 Good morning, Cloud users, IT pros, and everyone else in between. It's Jay, and here with Rick, welcome back to this week, November 19, 2021's edition of AZ Update. Morning, Rick. I'm excited, man. Like, they actually let me do the show. First of all, thank you for asking me to be able to do the show. But it's been a long time since I've been hanging out here with the AZ Update crowd. I normally just lurk you in the comments once in a while. How are you doing today? I'm doing good. Pierre has trusted me for these last few weeks to take care of this. Yeah, that's a strong word. He's trusted himself to enjoy some time off, which you should. It's that time of year where you start looking at how much you have left and paid time off if you're so lucky to. And you try to at least get it all in. Want to say hi to everybody who is in the chat. I see you all. You're all really great. We've got our regulars. We got Andrew here. We got Richard. How are you doing? Hey, look who we have. Old friend, Sarah. In the chat, hi. We miss you. Yes, good to see you, Sarah. So we've got a show full of a lot of stuff to talk about today. Before we do, I just wanted to recognize, you know, Rick, you were the first person, and you like to mention this story to me, that when I stepped onto the Microsoft campus for my first day when I flew from New York all the way to the campus, you were the first person that welcomed me. We end up in the cafe, had lunch, talked, and I've always enjoyed being able to have a good conversation with you. No, it was a lot of fun. The tradition is called NEO, or New Employee Orientations, stuff like that. I saw this guy coming out of the room wearing this New York ball cap, which of course, sporting, they're always good to have hats on the show. I don't know if Pierre knows that, but hats are always a bonus. There you go. And, you know, we got to welcome him to the campus and welcome him to the organizations, stuff like that, had a good lunch. And the, I'm curious, did you go and explore the campus at all outside of that one little tiny thing that we did for lunchtime on that first year? Oh yeah. What was your first thing that you did in New York? I was there for a week. So I tried to get around the campus. I saw some of the, like the visitor center, where there's like the little play area that you can go and like mess around with Xbox stuff. There was some great AI things. There's one great AI thing that, I'm not sure if the campus is open in that way, but when it does open up, and if you're visiting the Redmond area and you want to go, you can visit the Microsoft campus at the visitor center. And there's this kind of neat thing where it's, I think using the AI facial recognition technology that we provide for Azure, where it actually determines whether or not you're a dog. And if you are a dog, which that's what it does, it picks out what dog you represent. I don't recall what dog I had, but I like getting my own dog. Nice. We've got some stories to talk about. You just got back from a trip. You're home, you're comfortable. You got your back in your home place, your studio. And I think we're ready to kind of get into some of the beginning banter, if you will. Oh, no, no, for sure. Like I was trying to pry a little bit to see if you did one of the things, the first things that I did when I came to campus, which was explore and try to find the Xbox area, the Xbox team, because in their lobbies and in their studios, they have all these life-size replicas of different halo characters and characters from their different games and stuff like that. And I was kind of alluding into that kind of prodding to see if you've been down that way, mainly because they just released and were talking about the 20 years of Xbox that was published. This one I think you've got up here is from The Verge with their good friend, Tom Warren, talking about the Xbox 20 year celebration. Now, Microsoft give a campaign that they have here at Microsoft at an auction where you could go off and possibly buy this particular Xbox from the Xbox team. This is the Halo Xbox Series X. And the reason why they have this one up is because there's a traditional thing that they always do, which is Easter eggs that pop up. And so what do you think of this one here, man? Would you have thought to like scan your Xbox S with a black light to be able to find this one? No, I guess I'm gonna have to invest in a black light so I can start using it for all of my at home technology. It's always kind of funny to see this kind of stuff pop up. It's one of those things where I think it's really neat that it's been such a cultural add to the world. Like, I remember I had the original Xbox when it came out. To see it go past 20 years now, it's pretty crazy. And speaking of compute, because you're gonna use an Xbox, you need to have some compute in it. There's a story that came up that Microsoft now has one of the world's fastest supercomputers. And no, it does not run on Windows for Linux heads like myself. We take a little bit of pride in that. It's called The Voyager, which, you know, as a Star Trek fan and I need also The Voyager EUS 2, which is in the East US 2 data center. It is using Ubuntu 1804 LTS and it has, here we go, you ready for this number? 