 Hello, and welcome back to another episode of AZed Update. I'm Anthony Bartol. And back again is Sarah Lee. And Sarah, how's it going? I'm good. Thanks, Anthony. It's sunny here in Scotland, so it's a good Friday. Sunny here in Toronto as well. It's warming up. It's springtime. We're very excited about that. We seem to be having some technical issues on Learn TV and our producer Pierre is looking into that right now. It's been a busy week. It's always been a busy week. It's been a constantly busy week. I hope you do get a chance to go outside. I'm looking forward to getting outside today and the weekend hitting us. What have you been up to, Sarah? You've been out for a while? Yeah, I've been quite busy with a lot of filming commitments with the Azure Naval Mint show, which is a show I talk about with a bunch of Microsoft experts around cloud adoption framework and just that general cloud adoption journey that a lot of our customers are on. So yeah, their favorite slot is Friday Afternoons, which classes with this, unfortunately. So you warm up on EaseIt Update, and then you go and do the other recordings, right? That's what I'm doing today, yep. Now, Thomas and yourself were actually on video this week as well on Tuesday. You want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so Thomas and I have been working for the last, I think it's almost a year now, on a blog series where we release five blogs that talk about the cloud adoption framework and the Azure Landing Zones. And the sixth part of that series was a live stream where Thomas and I were on camera for 30 minutes answering questions from the audience and talking about landing zones. And it was amazing that we had so many people and so much interest. It was honestly the fastest 30 minutes I've had all week. But it was really fun to do. And I think there was tons of questions that Thomas and I are going to have to go through and potentially do another blog post or even another live stream. So if you caught that, didn't get your question answered. If you want more of those kind of live streams, then please do reach out to us because the team and I will absolutely happily accommodate all of that. So yeah, that was the fun thing that Thomas and I did this week. And tell us a little bit about landing zones. Like what is the whole premise behind it? Yeah, so when you migrate your workloads into the cloud, what a landing zone does is help provide that minimum viable product for you. So when you move a resource into Azure, if you need certain components such as networking or storage accounts or identity or security, all the bits that kind of make that, if you're putting a server there or a web app, the components that make it work ultimately. So a landing zone is really just us talking about how to design that minimum viable product to host your resources in. And we have a lot of guidance in the form of the cloud adoption framework and enterprise scale landing zones that make it easy for you to deploy because the guidance is really there to help you design that landing zone and ask the right questions of everybody in your organization and then actually start to deploy it. So there's lots of templates and that's what Thomas and I kind of walked through on the live stream was how to take one of our templates that we have and deploy it into Azure and how easy it can help you get started. One thing I do want to say is don't get carried away if you're trying to adopt the cloud by deploying a landing zone and hope that that just works. There is a lot of design work that you have to do ahead of actually deploying that landing zone. So it meets your needs because everybody's needs are different and those templates are just there to help you with the bare bones as it were. So yeah, I think that kind of sums up landing zones very quickly. And that's why I love about that session, right? It wasn't about, you know, here's the templates, go forth and do it. Do the research, talk to the organization first to see what their needs are before adopting any of the templates that are there. Customization of the templates is also key specific to what an organization needs to accomplish. It's that conversational piece. We talk about it a lot on the show. It's not just the role of the IT Pro to move forward and make sure that the organization is safeguarded as a standalone responsibility. Is this something that, you know, it's tied into the business, it's tied into business decision makers and developers in terms of the course of actions that should be taken to ensure that there's uptime for the organization, to ensure that access to information is there. It's not just a, I said it and forget it and walk away, especially during these times and everybody working remotely, having that capability and that fluidity of accessing your data and ensuring that your needs are met from a productivity standpoint, it's everybody's responsibility. Yep, absolutely, absolutely. So let's jump into the news and you're up first. Is it me? Is it me? So yeah, so this week we announced a kind of new service or an additional service in terms of the Azure Cloud Services. Now the Azure Cloud Services is an example of platform as a service, a bit like what we have nowadays in the Azure app service, but Azure Cloud Services was before Azure as such. Now Azure Cloud Services was based on, I think it was ASM, so Azure Services Management, is that manager? That's what it was, Azure Service, yep. And now what we're seeing is the Azure Cloud Services extended support model, which helps you get to the ARM, so Azure Resource Manager type deployments that we're used to now with the current version of Azure. And this might sound a bit confusing if you've never used Azure before, if you're just currently using it and you weren't maybe an early adopter of it, but what this really allows you to do is start to migrate away from that ASM model into the ARM world and start to get a bit closer to moving towards the current version of Azure. Also embedded in this new service is a migration tool that's in public preview that, like I said, can help you migrate from