RunAs Radio

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!