250,440 AMD APYC CPUs. Yeah, it is absolutely insane. It's using the Epic processor comes with 48 cores. So it's got a crap ton, I think is the official term of cores available for this guy. And then some A10 GPUs as well for GPU capabilities. And as you mentioned, this is finally cracking the top 10 of supercomputers. We have five other ones that are also inside the top 500, but this is the first one for Microsoft in the Azure space. It's actually cracked that top 10. So definitely hats off to the folks that be able to pull this one together. Yeah, I think that there was a Japanese company that was previously the title holder of the fastest supercomputer in the world. It's nice because that ultimately allows things like, you know, medical data crunching, which I think is super important. And I know Microsoft has a huge commitment to healthcare organizations. And we think about the last, you know, 18, 19 months, that service between being able to share it in the cloud and utilizing teams, it's all that's so important to help us get a little bit closer to where we are at right now as far as the world kind of come back, people being healthy. So we've got some, oh, go ahead, sorry. I was just gonna say that, you know, other things that go off and do this for us, obviously weather pattern and weather pattern simulations and stuff like that for forecasting, climate change impact and things as well. I like it because in that particular article, they also talk about how these operating systems normally run a programming language like Fortran. So hats off your books from computer sciences. Yes, Fortran, geez, we're gonna talk a little bit about old school and we're gonna get into some assembler. So we've got a story for this week, which I think is really interesting because, you know, you're always looking for new ways to make it easier for you to pick what you need as far as what size VMs you might need. And so for you who are still not in that containers world yet, you still may be using virtual machines and there are a lot of you. There is now a virtual machine selector that's gone into GA. It allows you to take into account the right VM for your budget. It allows you to take your operating system, your disk storage. I'm gonna pull it up and we'll take a look at it. Did you get a chance to try it out? It was kind of cool with the way that they brought this up and made this simulation work for you. Yep, so I'll go by section and then we'll see we can pick our operating and I'm a Linux person. I want the free version. So I'm gonna go with Ubuntu. We just click next. Now as you're making those selections on the left, on the right hand side, it shrinks the number of available options that you have to narrow it down to the proper selection that's gonna recommend for you, which is kind of cool. So yeah, we can say I just have some compute intensive, go to next and you can see that there were things like GPU and all those different selectors, how many VCPUs, let's say 12 and we can see we're down to 65 different types. If we need some features as far as a GPU, do we need full CPU support? Also temporary, like ephemeral storage. So if we wanna have say two gigabytes or two terabytes of ephemeral storage available so that you can do some things, security features, confidential computing, making use of those Intel confidential computing CPUs. We get to next and eventually we can say I have made it where there are no, I broke, I broke it. I love that. The main thing is simply ease of use for discoverability of their propices. And then you can take the recommendation that it gives you and then plunk it into the cost calculator to get more detailed views on the cost and usage and where you can go off and deploy those things. So it's a cool new interface for being able to go and take a look at your selection of VMs. So if you wanna take a look at that for yourself, you can head to the blog post aka.ms slash VM selector. Go ahead, give it a shot, find the right VM for you and get building something because we're trying to empower you to do more. You got it, you got it. Now, you mentioned VMs as a good way to start with the VM selector. I'm actually talking about something called VM applications next as far as a news article is concerned. Now, as you mentioned, like VMs are still the majority, well ahead of the majority of what's going on inside of the cloud when people go off and deploy stuff inside of Azure or any of the other Hyperscale clouds. And so when you deploy VM, normally you would go to a gallery and you would install a VM with applications already installed on it like SQL or MongoDB or other stuff like that or you pre-configured and ready to go. The problem is with those VMs you deploy like that, if you need to go through and do an update of the OS to something new, you then have to go and pull down that particular application package or pull down another VM pre-built with that thing on top of it or do something manual on top of the board. Well, we've in public preview, you got this thing called VM applications where you're able to go in and basically make your package of the application you want to deploy inside of your own gallery and then go off and deploy it against a VM that you've just deployed or a new VM that's part of an automation have the VM package deployed on top of that basically think of