adoption and interest in the latest operating system. Jason talks about how the continuous improvement model of Microsoft products including Windows can be a challenge for some folks, but provides huge benefits also. Should you install Server 2019? Jason says YES!

SharePoint is not just a product, it's a tool for helping your organization manage critical information. Are you taking advantage of it? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about what information architecture is about and how SharePoint can play a key role in helping an organization find, store and share data. Every organization needs this capability, successful organizations do it well - how well do you do it?

IT may be evolving, but are all aspects of your IT organization advancing? Richard chats with Jeff Stokes, former Microsoft PFE and now working at Tanium about the challenges IT people have around improving performance. Arguably the least advanced part of much of IT infrastructure is the network - so what does a modern network look like? Jeff talks about being able to get visibility into what servers and desktops are talking to each other, and how to set logical boundaries around them. At least know when your machines are speaking out of turn!

How do you make your SQL queries go faster? Richard chats with Erin Stellato about how Query Store in SQL Server 2017 and its ability to provide detailed information on query performance, including where SQL Server is compiling new query plans for repeated calls. Erin talks about how ORMs can cause repeated ad-hoc queries and how Query Store can be used to help educate developers and explore options for tuning those queries with stored procedures or parameterization. But you can't blame code by default - Query Store can be used for a variety of performance tuning options, on-premises and in the cloud!

Firewalls and MFA are awesome, but how's your physical security? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about a story surrounding a consultant able to walk into a data center, take a VM host server and walk out - and then was able to exploit it to pull all sorts of information out of the Active Directory service on it! Ned talks about taking both physical security and policies seriously, and then moves to the next phase: How do you protect a virtual machine even when its stolen? Enter Guarded Fabric and Shielded Virtual Machines, first introduced in Server 2016 and improved in Server 2019 - go beyond BitLocker protections and really digitally secure your VMs!

The next DevOps Report Survey is out, and Nicole Forsgren needs your help! Richard chats with Nicole about the changes at DORA (now part of Google) - but the work to understand how to make high performing teams continues! Nicole discusses her now expanded team of researchers getting to the heart of what it takes to make great software in your organization. Its never one simple thing, but many aspects that work together so that everyone involved in the creation and operation of software can be as effective as possible - take the survey today and contribute to the effort!

Office 365 is growing in popularity - but is it fast enough? Richard chats with Paul Keely about how IT needs to monitor Office 365 to understand performance problems and worse. Paul talks about all the various aspects of performance that can be impacted by working with Office 365, including needing more overall bandwidth. The discussion turns to the Azure Service Map tool that runs on workstations and in the cloud to understand what services are eating resources - and how that can turn up potential malware and security breaches! There are a lot of aspects to understanding exactly what's going on with Office 365 in your org, but it is a solvable problem - dig in!

Is Artificial Intelligence part of your data analytics strategy? Richard chats with Jen Stirrup about how data analytics and business intelligence continue to evolve to include different elements of artificial intelligence. Natural language interfaces are one aspect, but machine learning can play an even larger role - if you continue to do your diligence! Jen talks about needing quality data to feed to machine learning algorithms and the challenges of dealing with data bias and confirmation bias. We've had these battles all along in analytics, but the new AI tools can amplify your mistakes - there are no shortcuts to good data!

Whitelisting is a good idea - but not easy to make happen! Richard talks to Aaron Margosis about his work making it easier to use AppLocker to implement whitelisting on Windows, a set of scripts and tools named by Chris Jackson as AaronLocker. Aaron talks about implementing the whitelisting strategies outlined in the NSA whitepaper on the subject, making it easier to maintain the whitelist when apps need to be updated. Admins can choose how locked down to make a machine, providing flexibility around updates while still blocking the primary malware vectors - check it out!

How do you understand what's going on in your applications? Richard talks to Isaac Levin about Azure Application Insights - now part of the Azure Monitor Suite that can help with monitoring of PCs, virtual machines as well as a large variety of applications. As Isaac explains, Insights is really a reporting tool that feeds off of a standard SDK that can be installed in a variety of applications - but in the case of .NET applications, you don't have to install the SDK, AppInsights can still instrument it! But the most important aspect is all the complex reporting built-in that can show trends of behaviour as well as errors in your suite of applications.

