RunAs Radio

What does it mean to be a System or Network Administrator? Richard talks to Tom Limoncelli about his experiences and book around the subject. Tom talks about how networking and sysadmin roles have evolved recently, where all the roles are being impacted by automation and DevOps practices - nobody is immune, nor should they want to be! The conversation dives into providing value to the organization, both in the form of keeping the employees productive, as well as safe and secure. It's not just about plugging cables and spinning screwdrivers, today, more than ever, the role of the sysadmin is understanding the needs of the organization and helping to achieve those needs!

The challenge of hiring new people into the world of IT is getting harder every day - what does it take to grow your skilled staff? Richard talks with Don Jones about his book Be the Master, where Don focuses on the fact that there are plenty of apprentices out there, but not enough masters to teach them well. And the masters exist - it's just easy to forget that you know things that others don't know, and need to know. The conversation spans around where learning responsibilities lie - it's not going to be the tools vendors like Microsoft, and while organizations that need skilled people need to support learning, ultimately it comes down to us - we need to want to learn and grow!

If you're writing PowerShell, you're writing code - now debug it! Richard chats with Josh Duffney about tools and techniques for debugging your PowerShell code. The conversation starts out with the admission that as PowerShell coders, you really are doing development work, just for sysadmin tasks. That means you need source control, testing, coding practices and hopefully, a continuous integration pipeline - DevOps all the things! Josh talks about how VSCode has made his life of debugging PowerShell easier with color coding, breakpoints, code formatting and more. It's all code in the end!

Modern security is complex - how can the cloud help? Richard chats with Paul Keely about his work with organizations helping to secure workstations and using the cloud to get insight into the kind of attacks going on and how to mitigate them. Paul talks about security starting with administrators, who are now the key vector to exploits in the modern cybersecurity age. Just Enough Administration, where there are individual accounts for each service that an admin uses and the accounts are logged, emailed and meant for short-term use only. There is a large array of tools provided by Microsoft both on-premises and in Azure - it takes awhile to sort them out, but they are powerful!

How do you ETL? Richard chats with Tom Kerkhove about Azure Data Factory, now previewing V2 features. We've had Extract-Transform-Load workflows since databases were first invented, but the concept was really formalized back in the data warehouse days. With the cloud, there are more tools, more data sources and more compute to enhance your ETL experiences. Tom talks about how V2 of Data Factory adds SQL Server Integration Service functionality so that you can put your SSIS packages directly into Azure. Data Factory is tied in with Logic Apps, including supporting features like Azure Key Vault. This leads to a great conversation about data-centric vs. application-centric workflows. Your company is sure to have both!

Ready to manage SQL Server with PowerShell? Richard chats with Rob Sewell about dbatools, an open source effort to build an amazing set of PowerShell commands for SQL Server. Yes, Microsoft has a few PowerShell commands implemented, but when you see the dbatools set, you'll see what PowerShell can really do for you! Rob talks about the focus on migration for continuous integration purposes, upgrading from one version of SQL Server to another, even into the cloud. If you wanted to get to a place where you can experiment with SQL Server configurations, settings and performance, you need dbatools!

What's a company intranet look like in 2018? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her work helping companies find value in their internal information management systems - after all, it's where you keep a lot of company value! The conversation starts out with a discussion around search, the bane of most intranet implementations. Sure people want Google, but do they really? The indexing system that Google relies on doesn't make sense in an internal website. Susan points out that today's modern intranet is typically in the cloud, taking advantage of great tools like Office 365. That helps with search, but it starts with culture - does your organization value finding existing things? Without culture, the tech can't save you!

SQL Server keeps getting smarter! Richard talks to Erin Stellato about Query Store and Automatic Tuning. First introduced in SQL Azure, these features showed up in SQL Server 2016 and improved substantially in 2017. Erin describes Query Store as a kind of black box for databases, similar to an aircraft, but you don't need to wait for a crash to value the data stored in it. Query Store is a real-time record of the queries happening in your database, along with the query plan and what caused the query to wait. This leads to a ton of tuning opportunities, including automated tuning, where SQL Server will recommend indexes and other performance features for itself!

SharePoint has never been more manageable! Richard chats with Andrew Connell about his experiences around using the latest programming models for SharePoint and how they stick to more standardized client-side development models that are easier to secure, audit and don't mess with your servers quite so much. The conversation starts out with a discussion around the Office 365 APIs and the programmability they bring to Office 365 as a whole, while also sticking to good secure standards - this is the stuff that Microsoft itself depends on! Andrew talks about how the cloud-first approach to SharePoint has strengthened and simplified SharePoint on-premises, so we all benefit!

How does Office 365 help teams collaborate? Richard chats with Tony Redmond about his insights into Microsoft's on-going effort to make Office 365 the most efficient place for people to work together. Tony talks about two primary hubs of team work - collaboration around email and collaboration around chat. The chat product is, of course, the new Office 365 Teams. The conversation dives into how different people like to collaborate in different ways, and that Office 365 has carved out spaces so that all those styles of collaboration can work together. Some conversations are best suited to Teams, some are best suited to Outlook, and you don't have to choose one or the other. Just don't store files in email!