it like compartmentalizing the metadata about the install files, how to configure them, how to go off and using them that kind of sits as an object inside of the infrastructure that now you can go off and apply with rules like if this doesn't exist already please deploy this on top of this VM inside of this group because you can actually use roles-based access control and policies to be able to go off and get those deployed. So now we have a scale set that has like a hundred different VMs that are on it. You do an OS upgrade on top of them. You can simply use again, a VM app package to go off and have this automated and deploy down to it. Now it's important for you to know you got to make this package, you got to make the scripting but now we give you the infrastructure in the repository or where you can hang on to it inside your Azure infrastructure and then even replicate it amongst different regions so that when it goes off and deploy to your VMs you're good to go. So we build an infrastructure prior to this like how would you do this in the past life? Like you literally would have to go in and manually copy down pieces from different locations and then run your bash scripts or your PowerShell scripts to go off and do these automated deploys. Now we give you the ability to have it done for you if you go ahead and you make those in individual VM applications. Pretty cool stuff in general preview right now. What are your thoughts, man? You know, it's great that one, you can add some versioning to your actual VMs that you have. So if you've got different things or different releases that, you know the way I always kind of remembered deploying VMs at scale as I at least liked having a gold master image which I knew had, you know on it all the right security patches it had the dependencies that I might need to run my software and then I knew I could just, you know auto scale that image and it would just work. And it's nice to see that we're trying to, you know, ultimately technology tries to create easier packaging methodology. You know, that's the reason behind something like Helm for Kubernetes. That was the reason why NPM for JavaScript was created. It's all about reducing the complexity to be able to present dependencies. And so here's just another way of, you know giving people a way to package things and present them so it's a lot easier for them. There's a couple of quick limitations in size, obviously. You can only have up to a one gig application that's going to be installed with all the individuals supporting files. You can only actually have five of these packages deployed to an individual VM. And it obviously requires a VM agent for a level of automation that's in there. So. Yep, and there's some information. Yeah, there's some information in this doc that you can go to. So if you want to learn some more go over to aka.ms slash VM apps preview. We've got a link directly and it'll be in the story notes or the show notes. Now another way of making things easier that I really liked that came out this week. And I was playing around with this a little bit is Run Command, which allows you it's now in public preview, the ability to manage VMs by remotely executing scripts. And so I have been a system administrator in the past that had production systems that I might need to have run one off commands on. And that meant modifying network access to be able to SSH and to be able to make that change then sit and watch it and then make sure that I actually closed that network connection on my way out the door or make a VPN connection or whatever, but I was on call sometimes and doing these things would take a ton of work because you're hopping between networks, you're trying to make sure because you could be on some wireless networks that don't allow VPNs. And I'm sure we've all been there. I've definitely been on an airplane and someone said, hey, this is down. I know you're on an airplane, but could you take a look at it? And I would be telling you more. No, that's the, you're somewhere someone wants something. So with run command, it actually allows you to run scripts. And so you can run scripts in your Windows VM or the thing I used recently was the Linux VM. So I wrote myself, there's a two different major features that you can do and let me scroll down to see that it allows you to run if config commands, which is Linux networking. And then, and this is a really cool example of like an ARM template or a JSON for ARM, you can go ahead and just run ad hoc scripts. So sometimes if you want to be able to, and this is a really good use case, let's say that you wanna do something like I need to get some information out of a log and then have that go through my Linux machine or even my Windows machine, local MTA, so that I can eventually send off what's in that log to a specific place. Maybe it gets pushed to some sort of like disk repository. Maybe it goes into an email. So run command allows you to just go ahead and on the fly execute scripts. If you'd like to, you can see, let me see if I can get it a little bit more visible. Run shell script executes a Linux shell script and it's built right in and you get the standard out from what you're doing. So this is an example of the virtual mean machine if config and then it also allows you to run some