 Hey and welcome back to another episode of a zed update I'm your host Anthony Bartol joined as always by Sarah lean who wasn't here last week And we were you know nice enough to have Sonny cuff was out at midnight her time to join us Sarah glad to have you back What happened last weekend? What were you up to? And I was doing a secret filming show that's gonna happen in a couple of weeks time So can't say anything more than that. But yeah, I was filming something with another team Something that will come up possibly a big night. We don't know which is really cool But what's awesome is that you brought a news story with you, which is really cool and Producer Pierre and I were like, oh my god, this is amazing. So let's talk about it really quickly Kick it take it away in terms of what it is And so I was reading the news stories this week and I spotted that scientists have been playing video games with pigs so And they set up this video game with him kind of reward if the pigs complete a puzzle they get it get fed And which is interesting because I don't think pigs have the greatest eyesight So they've managed to actually train or get the pigs to do this video game But what's also interesting about this is that the feed part of the machine broke But what happened was the pigs still came up to it because and the scientists believe that it was a social contact the kind of Calming voice encouraging voice from the scientists saying, you know, good morning. Hello. Have a we go at the game? And so yeah, it was interesting just to see that they're they're looking at how they can better interact with our animals And and make their welfare better And I thought it was also cool because of the whole video game thing because we're all video game geeks in the team So yeah, and that's the thing right so so, you know, I definitely, you know Look at this and say well my eyes say it's not as good as it used to be there So is peers. So we're both squinting at the screen while we're playing Call of Duty But it's it's interesting that the the peer is screaming in the back and saying hey, no, I'm not that you know, I can see The the interesting piece of this is the social interaction, right? I'm so grateful that I have you know yourself and Pierre and Rick and others That we have this ability to to game together You know, we've been do we have been doing a lot of Call of Duty There's been a little bit of fortnight in there too. I'm hoping to get the racing going in the ports of horizon That's that's my favorite Paul Jensen wants to do head-to-head on on Pong I've actually been dabbling a lot in that too in terms of the the older games You know, Clico vision and Atari and stuff like that, which has been really cool as well Then there's ways to play over the network for those type of games the the Interesting thing with this is this the social aspect of it and the fact that we're in this pandemic and it's a new opportunity Well, it's been around for a while But it's it's something where a lot of people have gravitated towards in terms of gaming and it's just a common goal That you're trying to achieve with your team and it's you know, a lot of fun I wish I got I got fed every time we want to match. I actually probably start because we never really I might be a great way to lose weight Is it to be fed when when you won a game because never happens? But the whole aspect of it is it's just the fun, right? You're having this great little time We we have to have another game at the time zone thing is very challenging I think you're we're a five-hour difference, but we both have snow. It's snowing outside right now I think we've got about almost two and a half feet of snow coming in right now. Oh, yeah It's coming down hard It's it's we got it. We got to plan those times to for us to game It's just hilarious. It's you know, it's that's the whole thing. You forget about everything else You have a great old time We do talk about tech sometimes while we're gaming and you know, that's it brings up an interesting point because I've seen a lot of Streams now live streams coming on where you have like-minded individuals that are passionate about technology passionate about learning about the enablement of services and what have you and they're talking about this while playing video games and You know, it's an interesting, you know thing because you're concentrating on the game But you're talking about tech and obviously you can't run a live demo or you could I guess if you were playing Minecraft And you set up this whole network and you could in essence do that that way But it's an interesting new paradigm that people are exploring in terms of having those conversations over gaming with other individuals And it's something we'll see how that grows beyond the pandemic, right? So Who knows what will go from there Sarah your thoughts? I'm not a fan of watching other people play video games. I'll be honest I would rather play them myself and then shout at the screen and throw my controller about but And but yeah, if people enjoy watching other people play games then that's you know, go for it I'm not gonna Criticize you from that, but it's not my personal thing. I'd like to say I'd rather play the game and Any great controller than throw them through the wall and stuff like that. So yeah, I Watched sometimes purely from the aspect of to learn how to play the game because you know, a couple years back I could beat my son handily and let's say EA sports NHL 2000 and what was the 2010 2011 and now it's gotten so complicated in terms of the sequences that you need to do And he's mastered it and I'm still trying to figure out how to get my goal in a slide across the other side of the net And and so I'll watch the videos This is here's what you need to know if you're a dad trying to beat your son and literally they have videos to that extent If you're