 Hello and welcome back to another episode of AZ Update. I'm your guest host, Anthony Bartolo. Join us always by producer Pierre. Producer Pierre, what's going on my friend? Guess who's back, back again. Guess who's back. It's like a Charlie Brown special. Only one at once in a lifetime. Hey? It's like a Charlie Brown special. It's today's Earth Day. So celebrating Earth Day, I'm here on the show to talk about Earth Day, which is awesome. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. How you doing? I'm good. Good to have you back. If it's only for one week, kind of stepping in to help out and maybe a little bit of nostalgia. Hey, you know what? I have fun doing the show. This is, you know, it's a great time to get to share information with all of you, get to chat in the chat. You know, I've been in the chats in and out during the shows. Your co-hosts have been awesome. You know, everybody that's been on the show has been doing a phenomenal job. It's great to see this. It's continuing to grow. And, you know, we have Paul Jensen. How's it going? Andrew McCallan. How's it going? Good to see everybody in the chat as usual, chatting away. We're probably going to see the man with the big green hat show up later and producer Steve. Producer Steve, did I say it correctly? I always messed that up. Steve, the audio guy, you always messed that up. Yes, that's it. Always messed, see? That's, I'm going back to my roots there. You're the only one. Ha ha ha ha. What have you been up to? It's been a great adventure. As you know, I'm working on the student side in terms of academics and understanding, you know, their perception of technology and their, you know, how they're trying to put their ideas up in the cloud and utilize Microsoft services. Stop me if you've heard this one before. The interesting experience that I've been coming across visiting a lot of universities and colleges in North America. This has been coming up a lot. Walking to a scenario where I'm talking to professors and professors like, yeah, we can really use your help. Okay, let me know what's going on. You know, I have this classroom and we're teaching X and you know, I've got this set up for my students. I was like, okay, what's the setup? Oh, you know, I have this compact Proline 3000 that's sitting under a desk that's my curriculum for the year. And I haven't seen a compact in decades. Maybe I'm over embellishing a little bit in terms of it, but it's why I use compact. So I'm not, you know, throwing out another server name out there. And you have this situation where the server keeps on getting kicked off the network. And it's like, why not? That's weird, what's going on? And then talking to the corresponding IT teams like, yeah, we've told this professor numerous times that, you know, if they're going to deploy a server, they have to make sure it's kept up to date so that the security parameters meet the requirements of the university and college. Since they don't do that, it gets kicked off the network. And so sitting down and having this conversation with the professors and with the IT is like, what's going on? What is the challenge here? Because, you know, with the cloud services that are out there, there are grants that the schools could take advantage of. Why are we not taking advantage of these? What's going on? And we have this situation where IT, you know, is very controlling in terms of how the grants are being utilized and how cloud is being utilized. The professors are upset because they think that the control is too tight on what they're trying to put forward. And then you have this situation where, hey, have you ever heard of governance as a strategy? Right, and literally it's like, what's that? And you're sitting there and you're talking about the whole enablement of, it's okay, let's create up the subscription specifically for a class load. Let's use agreed upon ARM templates that you can deploy for your courseware. Let's, you know, and you're going through all this, I've never heard any of this. Of course. Right, and it's like, but it's on both ends. And then by the end of the week visit, they're planning out, they're architecting how to best collaborate. And it's like, we didn't know we could talk to each other and have this enablement. And it's so, it's amazing. You can talk to each other like, haven't they ever heard of like DevOps practices? They're in college for- But this is the thing though, right? So we've talked about this before in terms of the importance of communication with the business decision maker, the, you know, IT professional and the developer. It rings true at every instance and academic is the same thing. And it's interesting because it's that, what I'm experiencing firsthand is that professors are fearful of talking to IT pros because they feel that the answer is always gonna be no. IT pros are fearful of talking to professors because they think that they're gonna, you know, they're gonna want the moon and go over budget and then who's responsible for the budget. And it, you know, bring both parties together and having the communication, it's amazing. And just seeing in their eyes like, we can do that. Yes, of course you can. I actually can relate to this because I started my career as the network coordinator for the University