Every organization has information hoarders; the question is, do you know where it is? Richard talks to Stephanie Donahue about the challenges around discovering information hoards and helping to unwind them - finding out why people hoard data and get them to share it to the larger organization that can benefit from it. Part of the challenge is tooling, and part of it is personal. Either way, it's worthwhile to get that hoarded data shared and help everyone be more productive!

It's 2019 - do you know where your IPv6 network is? Richard chats with Ed Horley about the current state of IPv6 and his new business, HexaBuild, that specifically provides services to companies implementing IPv6. Ed points out that the cell industry has pretty much moved entirely to IPv6 - if you're using a current generation smartphone, it's running across an IPv6 network. All the cloud providers offer IPv6 addressing, so the laggards at this point are the big, older corporations. The real question is, when do we move off of IPv4?

Machine Learning is all around us - are you getting ready for your company to use it? Richard chats with Ginger Grant about what you need to understand around machine learning to be successful. Not all data is created equal - often we think if we just store everything, it'll be useful for machine learning analysis in the future. Ginger talks about some of the mistakes she's seen in the space, and that analysis can't be an after thought. There are lots of great tools in the show notes to help you get started and be successful!

It's a container world - we're just living in it! Richard chats with Microsoft VP Corey Sanders about how containers have taken off in the cloud world. Starting the conversation with the previous show done with Corey in 2017, the discussion dives into how containers in general and Kubernetes specifically have dominated deployment and operations in the cloud. Corey runs down the gamut of advantages, including hybrid and cross-platform options, and how Microsoft is using containers under the hood - it's a container world!

How do you get developers and DBAs to collaborate more effectively? Richard moderated a panel discussion at the PASS conference in Seattle with panelists Amy Herold, Angela Henry, Lyndsey Padget and Tim Corey to share their experiences and debate methods and mechanisms that can help. Lots of participation from the audience as well!

Why does DevOps work? Richard chats with Martin Woodward about the key aspects of DevOps and how they make a difference in an organization - even one as large as Microsoft! Martin talks about how developer often drive a DevOps practice from their Agile development experiences, and how that is a challenge to translate to operations. There's a natural tension between shipping more often with smaller changes and keeping the system stable - how do you find the right balance point?

Once more into the questions and answers! A twice-yearly event, SQLIntersection always closes with a great question and answer session with all of the SQLIntersection attendees asking questions of an amazing line up of SQL Server experts including Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Bob Ward, Brent Ozar, Erin Stellato, David Pless, Aaron Bertrand and many more! Want a sense of what the SQL Server community is worried about and otherwise focused on? Have a listen!

What's happening with Exchange 2019? Richard chats with Gareth Gudger about the announcements around Exchange 2019 back at Ignite, and what has happened since. A number of interesting performance improvements including the MetaCache Database and Dynamic Database Cache let you take advantage of high-speed storage like SSDs without committing to moving your entire Exchange storage over. New security features also factor strongly. More challenging is the removal of unified messaging and the shortened support cycle for Exchange 2019. This leads to some speculation from Gareth about Microsoft's plans for the future of Exchange!

PAL is back, and speaking more languages! Richard chats with former PFE Clint Huffman about his latest work on Performance Analysis of Logs or PAL. For more than ten years, Clint has been supporting the open source project that helps you understand what's going on in all sorts of important Windows applications including Active Directory, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange Server and more. Clint talks about evolving PAL and it's sister tool CLU into Pro editions that you can subscribe to - stay tuned for more!

Time for a holiday season show and a look back at the year! Richard chats with Microsoft Technical Fellow Jeffrey Snover about the very good year that Microsoft has had in most aspects. Jeff talks about how Azure came of age in 2018 and is leading the industry today - and heck, Microsoft even jumped up to be the highest market cap company in the world, at least for now. Looking beyond Windows, the various products that work with Linux and even Microsoft's own Linux distro in the form of Azure Sphere speak to a new Microsoft world. What will happen in 2019?