that ASM model to the ARM world. And we're seeing a lot of customers enjoy this feature. We've been trying it out for quite a while and customers are saying it's great because it helps you change, you don't have to change your code actually, but it helps you just migrate towards that ARM world. And the migration tool helps you walk through those stages, helps you understand the validation process, helps you understand what would need to be changed if anything, and then just help you walk through that whole process so that you can either commit to moving into the ARM world or you can actually abort and have to start again and have to have a look at your deployment. So it's very cool, like I said, for those Azure early adopters that are maybe using some of the, I don't wanna say legacy services, but the older services as such, and I want to start towards moving towards the ARM world where we are nowadays. I think that explains it. Hopefully, did that make sense, Anthony? Well, 100% and thank you. You've done such a great job of doing that. The thing for me, and we talked about this yesterday, right? Change is hard. And we've heard before, if it's not broke, don't fix it, right? So a lot of organizations stay on the older ASM model because they don't see the value moving to ARM for their implementation, right? And so it's challenging. How do you ensure that, to take advantage of the newer features of the newer services that are available in Azure, everything from cognitive services to ARM template utilization to governance, to what have you, if the organization doesn't see value and they won't move, right? It comes down again to ensuring that you're putting the best foot forward for the organization that you support and knowing the roadmap in terms of what they're trying to accomplish. On the ASM model, there's a limitation in terms of your ability to grow in terms of adoptions and services and what have you. I think it's great that Microsoft is realizing that it is a challenge for a lot of organizations to migrate. And so the migration tool is a great benefit to reduce the complexity of moving to the new ARM offering and everything else that comes with it. It's interesting though that the, that there are still people on the old ASM model and it's specifically about that point, right? If it still works, why would you change it, right? Yeah, and I think some people are also still using it because there's a wee bit more flexibility with the legacy system because it's based on like the Azure cloud services is like the Azure app service where it's kind of hosted on a virtual machine but we look after it as such. But in the older version, you had a lot more flexibility with those virtual machines. You could install software on them, you could connect to them remotely. So depending on how your application was, then that allows people to do the things that they're used to, whereas not necessarily the Azure app service is a great one. You don't have to look after the underlying virtual machine but you don't get that same flexibility. And I think maybe that's why some people haven't moved or haven't felt the need to move because they feel like they're gonna lose a bit of the flexibility, but hopefully this new announcement helps them actually migrate towards ARM without too much pain and heartache and losing the flexibility that they probably love with the Azure cloud services functionality. I would think that it's a change. Yet there was that flexibility in ASM, but now in the ARM world, there is a change in terms of flexibility, what that actually means, right? It's not just a, you know, you lose all this capability. You gain capability. There are some changes in the way that you do things, but most of the flexibility is still there. And if it's not, this is where we say it a lot too. In the show, make sure your voice is heard in terms of what are you missing from the ASM days that you would like to see in the ARM days that, you know, your day-to-day business requires. And if there is an A, something that, you know, replaces it, make the case for it so that Microsoft, you know, look at it and see how they can incorporate that into the new world. In terms of the new functionality that may be available. Absolutely. Let's continue on with the news. So next up, verifiable credentials. Sarah, you know, this is something where, especially during the pandemic that we're in right now of great importance. And this is not just specifically from a perspective of, I'm connecting into an organization. This could be something where you have a student, and this is the example that's shown here. You have a student that needs to gain access to specific resources based on their course. And you want to prove that the student is who they actually say they are, right? It's the whole ability now to actually verify that the student is actually a student of said school to gain access. I know, you know, my kids have had situations where they've had to do tests from home under lockdown orders. And, you know, what stops somebody from jumping in the seat of my child and completing the test or the exam on their behalf with the camera off, right? Like it's something where, you know, the schools can't mandate to say, no, you have to have the camera on all the time because of privacy rights and what have you. So how are you verifying that, you know, this person is who they say they are? Now, in the traditional corporate world, you have that Azure AD and the Microsoft Authenticator, and you have that availability for proving out, yep, I am who I say I am, and I have the key fob. Well, the application, not the key fob, you have the application of Microsoft Authenticator to say, yep, this is who I am. I can prove this out. How do you do this in a non-corporate environment like a school, right? So now is the availability for verification. Yes, this individual is who they say they are using an application, taking kids' exams. Producer Pierre is chatting in the, I am not, trust me, if I was taking my kids' exams, they would not be doing well. He just lit it up on the chat. They would not be doing well if