of Ottawa. So all of the networks across campus for the campus management, but also for faculties is what I was looking at. And I do remember that there was always friction with faculty. Some were just thought that they were better than me because they were professors and others just didn't want to, because they was beneath them. But you're right, getting teams within the same organization to actually talk to each other and come up with solution is something that should be done more often. I'm just excited that the opportunity is now presented itself. And a lot of the universities and colleges that I've spoken to are taking advantage of that and they're incorporating that into their day-to-day activities. Even so, you know, the use of grants, having the ability to monitor grant usage and set the threshold up to 20% consumption of that grant to provide that alert that they're about to go over. There's a lot more tools that are coming out that are going to be specific for academic which I'm very excited about. I can't talk about right now. But it's awesome that you have this thinking now coming by. But even the tools that you have now with the monitoring and alerting and policies and cost management, Sanya talks about it all the time about getting the alerts on your budgets and stuff. Like the info is there, the knowledge is there. It's just a matter of applying, go in and get it and applying it. How are you? What have you been up to? I have been preparing drumrolls for my first in-person event in nearly two years. I'm building a session and I'm going to be presenting at the PowerShell Summit in Bellevue, Washington. So North America, just other end of the country. And we're gonna be doing one session on triggers. So are you triggered? Is there anything I can do to trigger you? But also we're gonna run a couple of round tables to review some of the learn modules and documentation around PowerShell and see what the community and the experts think are gaps. And then we can address those. So as you know, I'm a big fan of getting the community involved in telling us what they think we should do and then see if that is actually possible. Are there any, have you had a chance to look at the agenda of the sessions and see if there's anything of interest that you'll be attending as well? There's a bunch of them that I'm very interested. There's one that, so my session is finished. But now I'm kind of building an alternate session that's using about the same topics but presented different ways because I saw on the agenda. Two days before mine is a session that the abstract is almost exactly the same as mine. So I don't wanna make this a, so I'll go talk to the presenter and I'll go sit in this session and then I'll adjust mine. I'll have two days to adjust mine to do that. But how can you do? Have you been taking advantage to the Microsoft Learn having the sandboxes? I've seen a lot of presenters now using that as their demo stage. So when they're doing the delivery of a demo, they're using the ones coming directly from the sandbox to learn. In some cases, I have in this one, I have not because some of the stuff I'm setting up, I have to set up a fair bit in advance. For example, like getting metrics from a VM that's running. I can't just set that up and then an hour later because I won't have enough metrics for me to actually query and create my alert. So in this case, I can't, but sandboxes are a great thing and actually Andrew kind of agrees here. In some exam, they're starting to include them. Yeah, and that's, it was included in the past, but it wasn't really a sandbox. It was more of a, I don't know exactly how they set those up, but it wasn't always. I remember two exams that I did where the sandbox locked up in between and I couldn't finish the exam. So they basically add me reschedule it. And that's interesting. You and I coming from the days of the Rockstar case, lugging that big 20 laptops. I think I still have one of the cases in my garage. Did you keep the art? No, I, you know, when- No, no, no, no, not the big, big, big ones. I was just saying- Not the big ones, no, no, the size of chest freezers. No, I'm talking about the big Pelican cases. Yep. With all the foams. I think I still have one of those. Oh, no, those are great. I actually have one, I put tools in it. It sits in the back of my truck. No, coming from the days of carting those big Rockstar cases across Canada and, you know, others across the globe were doing the same thing. We've come such a long way in terms of the enablement of doing the learning online now in these sandbox environments. And, you know, as Andrew mentions, it's a great way to learn and to do hands-on learning with that. It's part of the reason why on this show. And I'm glad you're still doing it. Microsoft Learn module of the week, which is awesome. