 Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of AZ Update. I'm Anthony Bartolo, and we are joined today by Sonya Cuff. Sonya, thank you very much for being on the show. I know it's midnight your time, and so we're so grateful to be able to join us today. How's it going? Look, being an IT operations team, we are a follow the sun model. So this is global news coverage for you. That's awesome. We actually have items specifically targeted to our Australia in terms of news and events. So can't wait to jump into that really quickly. We have a couple of things to talk about prior to the news. First one being how is your screen set up at your home for your windows, your windows devices? Look, it's complicated. I have a surface book running through the surface hub and two external external monitors, one's portrait and one's landscape. And then another external monitor, sometimes for my teleprompter set up. So I have screens everywhere. One of my biggest challenges, because I do have the three screens myself, is usually when I open up Word, and that's the one that's been the trickiest for me thus far. I have two screens in front of me and then I have the camera. And then behind the camera, I have my screen that I do. It uses a teleprompter or when we're doing live streams like this so that I can look at people when I'm talking to people. And what happens is when I open up Word, it usually shows up on the screen behind the camera for some reason. First time it happens to me, I was in a complete panic. I was like, why is it not showing up on my screen? And I look up and it's like it's there hanging up on the rafters there. And, you know, that's a challenge when you have multiple screens, whereas your app will be up and you have to search out all your desktops. If you have a messy desktop like myself, where is your app running? In the latest Windows Insider build, there are there is new functionality now that you can actually target which screen the app will load into. So you don't have to look throughout all your screens anymore. You can actually go and say, OK, you know, when this one word opens up, it's going to open up on screen number one or screen number two, as opposed to it, you know, using by default, what was the last screen it was on? And usually what I do with Word is I do use it frequently for teleprompting on the back screen. And that's why it keeps on opening up back there. Now, it does require for people to go out and say, hey, do you like this feature and provide feedback for it to actually come into production version of Windows is only in the Insider builds right now. So you're able to go out and test the functionality. But you have to make sure that you have, you know, make your voice heard if this is something that's important to you. Let the Windows team know so they can bake it into the next offering. Oh, my gosh, I need that feedback link. I've had a really annoying bug that is one of those intermittent things. And you know how hard it is to troubleshoot something when you can't consistently reproduce it. But I've seen some strange behavior with some earlier Windows 10 Insider builds where if I go and launch an application on an external monitor and then I close it down, if I take my laptop away, sometimes when I go and open up that app, it tries to open up on the external monitor that's not plugged in anymore. And so I have this kind of phantom monitor where my app is going and I've got no way of getting it back. And it's the most frustrating thing because it only happens sometimes. So I'm really hoping that this update is going to fix this weird phantom external monitor, not a touch bug that I've been saying to. And it's only going to happen if, you know, based on feedback. So make sure if you're testing on the Insider builds, it's important to you. Make it known that it's important to you and they will add it to production. I just they want to make sure that before they're adding it, that this is actually needed, right? And I put in my feedback. Yes, I definitely want this to be made available. You bring a bit of news as well with us. Yeah, well, this means some interesting tweets going around lately because our official Microsoft account has hinted that good old Calibri might not be our default font and word anymore. So if you're a big fan of Calibri, it's not going away. It's still going to be available. But they're looking at other options for what their new favorite child might be in terms of default font. So we've got a choice that they kind of tweeted out. We've got BearStat, GrainView, Seaford, Skeena or Tenorite. Don't ask me if I pronounced any of those correctly. But yeah, they've sort of put out this teaser of this is what these these fonts look like and the different styles of bold and italic and and spacing and getting some feedback on your favorite. When I kind of looked at it originally, I was trying to place what the difference between these different font styles. But Donna Saka brought up this really interesting point about what it looks like for her and people that might have literacy or language issues, reading character sets on on screen will find some difficulty with the spacing of characters and sort of the kerning of the font. So it's really important to them as well. But just a bold move that gone other days of Calibri being the favorite child. And, you know, I'm still hucking back to Times New Roman, to be honest. Paul Jensen jumps in the chat says, what, no Klingon? And I think pretty superior actually mentioned the same thing for the Klingon font. I being an old time Windows Mobile, Windows Phone individual, I'm still using, I don't know if I say pronounce it properly. Segu or Segoi. So back in the day, you know, the whole aspect of modern apps and the clarity of reading signs. And I went through the whole study of, you know, why they use the font that they did for Windows Phone and its clarity of what have you. I