RunAs Radio

Ready to go off the IT rails? Mark Minasi is back! Richard chats with Mark about his favorite subject at the moment - automated vehicles. Mark takes a humorous poke at the role of computing, cloud and sensors that should bring automated driving to fruition. Are we really ready for this tech? That's a big shift in the workforce, a change in the cost of technology and a change in how we all travel. What comes next? Meantime, Mark's life is changing too, what's next for him?

DevOps for Mainframes? Really? Yes really! While at DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Rosalind Radcliffe and David Rizzo to talk about how mainframes can be part of a DevOps practice! The conversation starts out with Rosalind talking about the modern mainframe, which in IBM parlance is all about z/OS operating system and hardware. It's not just CICS anymore; Java runs there too! And with z/OS available for IBM Linux, you can run the same operating system setup on traditional PC hardware as well. This leads to all sorts of options in the modern DevOps practice with mainframes!

How can PowerShell improve your help desk? Richard chats with David das Neves about his work improving the efficiency of a help desk by writing PowerShell scripts. Not the most obvious role for PowerShell, but David walks through the process of finding common tech support requests that can benefit significantly from automation, rather than mouse click - like uninstalling and reinstalling Java! This leads to a conversation about creating mature, shareable and maintainable PowerShell scripts that multiple people can use reliably and safely. Think bigger with PowerShell!

ITIL and DevOps together? Yes! While at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Akshay Ananad and Kaimar Karu of AXELOS to talk about how the DevOps practices apply to service management. ITIL was born in a slower time for IT, but the core axioms are still relevant - you just need to focus on service rather than technology. The conversation also goes to including your service management folks in the conversations around software, the same way that operations, infosec and bizdev need to be involved. Devops is all about service, and so is ITIL!

How is DevOps evolving? While at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Nicole Forsgren to talk about her latest data finding and analysis on DevOps. The conversation starts with a discussion about making good reports, including who the data is collected from. Ideally you'd want a fully random data set, but as Nicole explains, that's not possible - you have to go with as large a set as possible. In the case of the 2017 report, that's 3200 survey responses. And what do they say? DevOps works for everyone! It's not always easy, but it's worth it!

More questions answered at SQLIntersection! Richard hosts a panel discussion of Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Bob Ward, Brent Ozar and many other SQL speakers from SQLIntersection. The questions are far ranging this time around, talking about business intelligence, data science, reliability approaches and a record-setting answer on data partitioning from You-Know-Who!

More database services in Azure! While at the Build conference, Richard sat down with Jason Anderson and Sunil Kamath to discuss both MySQL and Postgres coming to Azure Database services. Sure, you've been able to run MySQL and Postgres in virtual machines on Azure, but why would you want to maintain an operating system and patching yourself? Jason and Sunil talk about all the cloud aspects of a database service - update policies, resiliency, backup and extension options. There's more coming, but the first versions of MySQL and Postgres available as an Azure Database Service look great!

Azure Stack is coming soon! While at the Build conference in Seattle, Richard sat down with Jeffrey Snover to dig into the latest developments around Azure Stack. If you like cloud architecture but are not prepared to go to the public cloud, Azure Stack offers many of the capabilities of Azure but in a private configuration. Jeffrey talks about the various scenarios that make sense for Azure Stack and how it is likely to be made available through a number of third party providers. Azure Stack will be in GA mid-2017 and the features will just keep coming!

What's the latest on Exchange 2016? Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Mike O'Neill about some the things he's seen lately in Exchange world. Mike talks about the hybrid world of mail these days, with on-premises Exchange servers working alongside of Office 365 Exchange Online. The conversation also digs into the affect that feature testing in the cloud has had on the on-premises edition of Exchange - the quality of updates is better and you can have confidence in doing updates during the day with zero downtime - with caveats of course! This may be the last version of Exchange on-premises, but the features will keep coming!

Why would you run Linux on Hyper-V? Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Kevin Kelling about his experiences working with a customer that had tens of thousands of virtual machines running Hyper-V - enough that the licensing of the VMs became an issue! And since Windows Server Data Center edition allows for unlimited Hyper-V instances, the effort was on to make those Linux-based VMs run well in Hyper-V - and with the right tweaking, they do! Great story about digging deeply into how Hyper-V works!