How do you engineer a customer experience? Richard chats with Chris Jackson about the role of the Windows Customer Experience Engineers - the folks at Microsoft who talk to people using Windows all over the world and advocate inside Microsoft to make those experiences better. A lot of Windows experiences are collected automatically via telemetry in Windows, but there are certain places where that telemetry doesn't work. Chris also digs into Deskop App Assurance, where Microsoft is actually helping to fix compatibility problems with applications on the latest version of Windows - no really!

What's new in SQL Server 2019? Richard chats with Brent Ozar about his take on the latest version of SQL Server. Is there any more to do? Apparently yes! Some features are a bit more questionable, like Java support in SQL Server. But others make a ton of sense, including more analytics, more insights and better support for containers. It all depends on what you want to do with SQL Server. Brent talks about how the culture of DBAs is changing and how that is reflected in SQL Server itself. There's more data to store than ever!

Device Management is evolving - are you? Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about how device management is changing. From the good old days where Active Directory could do everything to the today where there is a huge diversity of devices, even versions of Windows, that cannot be domain joined - there are management solutions for everything. The question is, what makes sense for your organization? Jeremy talks through the different scenarios and options for traditional, hybrid and modern device management!

How do you make the Internet of Things (IoT) secure and reliable? Richard chats with Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt about Azure Sphere, a comprehensive approach to IoT that provides security and the hardware, operating system and cloud services layers. The discussion digs into how microcontrollers (MCUs) permeate all technology in our lives, and that they will soon be a part of the Internet of Things, but only if they can be made safe. Azure Sphere starts with MCU hardware that has a hardware root of trust, along with the Azure Sphere OS, a custom Linux kernel developed by Microsoft for MCUs. And finally, the Azure Sphere aspect provides the mechanisms for on-going security, authenticity and response to threats. The first MCUs are available today for experimentation, check them out!

Who advocates for operations folks in the cloud? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard sat down with Rick Claus to talk about what it means to be an advocate, and how operations folks think about the cloud. A lot of cloud concepts, like containers, are driven by development - and yet ultimately, it all needs to be deployed, monitored and managed. Rick digs into how operations people are focusing more on those core competencies than any particular technology, and finding there's more to do, more opportunity and more fun to be had in the cloud - what a great thing to advocate for!

What's happening with VPNs in the Microsoft world? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard sat down with Richard Hicks to talk about the on-going evolution of VPN access in Windows. There's been a number of products along the way, Richard talks about DirectAccess as the one most people know and love - but it hasn't had much work done on it in the past few years. Enter Always On VPN, which simplifies VPNs as well as broadening the VPN support for Windows and other platforms. There are some tricks to migrating, not the least of which is deciding what additional services you need, like InTune - but this is the VPN service Microsoft is focused on today!

The DevOps movement continues to grow - let's see the results! Richard chats with DORA chief scientist Dr. Nicole Forsgren about the State of DevOps in 2018 Report. And it's great news! Nicole digs into the rigorous reporting methodology used to develop the report, covering a broad chunk of the IT community - large and small companies using a huge variety of technology. More than half of the respondents fell into the high performing and elite categories, able to deploy changes to software rapidly with low failure rates. But there are still holdouts - folks trapped in a cycle a slow deployment cycle that means each iteration is difficult because of the vast amount of change. Smaller, faster updates are better - read the report to learn more!

The Internet of Things and Industrial SCADA controls are colliding - what happens next? Richard chats with Niall Merrigan about the security issues around industrial plants - factories, power stations, refineries and so on. There has been automation there for years in the form of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems - but their security models are pretty primitive, often relying on air-gap networks to keep hackers out. Meantime, inexpensive and powerful IoT devices offer new capabilities - they have their own security issues, but there are solutions. What happens when the two meet?

What can Graph do for you? Richard chats with Jeremy Thake about his return to Microsoft, joining the engineering team at Microsoft Graph. Jeremy is focused on the developer experience, which leads to a detailed discussion of what Graph is all about and how it can help an organization manage rights between users, devices, and applications. This leads to a conversation about increasing the sophistication of security models within an organization by incorporating granular privilege controls provided by Graph. Get away from the nothing/everything security dichotomy!