still use that font today in a lot of my presentations and in Word as well. I understand Donna's aspect of it in terms of reading the characters and some of them looking flipped. I don't suffer from that, but for me, using Segoi or Segu, whatever, how you pronounce it, I got to find the proper pronunciation. I find that the letters are a lot clearer. When I do my teleprompter, I use Segoi or Segu for teleprompter reading as well. It's easier for me to read the letters on the screen. So for me, I'm actually shocked that it's not there as part of the listing, you know, as a callback to what it was on Windows Phone. That would have been an interesting choice. But, you know, all these ones are great. Again, to Donna's point, it's hard sometimes to read characters. And so it's great that Microsoft is thinking what character is, you know, a lot more legible. Timesy Roman, I've not used that in a long time. I know Pierre, for some reason, uses Comic Sans a lot. It's good to say you could pronounce it as in any way you like as long as you're not using Comic Sans, right? What's wrong with Comic Sans? I use it all the time. We know, we know the show notes are all in Comic Sans. We can't keep a straight face reading the notes. So thank you, producer Pierre, for that. All right, on with the news and you are up first. I am. So let's talk about Azure Monitor. There was a little update that's come out recently that is very exciting in terms of being able to support both stateful and one-minute frequency log alerts. So this is in public preview, stateful alerts basically means that if an alert has fired, it will auto resolve once that condition is no longer met. So that really helps us sort of clean up the noise of the things we have to go and tidy up afterwards. If it's just one of those little transient issues and being able to query every minute. I know that this is a big feature that was a road blocker for a lot of people when they were looking at using Azure Monitor's capability. There was a time delay between data being ingested into log analytics and therefore available to Azure Monitor to query. And now that we can actually run those queries on a per minute frequency will certainly help people that have those use cases where they're monitoring that really high availability and they can't handle much of a delay or a lag on that data. And that's big, right? Like log analytics, especially the data being adjusted into tools like Azure Sentinel, the more data that you can provide, the better the response or better the reaction that you can have or even the report out in terms of what's going on. I also love the stateful solution now that if it's resolved, it removes it. I'm curious, do we have any depth in regards to or further understanding if the log entry is removed because it's been resolved? Does that remove it also from past reports so that it's removed from Sentinel for analytics, do we know? So it's not actually removing the log entry itself. It is just setting the Azure Monitor condition for that alert to now not being fired anymore. So it is just that alerting part of that state. Oh, great. So then the information is still captured for analysis after the fact, right? So that it can know, hey, what's going on? Why did this occur and provide the resolution down the road, which is cool. Yeah, and the interesting thing about that too is I think that sometimes we can get hung up on wanting that in terms of how fast we're responding to things. I don't know many IT pros that are sitting watching dashboards or watching whatever system it is that they're getting their alerts in that closely than a minute or two would make much difference. When you think about it, let's talk about automation. So if you've got some automation that says if you detect that on the server, a service has stopped, for example, and that's a critical service, I want an automation to kick in and try and restart it before the human eyeballs might have even noticed that that alert has been fired. So now we can get that automation working a lot quicker as well. So that's a great bonus. And I know there was talk about in terms of charges, right? Because if you're doing a per minute long charge, it could get costly, but you would want to specify to a specific instance to catch a specific scenario. Is there like something going on right now in terms of the test or the enablement of this functionality that it hears to that? Yeah, that's a really good point. So at the moment, while it's in public preview, that one minute frequency log alerts will have no additional charge while they're in public preview, but there may be a charge on them when this becomes generally available. However, the stateful alerts that we talked about, there's no plans to make that at any extra cost when that feature goes GA. Excellent, so definitely check that out. And we have the notes in terms of how to get started on ITOPS Talk under the latest AZ update post. Let's continue on with the news. Next up, Microsoft has just announced new VM sizes made available to the general public for general accessibility. The DV5 series, I have all the show notes here, so I make sure I get this right, the DV5 series and the EV5 series. Now the DV5 series is a new general purpose virtual machine offering that's made available. What's great about this is that it has the ability to not require storage up in the cloud. So if you wanna attach on separate storage, whether it's in cloud or on-premises, you have the availability to do so. If you do require in cloud storage, it is recommended to use the DV5 series of virtual machines that you can deploy and it's your organization. And again, this is for general purpose only. Now for memory intensive workloads, if you're doing machine learning, if you're doing high-scale analytics, if you're doing database rationalization, all that type of functionality, you're gonna look at the EV5 series. And the EV5 series