PowerShell. You can limit access to your run command. Like I was just saying before about all these other things we're about reducing friction to be able to work with these services. And I think that it helps to be able to do things like, all right, well, let me go into the portal and let's get say something as quick as, I did a hello world. So I just went and I wrote a quick bash script that echoed hello world and redirected that into a file and then catted the output of the file. And then it came right in my output. So I thought that that was a really neat way to simplify work for people who have still some administrative tasks that can't let you be completely, as they say, no ops now. Yeah, and obviously this is an update to the existing functionality. And it's as you mentioned is to be absolutely clear. It doesn't require you to go in and do anything to the machine. You can just go in and run the command from the CLI to be able to reach into that box and go off and do stuff. Now, one of the things that you used to be able to do or would need to do or is common to do when you're managing your VMs is access files and grab files from someplace else to go off and do stuff and manipulate them, install them or do something on that machine. And we obviously have blob storage as one of the ways that you can go off and store stuff inside of an environment. But typically blob storage was only accessible if you're using other APIs or other custom tools or AZ copy or good old storage explorer to be able to go off and talk to storage environment. And if you wanted to have a way for your machines who don't have that functionality built in to access them, good old fashioned secure FTP was the way to do it. But you would have to stand up your own secure FTP system and then attach it to the blob storage at the front end, if you will, to be able to go in and attach up to it, which was a bit of a pain in the butt. And so we've now enabled, again, in preview mode, your ability to go through and have access to your blob storage using secure FTP. Now, to do this, again, it's in preview, go sign up and try it out. You will need to go off and obviously authenticate to that environment and we support two different levels of authentication. First of all, you have to have a local user that gets created for you when you set it up. And then we assign you or give you the choice of using an assigned secure password. So you have to copy that down and use it that represents that local user or you can use your more traditional public and private key sign with a key sign with SSH. So your call and how you want to go off and talk to that particular box and authenticate to it. But once you do, it literally functions and works like an everyday SFTP system that you could then access using whatever client you want to be able to go off and have access to it. Now, from a security perspective, just like SFTP, right? Once you attach up to that particular blob storage container, you then can go in and evaluate the different containers you have access to. Yes, no, yes, no. And then when you're able to access that particular container, all the standard read-only updates, that kind of stuff, those particular security parameters are available for you and you can have granularity with having different authentication users with different rights to different areas inside your blob storage. So we handle it for you now. It's in preview to be able to go off and to use it. You can even define a home directory that you land in when that user logs in. So to me, man, this is like taking me back to the old transfer days, man, with the old files that I used to use on the Windows side, to be able to go off and transfer files back and forth between systems. What do you think about this, man? You know, I used to work in situations where I had to have logs moved from a server to another place so that they can eventually be saved and processed in other services, like Splunk and things like that, but we'd have to move them off of the actual machine. So the big problem with that was maintaining certificates that go along for open SSL if I was working on a Linux machine and then also managing the actual storage. So if you're using a storage array, and back in the day, we had like our three pars and our different types of ways to connect, you know, sands or NASs, it meant another thing to maintain, including the operating system that came on top. And so there was things like FreeNAS, which gave you some things like SFTP functionality, but that meant maintaining still some sort of underlying infrastructure. With this, now we're talking about, as we do with almost everything, is how do we offload that to a service? How do we reduce complexity? And it keeps coming up. How do you reduce complexity and increase the level of performance that you as a person can have individually because you're not doing these minutia tasks? Oh, all right. Well, I got to write an SFTP command to pull this down and put it into a storage server that eventually, no, and the other thing that's great is like, let's say we need to set up temporary access to a file. You know, that's a great thing about the blog storage is that we can just send a URL using an HTTPS link where someone can go and maybe you specify by IP address, maybe you specify it