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Opportunities to learn, right? And we always tried to make it relevant to whatever news was that week. And speaking of the news, why don't you get us started with the first item? So coming from the academic audience, I thought this was important. This is important for everybody, you know, certification. Certification is something where it, you know allows you to, you know, prove to yourself, hey, I understood everything that was shared with me. I've gone through the certification process. And so, you know, I'm proving to myself that I know the material that's being shared out. This was exciting news that came out recently. Students now have access to free certification on fundamental certificates. So, and this is important because there is a lot of university and colleges in their COMPSI curriculum that have this as part of their curriculum. There's a requirement to pass these exams, obviously not just from us because the cloud is more than just us. But from the Microsoft perspective, us offering this is up for free. And this includes the material on Microsoft Learn that you can apply to, to skill up on. I was gonna say skilling because I know you left the word skilling. I hate that word. I hate that word. Skill up on is great. But now there is no costs for students to achieve the certification whereas there was a cost before it that you would have to pay. The other thing and this question has come up a lot. Do I need a school-based email to gain access to the free certification? You do not. There are other ways for you to gain access to the certification. There's one of the ways. Right, that is one of the ways but you do still require proof that you are currently enrolled in a university or college to gain access to this. I'm hearing as young as high school students. I wouldn't be surprised. And you mentioned COMSI. I looked at that list and I've got the list up on the screen right now of the concepts or the exams that are included in that. Okay, there's the fundamental exams for like data and AI and security and compliance. But if you look further down like Power Platform, Dynamic, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 like CRM and ERP. So those apply to like finance students. Those apply to management students. Those apply to basically admin students for in terms of managing Dynamics 365 CRM or ERP systems. So it's not just COMSI anymore. Well, and thank you for calling that out. 100% agreed. It is, and that was the eye-opener that I've experienced going to all the universities and colleges. It's not just about the computer engineering groups, doctors, lawyers, future doctors, future lawyers, business people, they're all taking interest. It's amazing to see how many people are taking interest even in machine learning for the output of X being finance or medical or whatever that's gonna be that's important to them. It's not just taking computer engineering for the sake of being in that vertical anymore. People really want to take advantage of it and incorporate that. This is an opportunity for them to do so in terms of understanding the material that's available and getting certified in it. Yep. I'm just checking, making sure that there's, I'm not missing any comments and we are now streaming on LinkedIn as well. Oh wow, okay. That's new. Yeah, that's new. It's kind of a trial. See if we're getting some people and we've got, I think four attendees right now on LinkedIn. Hello, LinkedIn. Hello, LinkedIn. Yep, all right. Next item in our newsreel is the new reporting functionality for device, for device control and Windows Defender firewall out of the Microsoft 365 portal. We all know that you actually need to collect and view the information easily in order to be able to do anything about it. Like if you don't know that a machine is being hammered at port 3389. So like how can you do anything about it? But IT pros and operations folks typically will go and manage and scan and review the logs from their like their perimeter firewall or their application firewall but they don't always check to see what the firewalls for each individual machine on Windows 10, Windows 11 within their network is doing. And so now with the Microsoft 365 portal you now have two more reports, more on one on device control and one on Windows Defender firewall that will report what each machine is doing which each machine is like fighting against in terms of firewalls. If they are a request to go out, request to come in and if somebody has changed something or you can do see that for your entire data center if you will or office in a centralized fashion in the Microsoft 365 portal. So more visibility, meaning easier admin of your environment. That's really cool. So it's not really like an Azure thing while it is kind of Azure service but it's more of a Microsoft 365 play here. I love the service. The service from what I've seen is the evolution of what was offered on IoT. So Defender for IoT, it's that availability of understanding, okay, so this device connects to what network internally at my organization, what databases is it accessing through what applications? It provides you those pathways and it gives you that insight in terms of how an attack could occur on a device and where an attacker could go and provides you that map of what could occur very so much like I said what was available on Defender for IoT. It's a new way of thinking of how an attack can occur at your organization. I remember the infancy of protecting devices, you're protecting the device itself, you're putting this wall around this device and then you're protecting the software on the device and now they're actually protecting the pathways. Why are you laughing? It's just funny