provides the same functionality. So the EV5 series allows for the requirement, sorry, the non-requirement of storage up in the cloud. You can have on-premises or in cloud and separate storage if required, but it too, if you require in cloud storage, there is the EDV5 series VMs that are made available. Again, these are high-intensive memory-capable virtual machines up to 672 gigs. Wow, that's a lot. A lot of my games would be running really quickly. But if you're, you know, and again, if you're doing data-like analytics, if you're doing machine learning, cognitive services, if you're doing functionality that is very memory intensive and requires in-memory computations, this is the series that you're gonna look at. And these are, both series are made available and generally available now for use in production. So any thoughts? E-Series is my favorite one to use as an example when I'm talking about cost management and Azure policy, because I love demonstrating how you can prevent anybody in your organization from spinning up E-Series VMs because the fact that they cost a fair bit of money. But you can see why, right? They are designed to be these heavy-hitter workloads. And the interesting thing about that is that the kind of use cases that we need those really strong, intensive workloads for is normally to analyze big intensive data sets. And so in the past, we've needed to get those data sets from wherever they are into the cloud to then be processed. So it's really cool to see a sort of detaching that and being able to run these compute workloads back against these local storages and the data sets that we may still keep on-prem. So speaking of cost management, you're up next actually with a new cost management story. Yeah, so it's been a little bit of update in the cost management world. And Azure Cost Management and Billing released their monthly updates and little bits and pieces here and there throughout the month. So the latest news this week has finally been the ability to query the retail prices and currencies other than US dollars. So you've been able to display them in different currencies, but if you wanted to query them like through an API, if you have built your own cost estimation tool, for example, or you've got some other solutions sort of analyzing things, those retail prices have all been by default in US dollars. So now you can change the currency of that, which is really helpful to anybody outside of the USA. We've also got a new date picker. And so the way that you go and you analyze your costs and cost management had some restraints on how you could select date periods to analyze your cost tree. Now we've got a new custom date range picker that's in preview that gives you a lot more granularity on being able to choose your start date and your end date through for a number of days to a number of months to try and analyze those queries in a way that suits your business. So that's been quite exciting. In addition to that, we've got cost management labs and cost management labs is the place to go for all of the early access to the features that are going into the public portal. So go and check out the blog post for this episode. It will tell you how to access cost management labs to get access to those preview features and also give you the opportunity to interact with the product group about those particular features. Tell them what's working, tell them what's not, tell them what's missing. Producer Pierre is wondering if you could do the currency in Gold Press, Latin upon the chat room, which is funny. I want to see how much my VMs cost in Dodgecoin. Dodgecoin, right? Bitcoin, Dodgecoin, all the miners out there, you can, you know, save up your money. This is big, right? We joke about the currency piece, but, you know, being Canadian, looking at pricing, you know, it's hard to get a U.S. pricing, then you have to convert it using your currency tool. You don't know if it's gonna be the proper currency or the proper conversion for your analysis. So doing this directly in the tool is big. I've always said, you know, from the business decision maker perspective in the assignment of costs to cost centers inside of an organization, having this type of tool, now with the specific in terms of the currency that's being utilized as well, that's huge. The other piece too is the cost management labs, right? The ability to go through and test out if we have this type of functionality enabled, what's it gonna cost us on the road so you can do better at forecasting, right? In terms of what your resource consumption is gonna look like at the end of the month so that there's no surprise bills, which is really awesome. Yeah, that's good. Let's continue on. What's up with that next? Next up, how is your container utilization knowledge? Is it, you know, we're, I know I hear you. Listen, I'm not proficient in containers as well. Containers, I've got a cupboard full of them. Yeah. We come from the Hyper-V world, right? The whole virtual machine piece was a big revelation and now we've gone into the container world, right? And for the aspect of time, containers are an instance you have a header that's your, you know, your compute and then you have all your data resulting in the container and the header can be transferred from different containers to be more efficient in terms of compute cycles and consumption of data and manipulation of data. Microsoft has recently acquired, it was announced yesterday, KinVolk. KinVolk is a open source community initiative for container utilization. The premise behind the acquisition is now Microsoft gains further expertise in container utilization. The team that said KinVolk, sorry, will automatically be brought in to help out with the Azure Kubernetes service solution as well as Azure Arc for management. So this is big news, right? And so there's the whole aspect of the expertise that KinVolk brings to the table in terms of container