dad trying to beat your son at this game. This is what you need to know. I'm like, okay Let's go. Let's watch this video. Well. Yeah, there's a lot of people that watch the live streams For pure entertainment of watching an individual play a game, which is also interesting as well So yeah, I suppose it's the new version of read the manual, right? Like who wants to read the manual? I'll just go on a platform and watch someone else stream and figure it out from there So at least we're reading the manuals though, right? At least we're reading the manuals. I Don't think I've read a manual on a video game for a long time though. I think they just sit in the box They look pretty but it's interesting Because then what is the difference in terms of the correlation of watching a video on how to learn how to play a video game? To you know, watching a demo on somebody at a service like Azure file share or you know, Azure Security Center You know, like both both aspects are very similar in terms of Understanding how to you know grasp new concepts or adoption of new technology. Yes I'd argue, you know in some situations where you're watching a stream or just play and they're not, you know They're not Sharing with you the details in terms of what they're actually accomplishing I've sat down with my son when he's watched live stream and for him It's been he's watching the way that the individual approaches the situation approaches the angles Even if that individual doesn't go and detail the steps, which is what I need And so that's why I watch specific videos on how to do those specific steps So it's interesting, you know in terms of the similarities of the technology being showcased and how it's approaching an opportunity With technology from a watch me do it Perspective and some people learn that way and some people learn via steps that are detailed out There's a lot of people talking about the weather and how cold it is. They are is there anybody in a warm warm destination? Well minus one in Berlin. That's that's pretty warm for me. That's almost short-sweather another five degrees Let's get started with the news. We've gone really off-tage at this morning Sarah you're up first Yes So first piece of news is about Azure file shares and soft deletion Or soft delete if you want to call it that but basically what this is is it enables you to have a kind of Backup or other repository for things that are getting deleted So we've all been to that that place where we've deleted a file on our file share and realized It was the wrong file that we've deleted and then you potentially have to log a call with the IT department They have to go and get a backup Hopefully the backups there all that kind of good stuff But what this feature now allows you to do is have that soft deletion kind of retention policy So it's a lot easier for you to pull back something that's been accidentally Deleted and you can set the retention policy for this soft delete So I think it's minimum of one day all the way up to 365 days at the moment Now you can turn this feature on when you create a storage account So it's at the high level of your storage account So it's turned on for the full storage account and every subsequent Azure file share underneath it Or you can retrospectively turn it on as well For your file shares if you want to start using it now The one caveat I would say about this is there is a price Attached to this based on how much data you're storing So if you're storing soft deletion for up to 365 days It could have quite a bit of an impact within your bill So I would turn it on definitely sounds like an interesting feature And hopefully it would help you get files that have been accidentally deleted back quicker But do watch that because it could have an impact on your bill So, you know, maybe turn it on for seven days to start with see how it impacts your organization and your bill And then take it from there and see if you want to continue using it But sounds like a cool feature don't you think Anthony? Oh 100% You know, it's something where you can empower the user that they've deleted a file You know to to bring back that file, you know happens all the time I remember my early days in it file gets deleted. It call comes down I got to find the deal DLT tape put it into the drive extract it what an ordeal It's it's it's balancing though the cost and and the convenience of acquiring that file Right, so there's obviously a cost if there's a soft delete protect on any of the files that you have You know is something that your organization sees value in you're obviously going to go forward and implement that solution But you know great suggestion in regards to tests to see what the uptick in cost is going to be. I wondered is this Calculation also available in the Azure cost calculator. Do you know if that's something available in there? I'm not sure I did try to have a look for the pricing information and I couldn't find it specifically on the pricing page But that might just be me not finding it correctly So if anybody does find the pricing then please do let us know and we can share that to the wider community as well But yeah, I don't know the exact details Yeah, no, no, and that's great So if anybody knows in terms of if this has been added to the cost calculator If you can add it in the comments here on the YouTube channel or on learn TV under pubble Let us know if you found it. We'd love to you know, share that out on your behalf That you know here's the specific location again if it's something where your organization can budget that type of capability It's hugely important for that, you know Sensitive files that you know could have been deleted by accident Especially multiple people around accessing that file share and quickly bringing you back is a huge benefit Let's continue on with the news next up Connecting Azure to the