because we used to build the wall and the moat around the data center. It's true. But we never really figured out how to protect about the guy that parachutes in the middle and once he's in, he's in. That's where we're at now and so that's what Defender does, right? Exactly. All right, so because we are at 18 minutes, let's move on to the next item. You wanna take that one? Sounds good. So next up is the availability of metrics and alerts supported inside of container apps on Azure. This is a big one. A lot of organizations are taking advantage of creation of applications inside of a container. Easier to manage, easier to migrate. The challenges that come with that though is monitoring of the resources inside of that container and so having this availability now for alerts and metrics inside of the container itself is crucial. For those that are building those applications to understand what resources are being utilized, is there capacity limits that are being hit amidst the application itself? What ports on the network is being utilized? Is there a bottleneck somewhere in terms of the information going out? This before was available but wasn't as detailed as what you see now. It's in essence the same capability that you would have on a traditional virtual machine but inside of a container for that information. Well, and before you like you mentioned we had the information and you could like track it and trend it and see what was happening. So if something went wrong, you could go back to the trend and see whether or not like, but now because it's kind of part of Azure Monitor, you can now raise alerts on it. So if you see that the process is within your container is starting to go wild, 80% consumption or up. Like I don't know what your application is built on or configured like, but you can set appropriate alerts so you find out before the application goes to Bluey. So for me that's a really cool thing and that's one of the reasons why I'm so, I'm such a fan of Azure Monitor and Azure Monitor and I mean like the umbrella brand because it's log analytics, it's metrics, it's performance. There's a whole bunch of different things that come up with and it really helps. And it's the linchpin to so many other services. So that really needs to be set up properly. And I hear a lot in terms of containerization of apps. Is that actually being used in production or are people organizations taking advantage of it? 100% they're seeing it a lot more even down to the academic level. A lot of students are using containerized developer environments now so that they can have the ability to share their code amidst their peers and to co-write applications inside of containers for deployment. It's something where it's becoming the norm. Yeah and even three weeks ago, a friend of mine who works at a company that will remain nameless. They wanted to set up a secure FTP server in the cloud. Because they have some machines that are old and the firmware doesn't know anything other than SFTP. And it's like, okay, we wanna set, so help me set up like a virtual machine and secure it. I said, why are you doing a virtual machine? Right. What do you mean? I said, just set up a container, it runs. When it detects the connection, it runs. It connects the file, drops it to a blob and then goes away. So you're not paying for it when it's not running. It's like, really? Like yeah, so it's basically the basis of microservices like very small task oriented, task oriented processes that run when they need to and then send the info where that needs to go and then they take off. So that's a great way of doing that. I'm actually looking at ways to turn PowerShell more into microservices where instead of writing this big long script with multiple functions and it's write a whole bunch of little scripts that you pass info using queues and Azure Graph to trigger them. And that's basically the part of the session I'm given next week. Oh, cool. And basically turn them into microservices. So you call the functions you need at the time you need it. Let's continue on, Pierre, you're up next. Okay, so being on the monitoring tangent right now and as I am a fan of Azure Monitor, the monitoring agent now supports custom and IIS logs. And IIS logs were always kind of supported but it was like a different hat to basically turn them on separately. But I'm more interested in the custom logs because I've been asked that many, many, many times is how do I, if I have an application that dumps logs into a text file and many developers and many, I've done this before where even scripts will write to a log file as I'm going through so that I can track where something went wrong. But these are not standard, like we're not writing to the event log for like the system log for Windows or Linux. So by default, the agent can't see them but starting now, and it's a preview but I'm telling you now, I try to stay away from previews normally but this one is so potentially impactful that I'm saying go check it out now and start configuring and figuring out because you do have to tell the agent how to ingest what's in your text logs because it's a text, it's flat. So you have to tell it like which field is the date which field is so on the info you need and so on. That support is going to help tremendously