utilization to better fit or better make available the Azure Kubernetes service. To add to this, Microsoft understands the impact and the influence in the, what KinVolk has done to help the community in terms of their locomotive program and services that are available specifically for container utilization as open source. Microsoft has promised this is not going to change. This is gonna continue on. KinVolk is still gonna be able to act and participate in the community and provide the open source solutions made available through locomotive and other services that KinVolk had come to the table with. That is not gonna stop. That's gonna continue on. And that's big news, right? And it's something where Microsoft is doing its best and it's putting its best foot forward to ensure our organic interactions inside of the open source community. And so I'm very happy to see that KinVolk will continue on doing the great work that they do in open source and inside of community using their existing services as well as now bringing their expertise to Azure Kubernetes service to make the solution that much better. It's a really interesting one because I've come from such an infrastructure and server world that open source has not really been one of the things that has crossed my career path at all. I've had some great conversations with technologists about what open source actually means and where it fits in terms of customer size. When we get smaller customers who may be looking at it because it's cheaper but may or may not have the technical capability to be able to help improve it and feed back into that open source community to make it better. So they're more users than they are contributors. And yet you have some really big companies, Microsoft included, that have gone and done efforts internally that they've then released as open source so that the community can use it and contribute to it. It's a great story about Netflix and their Atlas monitoring and how they then went out in an open source to do that to make people being able to use it. But it is an interesting one. I do wonder whether or not we'll see more tendrils of it in the IT Pro operation space. And I think containers really is sort of the most obvious and the first and foremost use case. We're sort of seeing that it's crossing to our infrastructure world. I think we'll see more of it. I think the whole aspect of what happens in the open source community is the ingenuity and creativity that people bring to the table when not hindered by licenses and what not hindered by restraints on legalities of using specific of the mouse trap project as an example has evolved into an ice cream truck project into a newspaper sales project. It's interesting to see what people bring to the table and then they bring along their ideas and they share their ideas. And it's the whole benefit of the open source community is it's not just people are using the code that's out there, actually providing evolution to what you put out as a solution. So I'm excited to see how this evolves in terms of the relationship with the open source community around containers. And it's gonna be interesting to see the journey of what the whole play of containers does come down the road as it becomes even quicker in terms of its adoption which is really awesome to see. Let's do a quick shout out to the chat room. We have Paul Jensen in there. We have Andrew McCullen. Robert Jr. is joining us all the way from South Africa. Hello, Robert Jr. They're speaking Klingon in the chat room with producer Pierre, which is funny. Audio Steve is also in the chat room today. Jerry Chocolate, Jared, how's it going? I know there's Patch and Switch coming up in terms of events and we'll jump through the events really quickly. Patch and Switch is on today. It's been a fortnight. So they've been alternating which is really cool. Testing and production is last Friday and then we have Patch and Switch this Friday and then back to testing and production. Let us know in the chat rooms, what do you guys think about the whole testing and production? There's been a lot of comments in terms of producer Pierre set up and the appreciation for them sharing the setup and the strategies and the tips and tricks that they've learned along the way in terms of producing a show. I've definitely been taking notes just because doing shows like Acer Update and editing down the road for other things, it's really interesting just to see what technologies are being used. There's also Hello World and Hello World is that daily news program that you have also on Learn TV and it's a great show that showcases the humans behind the services at Microsoft. It showcases what people have learned and sharing of tips and tricks in terms of what they've accomplished down the road. And then as we mentioned earlier in the show, Sonia, you bring forth an event that's happening in Australia. Yeah, absolutely. So Microsoft Australia are running a security skills bootcamp. It is free, it is online and it's running from the 17th to the 21st of May. So there may be a little bit of overlap between our Australian morning and to the North American afternoon as far as time zones go. But the cool thing about this particular week apart from it being free and online is the variety of sessions. There's sessions on zero trust. There's a whiteboard session on zero trust. There's ask the experts and then there's security from the perspective of end points, identity, network, infrastructure, data, information protection and some really cool information on the latest sort of cyber threats that we're seeing and attacks as well. So really just a great portfolio throughout that whole week of free security sessions that you can register for and view online. And that's the thing, right? In this whole pandemic world there's the availability to attend these sessions because everything is online. The question that's come up in the chat