International Space Station with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I Really really really like this new story and the reason why I like this new story is because You're not only enabling the International Space Station with the ability to do artificial intelligence machine learning deduction of the sensory around it in terms of everything that's going on in space conducting of experiments in space It's being done in such a way where it's all happening on the edge the space Space station Partnership with Microsoft and Hewlett Packard is building out this solution that allows for the whole testing of you know weather modeling What's happening around the earth plant and hydroponic analysis? Can we grow food in space medical imaging? ultrasound to support astronaut health What I love about this story is it doesn't specifically call out This is a developer initiative. This is an IT pro initiative this story really highlights. Hey, this is something where We've come together in partnership with Hewlett Packard to build out the solution In essence, it's as you're on the edge and the edge is in the space is in space on the space station that allows for Calculation connotation of the situation that it's going on in the Space Center the space station itself for those experiments specifically Still connecting back to earth in terms of you know, the results and storing of those results for other deductions down the road But everybody coming together for a common goal to understand the environmental specific to those experiments Utilizing, you know, artificial intelligence. There's no delineation between who's doing what it's the whole aspect of here's the common goal that we're trying to accomplish And how everybody comes in participates together to get this done this is actually part of a Solution that Microsoft has put together called Azure space, which you know what I heard of this is like Oh, that's pretty crazy in terms of this whole initiative There's a full-on architecture made available And if you get a chance to check this out, we've put this on our blog and it goes through all the initiatives that we've done thus far This new one with the International Space Station is actually launching next week on February the 20th and the work has already been done that the Spaceborne computer 2 or SBC 2 is is going to be deployed on the 20th up in space and I love the fact that it's Beyond just a tech. It's about the enablement of everybody coming together Having the ability to do the calculations up in space and the participation of all the information coming back to earth the better You know, everybody here on earth in terms of results Sarah your thoughts on this I'm just blown away by the technology that we're now extended up into space and stuff. That's just like Proper edge right like that's not just an edge case is the real It's just another endpoint. Yeah. Yeah, don't worry. It's just between here and the moon And you know, it's another endpoint that's out in space. No big deal, right? Now, this is me also putting in the IOT play because in Sarah's like, oh, you think really It's the it's the whole aspect of IOT in space edge computing. This is you know, it's not your traditional computer that's up there It's calculating calculating and capturing all this information. You know, I say this a lot IOT is edge computing is also an opportunity for IT professionals to participate Here's a prime example of where this is going, right? Sarah, did you want to go into space one day and I had a hard enough time get you on a roller coaster I'm just wondering about how much cat 5 you need to roll up to make all that connected You're not wrong this it's that's you know What's what's amazing for me is like I said, right the whole aspect of doing computing on the edge, right? They must have they don't have a details yet There must be Azure Stack HCI enabled on this this computer or Something to that effect to do the edge calculation and capturing of information And then with the limited bandwidth that they have because I don't think we have a cat 5 going up there So international space station gathered by cat 5 You can tell vehicles with a cat 5 with some of the cat 5 cables. Why not have a 10th of the space station? Let's go for it. The the the whole aspect of cat 8 Steve Steven is it's like hey use cat 8 It's interesting to see this take full take hold and that we have this end point in space now When we're gonna have our starships and being able to do warp drives in the whole thing That'd be cool. I'm looking forward to that. Let's continue with the news Sarah you're next Yes back down on earth. We're talking about the new generation of power BI embedded And I think it's getting called embedded gen 2 now Power BI embedded is something slightly different from power BI if you're not aware of it So what power BI embedded is is allowing you to take the power BI features and functionality and embedding it into say an application You're making so if you're developing an application and you want to share insights and some data You don't have to write your own application or extra components to do that You can use power BI and then kind of put them under your app and expose it to your users So your users don't know it's power BI. They don't need a power BI license They don't need to log into the power BI portal. It's just kind of embedded into your application And what we've got here now is the preview of the gen 2 version and we're seeing enhanced performance with this And some improvements as well. So when you're scaling up your power BI instance in the Azure portal, there's no outages There's no downtime. I think with gen 1 there was a bit of an outage when you scaled up or scaled down Well, it changed in the background, but the team have made that better by the looks of it in gen 2 So not necessarily something