where you're looking at custom built apps or IIS or any other type of logging that your environment may be doing. And that's the key too, right? It's not just the regular text logs, it's also IIS logs as well. So you have that ability to really expand across your system and monitor different facets. Yeah, that's very cool. I'm planning so many different little tests and I read this on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I go through the news and I go, oh, this is cool. And then I put it on my list of things to try out and I guess start blogging about it a bit more. Yeah, you should. I think that's a great idea. Little tidbits and maybe do some TikToks. No, please. No, okay. All right, so let's move on to the next section of our show, which is community events. We've already talked about the PowerShell Summit next week. I am not aware of any other community events this week. Not this week, but there is a big event coming up and that would be Microsoft built. Yes, which I am doing some stuff for, but I haven't been told exactly what it is yet. It's like, shh, secrets. It's so secret they're not even telling me what I'm supposed to be doing. So we have a huge section for academic going to be at Microsoft build. It is delivery around Azure fundamentals and Microsoft services fundamentals. And what's cool about it is it's actually going to be delivered by student ambassadors. So student ambassadors are our version of Microsoft MVPs in the academic realm. And so we're empowering them to do the deliveries of a lot of the sessions. And then of course supported by us in terms of any questions that come up. So very excited about that. Okay. Andrew is asking in the chats if I could share the details of the event. It's just about PowerShell.org. You go there and click on the PowerShell Summit link and you'll get right into it. And I'm not sure if this year if it's in person but I'm not sure if it's hybrid whether or not they have a virtual section of it. Cool. One more thing before we jump into that we still got four minutes. Yeah. Is speaking of community. Mary Jo Foley is doing an interview with Microsoft's corporate vice president, Mr. Corey Sanders. And she's asking if you have questions for her in terms of how Azure for enterprise is going in. She wants to know whether or not if you have questions to email her or to tweet them at her with the hashtag MGFChat. And then she will ask them to Corey. And she's promised to be nice to him but this is gonna be one I'm gonna be watching. Mary Jo Foley has always been nice. So it's always awesome to see her interview. I know, but some of her questions can be tough. So it's gonna be cool. She's a good interviewer for sure. Absolutely, absolutely. Do you want to introduce our learn module of the week? Learn module of the week. I need to come up with some like dramatic cutout or music for that. Music. It's okay. So in keeping with our theme of enablement of parties through use of architecture, use of compute, use of cloud, we're looking at the AZ 305 design identity governance and monitor solutions. This ties in nicely with the show because not only talks about governance, it also talks about monitoring and having that understanding of how it all comes together. And it explicitly shares the need for inclusion of business decision makers and IT professionals and developers in the harmonization and creation of the architecture that your organization is going to build on support. So if you're having those conversations already in terms of governance, in terms of monitoring, in terms of resource allocating, in terms of role-based access control, this is a great learn module to go through and understand just what needs to be planned for. Yes. It's not a learn module. This one's actually a learning path. So it's multiple modules. Yes. So yes, thank you for correcting me. So it's a learning path. It specifically prepares you for exam AZ 305, which is a great exam if you're architecting the infrastructure for your organization and just what you need to think about when you're doing so. Yeah. No, I'm actually, I've put it on my list because every once in a while, I like to go back and revisit fundamentals because things change, things change all the time. And so if you don't revisit some of those things that you think are just like fundamentals that kind of in the world, in the word, you end up like going forward with ideas that now are no longer relevant. So, and it doesn't take a long time. So kind of good thing to do. See, and Andrew makes a good point in the chat, right? It doesn't just cover IT Pro, it covers Dev, it covers DevOps, it covers cloud. It's a full gamut to take advantage of and to upscale on in terms of doing that planning for your infrastructure for your organization. Yep, absolutely. Pierre, this was fun. It was. It was. Went by fast, I can't believe the time's early gone. I know. I know, and we're on time and normally we talk too much, but we're good. If people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to get a hold of you? I have been and always shall be at Wired Canuck. And if you want to get a hold of me for some reason, you can do so on Twitter at wireless life. Pierre, thank you again for having me on the show and we'll see you all next week. Cheers, everyone.