RunAs Radio

What can Azure Site Recovery do for you? Richard chats with Nicolas Blank about his experiences backing up on-premise systems with Azure Site Recovery, including tricky products like Exchange and SQL Server. You may not be ready to move your on-premise systems into the cloud, but often disaster recovery is more acceptable, if for no other reason than it is far less expensive than maintaining a separate data center. The question is, can you test it properly? Just because you've taken backups doesn't mean you can restore them. Nicolas talks through the fine details about being able to organize and test disaster recovery with Azure Site Migration.

Ready to move to Exchange 2016? Richard chats with Paul Cunningham about the latest version of Exchange and what it takes to move up to it. The older your version of Exchange, the harder it is to upgrade - as Paul says, moving from 2013 is the least painful. And if you're still on 2007, well, you have to migrate to 2013 first. The conversation dives into the typical problems that are revealed when you start looking at a migration - issues around namespaces, certificates and third party tools. And speaking of tools, Microsoft provides the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant to help you started on your own migration!

VMWare and PowerShell together? Of course! Regardless of the recent excitement around PowerShell going open source, third party companies have been supporting PowerShell for years, and VMWare is no exception. Chris tells his story of building out a set of PowerShell scripts for automating configuration of the company demo and operations VMWare environments. The conversation also digs into the logical line between automation and control, as well as better source management and testing for PowerShell scripts. Check out Chris' open source project called Vester that can help you manage your VMWare environment with PowerShell!

Is there a science to DevOps? Richard talks to Dr. Nicole Forsgren, who has a PhD in Information Management about her work with the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization. Nicole is one of the key people behind the State of DevOps report (published by Puppet). The conversation digs into some of the findings in that report, including the proof that stability and speed are not mutually exclusive - you can bring new features and products to market quickly while keeping your systems stable. Have a listen and a read!

How does the cloud shape your infrastructure? Richard talks with web pioneer and CEO Jon Mittelhauser about the on-going evolution of infrastructure architecture to something more closely resembling the cloud. You might not use public cloud infrastructure, but getting your virtual machines able to be created and destroyed on demand is certainly reflective of cloud architecture. The challenges come in the networking and mixing of the models. In the future, cloud architecture will be the norm - the question is, how long will it take you to get there?

How do you build a blameless post-mortem culture? And should you? Richard chats with Jason Hand from VictorOps about the blameless culture, which is a methodology embraced by the safest and most reliable organizations - think aircraft safety. Having everyone involved in an incident able to discuss everything they did and saw helps to get a clear picture of the truth. Without that information, it's very hard to make real improvements in our organizations. Jason talks about ChatOps as a strategy to get there, using tools like Slack to let people see the conversations going on and capture the critical information during an incident to address problems.

Here comes the Redstone update for Windows 10! Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the big one year update for Windows 10. Don't call it a service pack - it's full of new features of Windows. The patching normally done in services packs is now a routine thing with Windows 10, they don't even wait for Tuesday. The conversation digs into some of the new features in Redstone and how it can serve the enterprise effectively. A lot of energy has been focused on taking security to the next level, because the black hats sure are! Steven talks about some new security devices and a shift in attitude from an administrator's point of view - we're security risks too!

Infrastructure deserves tests too! While at ChefConf in Austin, Richard sat down with Steven Murawski to talk about Test Kitchen. Test Kitchen allows you to execute code to validate the operation and performance of specific features in your infrastructure. As Steven explains, you can used Desired State Configuration (DSC) to determine whether or not your configuration is correct, but when it isn't, how do you determine what's wrong? Test Kitchen is all about actually exercising the relevant elements of your infrastructure so you know what's working and what isn't, and how well it all runs. Since it's open source, you can download it and take it out for a spin for free!

What does it mean to have application automation? While at ChefConf in Austin, Richard sat down with Jessica DeVita to talk about Habitat, an open source project driven by the folks who created Chef to bring automation to the application itself. As Jessica explains, most applications are dependent on a given infrastructure to provide scaling, security, reliability and all of the other services that make a good application. But what if those elements were part of the application itself, and the infrastructure could change? That's the promise of Habitat. It's still early days, but well worth a look!

How do you manage the security of documents around individual applications on a mobile device? Richard talks to Simon May about Microsoft InTune Mobile Application Management (MAM). MAM allows IT folks to specify security privileges on an app-by-app and document-by-document basis. The identity role is handled by Azure Active Directory, and the entire Office 365 suite is supported - but so are products from Adobe, FoxIt, SAP and more. Documents can be time-limited (very spy novelish!) and even have individual parts of a document (like a paragraph) have different privileges. This looks to be a lighter-weight way to allow bring-your-own-device to protect corporate documents while leaving personal content alone. Check it out!