I'm massively aware of but another bit of cool tech to be aware of if you're developing applications And you want to get some of that functionality with power BI because I love power BI dashboards I love the data and the ability to drill into that data and find out what you need I hate making them myself But power BI embedded is obviously a good thing if you want to take advantage of that power BI mechanism and functionality Anthony you like a power BI dashboard every now and again, don't you? I so the funny thing with me is it's every morning. I'm on my power BI dashboard It's in essence my newspaper in terms of where my day is going to go in terms of the data we capture a Big a big piece of our responsibility as cloud advocates is we have to be out In social media and talking to individuals and it's not even a responsibility. We love doing it This is something that we enjoy doing just like the show. We enjoy talking to everybody That's in the chat rooms both on learn TV and on YouTube and on Twitch on Facebook The the thing with us though is there's a lot and there's only eight of us on the team And so the power BI dashboards that we have really go out and have that, you know capturing it No, what's this? What's the sentiment of the technologies that are out there? Is there is there something that's of a great challenge to a lot of people that we need to address right away? It allows us to be more precise now that the discord server that we've introduced of late too And if you want to join us on that it's aka ms forward slash it ops talk dash discord has been another great venue for information coming in For us to have those conversations But in the in the it's more precise in that respect so the the wider scale social media piece Twitter LinkedIn Facebook reddit You name it. It's a lot harder for us to pinpoint where the challenges everybody has And so the power BI dashboard for us has been a great indicator We know what's going on where you know are people having challenges that we can pinpoint and address right away Maybe it's missing documentation. What have you I argue? That's my newspaper every morning, right? That's that's I have a coffee. I watch the power BI dashboard And and go through it and say where's the opportunity for today? So the fact that they the ability to scale up and scale down to get you know Information even quicker to you. I know we have in a couple of dashboards. We have it's like 48 to 72 hour Update on data, which is challenging. So the fact that it's a lot easier to scale up and down now with the the new gen 2 Awesome. I can't wait to see that come into production for us Cool. Cobain. So what's it wasn't it? Can you story you have for us, Anthony? Next one up we're gonna go back into IOT and so the new Availability on Azure IOT central now has the capability of running jobs On IOT devices from IOT central. This is gone G8 was in public review up till last week. Sorry till up till early this week It's now gone public review. This is a huge one for me My first project on IOT was the mouse trap solution where you take raspberry pies and connected to a mouse trap Actually, I have it right behind you right there. It's still still on display still works We deployed a hundred of these over at one of the Microsoft campuses to see, you know What the data that we can pull from the mouse traps themselves? At that time when we had to do a update to the functionality of the mouse trap We had to deploy a third-party application called the hockey app Which doesn't exist anymore and it was a separate application that we would utilize to push out run commands of Sorry file repositories on the mass traps themselves to update the OS or the functionality or whatever that may be Specific to the mouse trap itself the fact that I can now push this out This job can be pushed out from IOT central from centralized place that I manage all my IOT devices from at is huge in regards to Taking a lot less time to update all my devices having a centralized location to understand what OS levels are these devices running at And making sure that everything is kept up to date and when it's pushed down to me that hey You need to update this function on the mouse trap to now capture X type of data I can do so directly from IOT central that that for me is a huge opportunity To see everything from a centralized piece of glass and understand that you know from a perspective of managing these devices I don't have to be hopping all over the place with with separate applications to do so Cool, I'm starting to think the amount of chat you've given me about IOT Anthony I need to go and set the exam because I could probably pass it. I Need to do the exam myself. I was there for the beta launch It's just it's been so busy and I do have to take the time to do to do an exam It's I'm actually waiting for the pandemic to be over. I know you can do the exams from home But you know, it's it's been Such an interesting change from when we were traveling and talking to people in person and it now It's harder for us to talk to people in person So a lot of the activities that I've been doing and I know a lot of yourself and others on the team producer care as well It's a lot more effort to do the connection with people. We love it And we don't you know, we don't want to stop it But it has unfortunately put you know pause on a lot of things and certification like the I believe the IOT exam Is the ASA 220 I do definitely want to take that up I do want to get that passed and the ASA 500 to is it just of interest to me That's the security one if I remember correctly, right? Those are definitely two that I want to get done But it's something where you know, I learned by hands-on and so doing these type of projects is something of great interest to me And that's why when I hear about IOT advantages. I used to play with Lego. I still play