it was taking their exams. So you have the situation where the, you know, how do the kids verify themselves? So this is a solution that's now gone. It's now generally available so that you have the authentication model that you can have a device authorized. It proves that I am who I say I am, and then allows the individual to go in and access the services. It still uses Azure Active Directory, but it's now hard-coded into the code itself as opposed to using a third-party app like Microsoft Authenticator. So it's a proof that, you know, I can go on, yep, I am who I say I am, and I can actually go and do that exam or I can access my records for my vehicle or I can, you know, a plethora of different information verticals. Sarah, thoughts? It sounds awesome. It definitely sounds like it'll solve a lot of challenges like you were saying around people jumping in and doing other people's exams and stuff like that. So yeah, sounds good. It sounds like a good way of solving a problem that universities or schools have with technology. So all in favor of those kinds of solutions. And if it can be made easier, right? And especially like in the situation that we're in right now and everybody working from home, you know, it's hard to, you know, great. We have this access to our corporate networks to gain access to information we have. What about that other serviceable information that you need access to, you know, maintenance on your car or you're trying to find out something about, you know, the situation in terms of support for the challenges that we're having with the pandemic to get your shot done or vaccination and what have you. How do you prove yourself as who you say you are? It's something where it's making it easier for that verification allows that comfort that yes, you are secure in terms of your connection. You're accessing your specific information and nobody else gets access to it and it's all buttoned up when it's a great scenario all around, so it's really cool. Let's continue on with the news, you're up next. Yes, so this is a public preview feature that we actually talked about if you remember the ITOps talks hybrid event when I did a deep dive with Tom Hinckling around the Windows Virtual Desktop. This is a new feature within Windows Virtual Desktop which allows you to deallocate all of your virtual machines but actually schedule them so as that someone connects to that virtual machine, it will start on demand. So it means that you could schedule all your virtual machines in your Windows Virtual Desktop pools to shut down on a Friday evening. And then if someone wants to work over the weekend they can connect and it will start for them. It's not like they can't work, they have to log a ticket and maybe wait for someone to respond to it. It's now giving you that ability to give your end users a bit more flexibility when they need them. And it also means ultimately that these virtual machines in your Windows Virtual Desktop pools are not running and costing you money when people are not there. You can schedule them to be shut down and then they will only be pulled back online when someone actually tries to connect to them. So excellent feature that I'm sure a lot of people have been asking about actually that's one of the things Tom talked about in that session I did with them. These features that are coming on the roadmap now and we're gonna be starting seeing rolled out this year have actually been driven by user feedback. Folks saying we need these features, where are they, can we have them? So yeah, I'm sure a lot of people will be massively excited about this feature being launched. It is in public preview. I think it's probably one you might be safe to run in your production environment given that it will just start your virtual machine. It's not necessarily something that could be damaging. But again, with a public preview feature, always be mindful of it when you introduce it into your environment that it might not quite be 100% ready or it might not quite make it to the production environment. But I'm pretty sure this one actually will given that it's something our customers have been asking about. So yeah, super excited to see where this goes and see some of those other road fat features that Tom mentioned and actually come out this year as well. And this one's been an interesting one too. It's that whole cost savings ability. I don't have to have the services running 24 seven anymore. I can do as required. So if I need to connect to my virtual desktop to gain access to my information, VPN is not allowed. I'm not allowed to have data localized on my machine. I'm connecting to this virtual desktop. I don't have to have that service running all the time which the organization is using it gets built for. It's something where spinning up as required, the resources are utilized as required. It's so exciting to see this happening in preview. And again, like you said, based on user feedback, it's based on your feedback. Make sure you're heard in terms of what your needs are. And if you don't like a service or you're struggling to adopt a service that's required for your organization, let us know. And that's why we have the chat room here and we have commentary available on the blogs and there's the whole, even a feedback and producer pair just flashed on the screen itopstalk-feedbackatmicrosoft.com It's that availability to reach out, especially now that we're all working from home and we're challenged in terms of doing so, making sure that you're covered and gaining access to your day is of great importance to us. So do let us know when you'd like to see changes like this. Yes, indeed. Let's continue on with the news. Next up, another public preview, the availability of Azure Monitor container insights for Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes extension model. It's a mouthful. In essence, what does that mean? All the functionality that's available on Azure Monitor for the monitoring of your Kubernetes clusters, the performance visibility made available, the visualization through workbooks made available, the alerting, the querying