RunAs Radio

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?