with Lego I think I have my Lego robots back there still I love doing the hands-on stuff and that's why it's of interest That's why I talk about it so much because it's so cool not that anything else. It's cool. Everything is cool It's just being a former mechanic. Well still mechanic I love working with my hands, which is cool And that's how I correlate my love for tech and my love for learning by doing hands-on Let's do a quick. Hello to everybody. It's in the chat room. There's a lot of people online today We have Steven Innes is here Paul Jensen is here. We have Andrew McCollum. How's it going Andrew? We have who else we have here Matthias all the way from Berlin. How's it going Matthias? A lot of people chatting on the room I know producer Pierre is chatting on there as well Talking about his old his old trusty Texas Instrument TI 30x Wow We're going back in time. Let's talk really quickly about the events that are coming up First up is Microsoft Ignite If you haven't done so already if you go to my ignite dot Microsoft calm you can go in and you can Register now it is coming up quick. It's barge second to the fourth All of us have been heads down in filming content for a night. I have a couple videos coming out I know Sarah has a couple videos coming out. So does producer Pierre So this is something where we're all excited about in terms of the new announcements that are coming out It's interesting that we're doing a second offering of ignite. There's just so much going on in The behind the scenes in regards to this preparation and everybody's running around getting this done So if you haven't registered yet definitely go out there and register, which is really cool the other events that we wanted to bring attention to is the upcoming Azure admin jumpstart if you're Getting your your toes dipped in the water for the adoption of cloud this is a great opportunity to hear from the PMs directly within the product groups in respect to managing identity and governance Implementing and managing storage Deploying and managing compute resources Configuring and managing virtual networking and monitoring in backup as your resources. These are happening on a Daily basis starting on February the 22nd They go for about an hour and these are live sessions that are putting being put on by Microsoft specifically to those that are you know getting into cloud and to understand how cloud will Work with their organization and their on-premises implementation very similar to the IT ops talk all things hybrid event In terms of its similarities, but it's something that you know, you can register for it right now Get a line and take advantage of this opportunity to further up skill yourself in regards to you know Technologies in terms of the cloud Pierre loves producer Pierre loves the term upskilling. It's almost as bad as my term plethora But he's he's in the background screaming right now. Stop saying skilling And we've got four minutes left. So let's jump really quickly into our learn module of the week We know that for Oren Thomas. No JS is a passion of his in terms of coding Sarah's laughing now the but Python is growing on a lot of IT professionals almost at par with PowerShell and So the whole aspect of the enablement of Python In the upskilling on Python is a great interest to a lot of IT professionals What a great way to tie in what we've talked about in terms of Microsoft Azure space and the Participation with the International Space Station for computing on the edge then to bring a highlight to this learn module that specifically runs through a story of you know a space center that's having issues out in space and To solve the problems, you know, the coding is done in Python to understand What needs to be Achieved in addressing the opportunities that are there being seen in space and this was done in partnership with NASA So this is a really cool learn module that takes you through hands-on labs to use Python to solve Problems and or address opportunities of you know, those that are in space. So do check this out it's available a link is available on itops talk comm on the latest posts for for a is it update and You know, don't say, you know, I'm not a coder I'm not a developer. This is not for me if you if you dive into PowerShell Python is very similar in terms of its code set and it's a great opportunity a lot of you know A lot of IT professionals are taking advantage of the Python capabilities even in automation for infrastructure And in IT roles Sarah interest in this and there's no IOT involved. I don't think in this one. So But let me know what you think this one has been on my radar And because I like the fact that there's a story behind it So rather than just saying put in this Python command and it does X and then you move on to the next one And they show you another command. There's actually a story behind it So I assume you'll end up maybe fixing a problem what we're having something built at the end of it So that kind of learning module is absolutely the kind that I Let enjoy doing I just need to find three or four hours to dedicate to actually doing it Which is easier said than done right now Well, this might be the catalyst to get you up in space because you might be you know, excited about It's trying to get rid of me people. He's trying to get rid of me No, come on. No, never never There people want to get a hold of you What's the best way to get a hold of you on socials? And you can find me at Twitter on at techie lass on Twitter That's where to find me And if you want to get a hold of producer Pierre You can find him on Twitter at wire connect And if you want to get a hold of me for some reason you can find me on Twitter at wireless life Sarah what an awesome show today. We talked a lot about space. We'll talk a little bit about IOT Have a great weekend and we'll see everybody back next Friday