of historical data made available, all the same standard functionality in terms of reporting and log analysis made available for your insights through Azure Monitor. Now the extended benefits is the easier enablement of container insights to the portal. So I don't have to go to another screen to see my insights. I can do it right from my Arc screen for my Azure Monitor insights. And the automatic agent updates are made available to that Kubernetes cluster right through Azure Arc as well. So it's not something where I have to go out and physically put those connectors in again or update anything. It's all done for you right through Azure Arc. The big thing for me is just the single pane of class. I can go to the one Azure Monitor piece under Azure Arc and see all my Kubernetes clusters and have that insight in terms of is everything running efficiently? Is there situations where I'm running into bottlenecks or is there not enough resources allotted to this cluster specifically for Kubernetes? That's a big deal to ensure that we have a lot of proficiency and great use of the resources made available. Sarah, thoughts? Yeah, I think anything to make your life a little bit easier and make sure that the monitoring is in place to make your life even easier because let's face it, the monitoring will help you probably identify any issues and be a bit more proactive rather than reactive. So again, anything that actually kind of makes all of that simplified and make sure it's all in place for you is a big win for me. I think I can't remember when it was. Last year I demoed Azure Monitor and what it can do for container insights and stuff like that. And again, a lot of the features I was demoing to internal customer were on the roadmap because people had been asking for them and identifying that they needed them inside Azure Monitor. So again, it's just good to see that these features are all just becoming much more easily applied within your environment instead of having to go off here, go off there, do this, you know, jump around, you know, jump around in three circles and you know, stand one leg to make them happen. I think, yeah, I think we probably all worked with products that had to do that. So it's good to see these advancements, to be honest. I almost got you singing the hokey pokey on air and I would have been so awesome. Put your leg in, put your leg out. No, it's the whole availability of, you know, I can get to my information quickly. I can do it in a single pane of glass. I don't have to jump through all these groups to gain access to all this information. That's huge, right? And that's again, based on feedback. So keep it coming. Let us know how we can make things better. Let's do a quick shout out to those in the room right now. We've got a lot of people chatting on today. This is so awesome. Hello to Robert Jr. We have Matthias Mathe, coming from Germany. Paul Jensen, good to see you, sir. Producer Steve, Jared Shockley is on today. Brett Coleman is here. Andrew McCullum is here. Pierre is bouncing around as he usually is behind the scenes. We have, who else? We have Pepe Kirstens. Sorry if I said your last name wrong. I apologize. Kirstens, I think I said it right. Tell me if I'm wrong in the chat room and I apologize if I've done so. Paul Jensen's asking, sorry, wrong show. We don't do the words for this. He's saying to name our next show and to put the word hokie-pokie. We can put that into later shows for the other show, Patches Switch, that's happening next week. But let's do talk about events that are going on. So first up, there's the Global Azure 2021 event that's happening next week. This is a community-run event. What I love about this is that there's expertise from around the world as participating. Some of us are participating as well in terms of sessions. I actually have to build my session still. We're talking about the soft line. It's been so busy, been so busy. I have my structure and there's a little I want to build. Oh, Johnny Chips has just joined us as well. Hey, Johnny. So you have this great community-run event and a lot of learnings. I love attending these events because I'm learning from the field in terms of, this is the way that I adopted this service and how I did it, why it was important and what I took into consideration. And that for me is huge, to understand what was the thought process behind the adoption of governance, behind the adoption of migration from IAS to SAS from the organization scenario. Why did they do that? You know, that for me is goal to understand what organizations are thinking about around the world in terms of that type of implementation. Sarah, you're participating in this as well, right? No, I'm not this year, but I actually have a funny story about the very first Azure, the Global Azure Boot Camp I ran in Glasgow. I think it was 2018. So first time I'd ever run it, I think it was maybe the second year that the Global Azure Boot Camp had ran as well. So it was still a brand new event. Everybody was at the venue in time. I was there to set up everything. Key holder for the building that I was hosting the event in slept in and I could not get him to wake up at all, couldn't get him on the phone at all. Ended up with a whole host of people standing outside in the middle of Glasgow, outside this building on an absolutely amazing, like the most amazing sunny day ever. Everybody wondering what was happening. I ended up sending everybody off to the pub for a pint, first of all, and eventually the key holder came and then we rejoined and we had the boot camp. But yeah, yeah. So those are interesting experiences, but no, I'm not taking part this year, unfortunately. I can't wait to have those experiences again and everybody's doing it virtually. I get it, it's times that we're in. You know what, the whole virtual piece too has been huge because we're learning really easily from around the world what people are doing. We used to travel to do that and a lot of people would not share online. And the fact that we are now all forced to share online, it's been a great eye-opener in terms of how people are adopting