And the battle is on - CloudOps vs DevOps! Richard debates with Dana Epp about what modern operations looks like. Dana points out that all too often, DevOps is purely a developer-driven initiative for automated continuous delivery pipelines - but there's more to DevOps than that! Meantime there's a group using the CloudOps term as an approach to not bothering with operations at all - let the cloud take care of it! What does the real value of operations looks like today? Do we have to decide between on-premises and cloud? How do we get to be a better team?

What's an IT Community and why should you be a part of it? Richard chats with Michael Bender about being a part of a larger IT community. Michael talks about how often IT folks are so head-down in the day-to-day crises of operations that they don't have the cycles or interest to connect with others in their profession. But it's a trap! Engaging with the community is a source of support, information and opportunities to make your work better, help your career growth and to open doors to the new things you might want to do. Go to a conference or attend a local meetup - you'd be amazed at what happens next!

What does a data analytics solution look like today? Richard chats with Trey Johnson of Zap about how data warehousing and OLAP have evolved into the modern data analytics solution. The cloud is the biggest shift for data analytics, changing what it means to Extract, Transform and Load. Trey talks about the focus being far more on extracting and loading across different SaaS products, and transformation being a rarer option. Whether you're starting a new greenfield analytics solution or looking to modernize an existing implementation, the tooling just keeps getting better!

Spectre and Meltdown are still out there - are you protected? Richard chats with Susan Bradley and Wayne Small about Spectre and Meltdown, a set of vulnerabilities found in Intel, AMD, ARM and other CPUs. Since the public announcements in early January, there have been an on-going stream of patches to mitigate the vulnerability - but at the expense of performance and in some cases, stability. The presumption that all patches are good is significantly challenged by Spectre and Meltdown. What are the right answers here?

What's new in Configuration Manager world? Richard chats with Johan Arwidmark about the latest for Configuration Manager - but starts out with a discussion around Windows Update. Of course, anyone immersed in configuration cares about the problems with Windows Update, and Johan talks about the testing they're doing that often results in needing to wait for fixed to updates before they get deployed. Report your problems - they will get fixed faster! Then into a discussion about the Cloud, and the new cloud management tools for Config Man - making it easier to manage configuration no matter where you are. Check it out!

Control what gets onto your PCs! Richard chats with Sami Laiho about the latest thinking around application whitelisting. For years we've worked from the blacklist model of allowing anything onto PCs and running anti-malware software to remove the bad stuff. But there's so much bad stuff today, it's impossible to keep up. Whitelisting has gotten simpler with better versions of AppLocker and approaches that allow you to more easily control what applications live on PCs. And it defeats the vast majority of malware right out of the gate!

Hey, it's episode 600! Let's celebrate! While down in Redmond at the residence of Kim Tripp and Paul Randal, Richard turned on the recorder and this bit of silliness emerged. Technical content? Not so much. Cursing? Yeah, a bit of that. But it's been 600 episodes - thanks for listening!

Ready for a chuckle? Richard chats with Mike O'Neill about a number of stories from his work as a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft. While it's best to always be kind, some of these mistakes, especially the security ones, are shocking... Mike talks about offices where everyone was a domain administrator (including every ex-employee too!), keeping passwords secure in paper envelopes, and many more. You can't know everything, but if these stories are any indication, it's still worthwhile to ask and know more!

Ready to migrate some storage? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about his work on the Storage Migration Service, which is part of Server 2019. You can get an insider preview of Server 2019 today, and with a couple of extra clicks, start experimenting with this cool tool to help you migrate file server content, that is files, rights, metadata and all the details onto Server 2019. Ned talks about the pain of manual file server migrations - what if you could make it like a Physical-to-Virtual migration in Hyper-V with no downtime!