is this going to be recorded? That's a good question. I don't have a solid answer on that but I will find out and I'll pop a comment on the blog post for this session when I've got an answer for you. Perfect. I love attending these global sessions because I learned so much from other parts of the world in terms of adoption, in terms of the way that technology is seen in different views from around the world. I miss that from the tour. That's one of the things I miss is sitting in the open area that they have on tour and just learning from everybody that's willing to share how they perceive the adoption of technology. And so being able to attend these events in other parts of the world so this one coming up May 17th is an awesome one because it allows me to see in terms of Australia, what is the perception of cloud computing and cloud technology utilization? How are they securing it? How are they enabling identity management? It's awesome to see that from other places, perspectives in terms of the way they put their best foot forward for security optimization as an example. Yeah. And that's one of the cool parts about Microsoft being a global organization, right? Is that it's not necessarily having to sit around and wait for a head office for a readment to go and put on one of our massive first party events like Ignite or Build. But we've got local offices all around the globe that are running skilling initiatives at the moment. And when you find one that's in the same language that you speak and in the case of Australia and Canada, it's even the Queen's English and we spell things correctly. So if you can get past the strange accents, it is just really interesting to see what those other subsidiaries are coming up with in terms of technical enablement training. And I just thought that this was such a comprehensive week of training and it really does, like the COVID pandemic has forced it to some extent of making these events go online first as their primary source. But we were having this conversation about how back in the day, the only way to get Microsoft training like this, Microsoft technical training was to go and sit in a classroom for three days or five days and pay for that sort of certification training content. And then we sort of saw a bit more of an evolution of that where they started doing more sort of technical workshop days that included your hands on lab, but it still very much was the go into the classroom bit. So let's see, I think that when everything else sort of comes out in the Washington's of how this pandemic rolls on for however long it does with countries rolling out vaccination programs, et cetera, the sort of online stuff is something that I hope we don't lose. And I do want to see in-person events back again. I absolutely miss those hallway conversations, the chat to the person next to you about what you've been listening to in the session because they're from a different organization. Like we desperately miss all of that, hopefully one day when it's safe again, but the opportunity to get into some online technical stuff from other countries around the world at the moment is just, it's mind blowing. Like just take advantage of it. It's all there. Agreed. Let's jump on to last segment, the Microsoft Learn module of the week. And Sanya, you bring this to our attention today which is an awesome one. Yeah, so Microsoft Learn module of the week is using Azure Lighthouse with your managed service business. Now, I don't want you to zone out if you don't work for a managed service business. Azure Lighthouse is our way of delegating access for your credentials into Azure tendencies that are not where your credentials primarily live. So you don't need to go and create accounts in those different tendencies to be able to log in and perform admin functions or monitor those environments or whatever. But when I talk about that, we have this thing about, yes, I can understand the relationship between a managed service provider doing that for multiple different customers and not wanting to have to switch credentials all the time. But it's also really great for our big multinational customers. And there's a number of reasons why a customer might have more than one tendency in their enterprise. We've got franchisors and franchises. We've got people that have just gone a little bit rogue with their tenants. And I've seen that. We've got now multiple different sort of directories inside our environment for whatever reason. And so to be able to use Azure Lighthouse to have this one place to log into with my set of credentials that now gives me access to see all of the resources and the tendencies I've got access to and manage them at scale. So decide that you want to roll out something using Azure policy and use PowerShell to send it out to the resources and all those different tendencies at the same time. Like that is pretty cool. The interesting thing about the learn module itself is I bring it up because I've just recently updated it. So I helped co-author an update to this one where we've now introduced hands-on labs inside this module. So normally in our Microsoft Learn environment we've got the sandbox stuff and the sandbox does let you stand up and do some of the exercises. Multitenancy is really hard to sandbox because obviously you need more than one Azure tenancy. And that's a little bit more complicated for us. So sorry, sorry, sorry. Producer Pierre is chiming in because we have one minute left. So awesome that you were able to share this. If people want to get a hold of you on social media what's the best way to get a hold of you? Find me on Twitter at Sonya Cuff. And if you want to get a hold of Producer Pierre you can do so at Wire Canuck. And if you want to get a hold of me for some reason at Wireless Life on Twitter. Sonya is so awesome to see you on the show. Hopefully we'll get you back again next week. Everybody have a great weekend.