by Azure AD login, whatever it is, you'll be able to get someone kind of gated to a particular file so that they're able to access it for just a short period of time or a long, and then you can add expiration, which I think is another thing. So you can say, well, these files should only be in this particular blob for X amount of time. Let's set up an expiration policy. And the other thing that I like is that if we wanted to use something like Azure Functions to actually, you know, access these and then do something with some sort of code, whether it's like Java or Go or JavaScript to take these things that we move along, it helps kind of like a, just improve how every connected thing is available within like a same network and none of it has to be managed. So Anthony wants to know if someone can ICQ link him to the latest QTFTP client. Yeah. Oh, I think was that, that was the, uh-oh, one, I think. Yeah, I'll just go off and just mention again, this does require that you sign up for the preview. It's only available in select regions, but they do have the list and the documentation which regions are available. Currently it's free, doesn't cost you anything other than your storage costs, your network egress and stuff like that, you normally would be paying. There may have a charge associated with it when it gets out of preview. And then as I mentioned, there's no integration at this time with Azure AD user accounts inside your tenant. This is a standalone local user that gets created specifically for the SFTP connectivity. So go ahead and try it. Fire up your file Zilla and your QTFTP options and inside your VMs or inside your VMs and go have at it. Cyber ducking away. So we're at that point where we're gonna start mentioning what's going on out here in the community. And one of the things I really think is great is our friends Richard and Gregor they have put together this festive tech calendar for 2021, they're there in our chat. We wanna say hello and thank you very much for always showing up. I want you to go and check out, there's lots and lots of content for the community by the community. There's prizes that are gonna come from all this. You can see they've got sponsors. So go ahead and check out the festive tech calendar. It's gonna run through the entire month of December. So you finish up your November holiday here and get to learning about what information and interesting articles that the community has to share with us. Have you participated as a presenter in the festive tech calendar in previous years, my friend? I have not, but that's because I'm not the most festive. I'm not the most festive person. What can I say? And holidays are coming up here in the States but you may not be in the States. And if you want to remember that there are still Microsoft events that you can go and check out, here's the one that I thought was really interesting on the 23rd, you could run this event where you can learn about running Windows, SQL, Linux workloads using Azure Hybrid benefits. Hello, Thomas, we speak your name. Go and check that one out. And then there was just a big conference yesterday, I think it was through the day before. It was early this week and I just want to make a tip out of the hat to that one there. That is the Azure IaaS Day that the Azure Compute Team pulled up. And that one there, currently it's over but you can get in replay mode. So if you go and follow the link, you're able to register for this still, just use your email and sort of stuff to be able to get past the registration page. They'll email you the link to go see the on-demand content and the on-demand content is available for, I believe it's almost a year but really I think of it more like 90 days or so that's available from this particular link. After that, it kind of migrates its way over into the YouTubes and into other pages as well. But it's a really cool content in there from my folks and my friends from the old Azure Compute Team that did the Azure IaaS Day just recently. Yeah, it looked like there was a bunch of interesting stuff up there. And want to get all the way to the end because we're just about out of time. I know that there are lots of great places to check out more content around Azure or ITS. And I know Rick, you normally do patch and switch. I'm sure you're taking next week off but that's one of those shows that you can go check. So keep your eye on at Rickster CDN and you also have a patch and switch Twitter, correct? Yeah, at sign patch and switch. We're gonna be doing a show not next week but actually two more shows in the month of December. One basically on the third and then one probably on the 17th or something like that before we kick it off in the new year. Yep. Well, I think next week Pierre is going to have us back. I'm going to be enjoying my time off. But Rick, I just wanted to say thank you so much for doing this with me today. Thanks to everybody who are in the comments. We really appreciate you watching this. And thanks to all of you for letting me kind of guide you these last two weeks through the show. Hey man, thanks for stepping up. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of fun. No problem. So everybody, we're gonna give you the wave. Goodbye. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next time on AZ Update.