RunAs Radio

Docker is coming to Windows and it's going to be huge! Richard chats with Taylor Brown of the Windows Core Virtualization team about the new Windows Server containers coming in Server 2016. With the TP3 release of Server 2016, you can start experimenting with Windows Containers! The discussion also focuses on the upcoming Hyper-V Containers, and the differences and reasoning behind having two different types of containers. Taylor digs into the focus on configuration-as-code for containers, so that automation becomes the default approach to any container based deployment. This looks to be the future of virtualization!

So where is remote access going these days? Richard talks to Richard Hicks about Microsoft DirectAccess and more. Recognizing that VPNs don't make people happy, Richard Hicks talks about how DirectAccess did a good job of making remote connectivity seamless and invisible - at the price of being a challenge to set up in the first place. Having your remote access roles as isolated VMs in your network has distinct advantages! However, the domain join requirement is a significant limitation, and one that Microsoft is working to overcome with Microsoft inTune and the cloud. Remote access continues to evolve!

Have you looked at everything available in an Office 365 subscription? It's easy to stop at Exchange or SharePoint online, but what about the services side of Office 365 including OneDrive for Business and Azure Active Directory Applications. Office 365 is more than just the Office suite in the cloud, there are APIs available to allow developer to build mash-up style applications that integrate with Exchange, SharePoint (both on-prem and cloud) as well as a huge number of third party applications. Jeremy Thake walks through the opportunities for doing overall application installation management from Office 365 - not just Microsoft apps!

So how interesting can power management be? More than you might believe! Richard chats with Microsoft PM Joao Botto about how Surface has taken power management to a new level. While it's easy to just think about power management as a tool to reduce company power consumption over night, when you get into the tablet space, it's also about conserving battery life. Joao talks about Connected Standby mode, which utilizes hardware, drivers, operating system and software together to minimize power consumption while still being able to receive notifications about updates, messages and more! This is some next generation power management!

Ready to manage Azure from the command line? While at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, Richard chatted with Brian Lewis about the PowerShell support available for Azure. Every command and more available in the Azure GUI Dashboard works from PowerShell. Brian talks about the advantages of using scripting to control Azure, creating repeatable, consistent execution plans through scripts for all sorts of configuration changes, including creating new VMs, configuring networking and activating services. Don't use a Word doc to set up your Azure apps - use PowerShell!

How do you build a data warehouse in Azure? While at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, Richard sat down with Michael Blumenthal to talk through a particular case study. Michael talks about the early days of Azure, and how for this particular project, Azure was used only as a VM host - entirely an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution. Using SQL Server and Integration Services, the system gathered data from a number of disparate systems and loaded into separate databases. Then the consolidation! Great stories about making the cloud work!

Ready for a new version of Desired State Configuration (DSC)? Richard chats with Don Jones about the second version of DSC, although it's bundled as part of The Windows Management Framework 5.0. Don discusses the evolving nature of server management and DSC's role in it, and how the tools need to improve to manage your scripts and configuration files. The conversation also turns to testing, and the tool Pester on GitHub as the ideal way to do testing for PowerShell. Don also suggests that if you're new to PowerShell, the ideal way to learn it is in the context of DSC - it gets you focused on a few key capabilities that can provide a ton of power!

How do you provide granular administrative privileges to junior administrators? Richard talks to Mark Minasi about the idea of Just Enough Administration (JEA). And it's not just for junior administration - the conversation dives into this idea that administrators should be domain users most of the time, and only elevate their privileges for specific tasks. JEA helps you organize privilege sets for those tasks so that you have no more capability than necessary. Administrator accounts are the hot new exploit vector, it's time to lock them down! Check out Just Enough Administration on TechNet.

Is ITIL still relevant in a cloud-centric world? Carroll Moon says yes! Richard talks to Carroll about his work building out the service management infrastructure of Office 365 and how those learnings can apply to your organization as it moves to the cloud. Carroll focuses first and foremost on monitoring - until you can see how your applications are operating in real time, other DevOps-type improvements are hard to quantify. And the instrumentation needed should be going down to the client, just monitoring servers is not enough. Getting great monitoring working on your apps means involving development - there's no getting around that. You can read Carroll's entire blog post series on Service Monitoring on Axelos.

How do you filter spam and malware for your mail server? Richard chats with Peter Schmidt about Exchange Online Protection (EOP). Remember Forefront? This is where the product went, into the cloud. As an Azure product, EOP is available when you use Exchange Online - but you can also put it in front of your on-premise Exchange server at a stunning price of one dollar per user per month. Peter discusses the spam and malware filtering, but EOP also offers mail proxying in general so that your mail has a place to live when your server is down. This is the first step to moving your mail to the cloud, check it out at Exchange Online Protection.