Computers and water don't mix! Usually. Richard talks to Ben Cutler, one of the team leading Project Natick - building subsea data centers. Ben talks about the history of Natick, starting with the first tests off the coast of California, and the phase 2 project happening now in the Orkney islands. Speed of deployment is one advantage, as is reduced latency by being able to put data centers close to customers. But the focus of Natick is first and foremost environmental - what is the least environmentally impactful way to provide compute to those that need it? There's more to come!

The month of July 2018 was an especially hard one for updates to Windows - and has prompted an important letter. Richard talks to Susan Bradley about her open letter to the leaders of Microsoft talking about the problems that Windows updates are causing for consumers and IT Professionals alike. There were 47 updates in July, and many of them had significant 'side effects' to Windows workstations and servers - even Microsoft products. Susan talks through the issues and offers some potential solutions - does updating Windows have to be this hard?

In April 2018, Microsoft re-organized the Windows division - so that there is no Windows division anymore. What does it mean? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott, who has made a career around Windows for years, about what happened with Windows division leader Terry Myerson, and what this re-organization means for Windows going forward. It's a new world!

OneDrive for Business continues to evolve! Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the announcements around OneDrive for Business at the SharePoint North America conference. Stephen talks about the improved support for photos taken via smartphones, being first-class citizens in OneDrive for Business - including using the amazing Office Len technology to make photos of whiteboards and documents (like receipts) super crisp and clear. The conversation also gets into getting those key 'known' folders moved into OneDrive, so that no given device has unique files, they're always part of the OneDrive for Business ecosystem. Deeper cloud integration everywhere!

Where do you keep your secrets? While at Build in Seattle, Richard chatted with Andrew Cheung and Paul Yuknewicz about the latest features for Azure Key Vault. The conversation dives into what should go into the Key Vault beyond the obvious TLS certificate private keys. Any username/password combinations for services accessed by other applications can live there - really, anything with secrets. And as Andrew says, containers have secrets too - they can live in Key Vault!

Have you got containers in your operations? While at Build in Seattle, Richard chatted with Jessica Deen about the gamut of offerings that Microsoft has around containers. Jessica talks about the latest container features in Azure, including the Azure Kubernetes Service. But even more important than services is tooling, and the conversation dives into the Kubernetes Tools for VSCode as well as tools like Helm for helping you set up and manage your complete container system.

Self-Service Test Labs in Azure! While at Build in Seattle, Richard talked with Claude Remillard about the on-going evolution of Azure Dev Test Labs. Azure Dev Test Labs allows you to define a set of templates and services for building up a set of VMs for doing testing - or anything else you like. The set can have run limits, billing limits and more, so you can control costs as well as make sure things get cleaned up when done. Claude digs into using Azure Dev Test Labs for demos, training and more - maybe the name should be changed to Azure Lab Services!

Data Warehousing is for everyone! While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Matt Usher to talk about the latest version of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Matt talks about how the cloud has made the barrier of entry for data warehousing trivially low - costs that are dollars per hour, so that you can afford to experiment at almost any scale. What can data warehousing do for you? Make your company more competitive and efficient!

Linux on Windows! While at Build in Seattle, Richard talked to Tara Raj and Sarah Cooley about Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). While you've been able to run Linux in virtual machines and containers for a long time, WSL actually lets you run Linux in a command line inside Windows. Why would you do that? Sarah and Tara focuses on the biggest benefit, which is taking advantage of great Linux command line tools and scripts.

The Exchange story continues to evolve - how about an update! Richard chats with Gareth Gudger about his work with a variety of companies using Exchange both on-premises and in Office 365. Gareth digs into older versions of Exchange that are coming out of support (time to upgrade) and the announcements around Exchange 2019 - the features come to the cloud first, but we get them in our own data centers eventually. There are plenty of ways to operate mail successfully for your organization, and Gareth talks through a number of those choices.

SQL Server runs on Linux and in containers! Richard talks to Bob Ward about the on-going evolution of SQL Server and how the latest version literally has a common codebase between the Windows and Linux versions - feature-for-feature identical! The tooling is different, but the new SQL Operations Studio is built to be cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac and Linux! The conversation also dives into container strategies using Docker and Kubernetes, both on-premises and in the cloud. Lots of data choices!