RunAs Radio

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.