services, which is really cool. Yeah. Let's continue on. Hello world. So if you haven't checked this out as of yet, this is a show that happens daily. It runs at about 130 Eastern Standard Time on Learn TV. It's a great show that talks about how people are adopting services, how people are feeling in terms of the pandemic and how they're addressing those situations, what others are doing to help others grow and deal with occurrences and situations, opportunities, challenges, you name it. It's a great show to check out if you haven't done so already. It has been a fortnight for the testing and production show. So producer Steve, AKA Jerry Shockley and producer Pierre will be on Twitch at aka.ms forward slash patch and switch or twitch.tv forward slash passion switch. They'll be doing their testing and production show today, which is a really cool thing because they not only talk about tech, they also talk about how they produce the shows and they share their insights in terms of how to be creative in terms of portraying a video or portraying of stories. I know very appreciative of producer Pierre working behind the scenes. I know we had a couple of challenges earlier on in the show which seems to be all ironed out. Do you know, Annie, you're getting slated in the comments because you've called Steve the wrong name. He's Steve the audio guy and producer Pierre. We're gonna have to get you to practice. I have to practice more. Sorry, Steve, the audio guy. I'll be attending your show later. It's all good. Let's continue on. So the Microsoft learn module of the week. Here we go. Create an enterprise scale architecture in Azure. This is something we talked about earlier on in the show. It's not just enough to adopt templates and deploy them. It's your organization. You really have to go forward and understand what your organization is trying to accomplish, not what they're doing today, right? I've had a lot of organizations come up to me or reach out to me online and say, hey, we're looking to move to the cloud. You wanna lift and shift everything and the way we go, how do we do that? And it's like, full stop. What are you trying to accomplish? What is your business looking at doing down the road? Especially with the pandemic, right? We had a lot of change in regards to how we do business and how we do work and how we gain access to information. It's not like what it was back when in the before four times, right? The whole, it's gonna fuck show today. It's the whole thing that because of that change, we have to be nimble in terms of the adoption services and what have you. If you hadn't done your due diligence in your homework in terms of where your organization is going, you may be in more of a challenge in terms of the rollouts of certain services, specifically allowing people to work remotely. This is a great learning guide, not only in terms of the tools that are available to you for adoption of cloud and building out your architecture in Azure. And then we're not saying move everything to cloud. We're definitely saying hybrid. There's still a very big need for on-premises implementations of servers and data structures and databases and you name it for regulatory reasons or just because it's something that's the requirement for your organization. But this provides you the questions to ask, the reasoning behind the why you would build our architecture in a specific format. So it's very interesting. It's a half technical, half business related what you're trying to accomplish on behalf of your organization. And here are some tools that you can use to run through this. Sarah, have you had a chance to look at this module yet? I'm gonna say no, which is gonna sound terrible, given I just did a show about this. But definitely it's something to digest. I love the fact that Microsoft Learn takes a lot of like our documentation and our best practices and tells it in a different story in a way that some other people might find more useful because I know sometimes reading through our documentation or any documentation actually, Anthony, it's a bit monotonous and you want to break it up with a little story or a little exercise of clicking through and how to do something. So yeah, Microsoft Learn is a great place to actually learn some of our best practices and documentation without getting bored. Mark and Hartman are gonna hate me. Listen, there's so much information, so much documentation, even from our perspective, we're involved in so much, right? It's hard for us to touch everything. That's why we pull out these modules of the week and learning paths of the week so we can share, hey, we discovered this, this is really cool, we found it very informative, shared out with the world and sometimes us ourselves, we haven't really gone through it and I haven't completed this one either. I've completed parts of it but I have not completed the whole learning path. But we just, we bring this to attention because it really, it's striking a chord with those that are watching, hey, this is a really cool tool bringing awareness to it and that's why we had the Microsoft Learn module the week. It's, there's a lot of times we haven't completed because the modules or the learning path is brand new. So it's fine, right? It's something bringing awareness in. It's like you said, sometimes docs is not enough for videos not enough, this is really immersive and you can do hands-on training. It's a really cool tool that's available for upskilling as well. Pierre's favorite world, upskilling. Oh, it's been quite the show. We got one minute left. Next week's show is the one-year anniversary for AZED Update. We're very excited for that show. So check that out coming up next Friday. Sarah, if people want to get ahold of you, what's the best way to get ahold of you? You can find me on social media at TechieLas. If you want to get ahold of producer Pierre, you can do so on Twitter at WiredConnect. And if you want to get ahold of me for some reason you can do the same on Twitter at WiredThisLife. Sarah, welcome back, great show and we'll see everybody next week. Have a good weekend, everybody.