 Hello and welcome to another episode of AZ Update. I'm Anthony Bartolo joined as always by Sarah Lean and producer Pierre in the background. Sarah, how's it going? I'm good. Thanks, Anthony. I'm good. How are you doing? Good. Good. I'm excited. This is our one-year anniversary. Actually, technically, our one-year anniversary is tomorrow because our first episode was on April the 17th, 2020. This being the closest episode to it, excited that we've done the one-year. Sarah, what thoughts? It's been a crazy year. I do. It definitely has. I remember when you and Thomas started and you were off trying to find a suit so you could wear it and be news presenters and talking about that and the posing of photos that you guys did. I remember that. I can't believe it's a year though. If you don't remember, that was the photo of Thomas and I in our pajama pants, wearing our suit jackets. I'm still wearing the same suit jacket I've been wearing a year ago. I think I need to take it to the dry cleaners. It's been a year. I still have the tag on it though. As you can see, I haven't taken that off yet. I don't wear suit jackets. It's like, you're doing a new show. Are you planning on returning it? No. I think we'll have an episode of me just taking the label off. But I did want to share a quick screen grab of what it was a year ago. There we go there. We had green screens at the time. We were using a different platform altogether. I believe the sound only came out of one channel, but that's one ear for myself. We learned a lot doing this show. I know producer Pierre has that new show now with Steve, the audio guy. I can't call him producer Steve. Steve, the audio guy that talks about what they learned in terms of doing the shows and how they're putting forth the technology to address it. We're all Cloud-based now, which is really cool for the show before we were doing everything on the machines themselves. I was doing it on a device that couldn't handle the amount of power it was required to live stream. There was a tray of ice cubes involved in order to run the show. But let's quickly go through the numbers, what we've accomplished on the show, which is really cool. This is the 52nd episode that we have on the broadcast. We've had 909 live stream viewers. So 909 people have been watching the show. Quick shout out while we're talking about that. Edgy McCollum is on the live stream. Sorry, Luna Jernberg. I apologize. I'm very bad for themes. Robert Jr., how's it going? Good to see you again. Regular IT guys on the show. So good to see you, sir. And Jared Shockley is here. So Audio Guy Steve is in the house. 909 live stream viewers. 6,599 viewers on the recorded. So once the show, the live stream is completed, then it's recorded. It's on YouTube for viewership. So we've had, just shy of 6,600 people watching the recorded offering of this live stream. On average, we've had about 16 minutes worth of views, which is pretty high on a 30 minute show. We've had 221 hours of this show being watched. And, you know, we're broadcasting live on four channels. So we're obviously on YouTube and we're on Twitch and Facebook. But more importantly, we're also on Learn TV, which is very exciting for us is the Microsoft property that allows us to broadcast on their platform. Jared, from this, you know, where are we gonna go from here in terms of the show? What do you think? Bigger and baser, Anthony, bigger and baser. I can't wait till we can go outside and do this, you know, back in the days of being somewhere and doing it from there and having those challenges in terms of doing the broadcast at a location. You know, honestly, this was done because prior to everything going on, we were traveling the world, we were doing Microsoft Ignite to tour and we were able to have these great conversations with people. I learned a lot just, you know, sitting in the common area they had at the shows and I miss that. I miss that having those type of conversations. For me, this has been awesome because in the chat room, we have all these discussions. I know producer Pierre has set up the Discord server as well and we've been having discussions in there. Sarah, like what's this been for you in regards to having this live stream? It's definitely been a learning curve doing a live show and having to deal with the technical issues and stuff that we've had. I think one of the shows, my browser crashed and I completely disappeared when you were trying to talk to me and being able to handle all of those kind of foibles that happen is an interesting skill. It's definitely helped me and also just dealing with having to talk to the camera. I think some of the viewers probably will be seeing that I've got my own YouTube channel and when you look back on some of the videos that I did way back at the start, I was like a way over here, looking over here talking to the camera. And now I've learned that you actually are supposed to look directly into the camera and those kind of things make it much more interactive for the audience, right? If someone's looking at them rather than looking off in the distance and doing something else. So it's definitely been interesting and it's helped me with the... I think we talked about this yesterday, Antony, that muscle, that memory muscle of presenting and doing this and having an audience and being professional. Whereas some of our team meetings aren't necessarily professional, but yeah, it's definitely been an interesting journey on trying to do this and trying to figure out the way of how to do all of the things that go around a live stream. What I love about this is, we've done this live stream. You were doing your live stream a lot longer than we've been doing this show, but these shows are starting to pop up now, right? You're starting to see these live streams happening on YouTube. I've seen MVPs put these together. We've seen our colleagues put this together. They've had their own shows going on right now too. It's a great new way to have that communication that I sorely miss when we used to go traveling and talking to people. It's been awesome that the conversation doesn't just stop in the live stream, right? We have people reaching out in the recorded shows. We have people reaching us directly in terms of their questions or their suggestions. And everybody's been patient, right? We're learning as we go. I think we've gotten a lot better to knock on wood in terms of production value. I think audio is coming in through both channels now. So we're very excited about that. Oh, I've had the same situations. You've had blue screen of death and everything crashes in the middle of the live stream. And thankfully I have wonderful people like yourself and Pierre to jump in and cover that when that occurs. I don't have that problem anymore. Thank you for the investment to Microsoft and to Rick Claus for believing in our little show and allowing us to move on. Speaking of moving on, should we jump into the news? Yep, let's do the news. All right, so Sarah, you're up first. I'm up first. So first of all, I wanna talk about log analytics and the uniqueness of the name that you're now allowed. I think that's the kind of right way to see it because previously when you created a log analytics workspace, your name for the workspace had to be unique across the whole of Azure. So if someone had taken that name for their log analytics workspace, you couldn't have the same name. But what the team have done now is you can actually have a unique name pair resource group. So you could have the same name for your workspace as someone else or even as yourself as long as in a different resource group. So this is great for those organizations that maybe have Azure subscriptions that maybe mirror each other. So a production Azure subscription, a development and a testing one. And in each of those, you can mirror it all and have the same name for your workspace. So as when people are in the production workload, they know what the workspace name is gonna be, same with development and testing and stuff like that. So definitely a good feature. I think it's good to be able to have this and being able to be mindful of your name and convention and not have to worry about someone else, somewhere else in the globe having stole your name and convention and already stole your idea for that workspace. What do you think? And agent, is this a good thing or? Oh, no, this is amazing, right? This is something that our audience has been asking for. It's like you said, if I have the specific naming convention for the series of services that I have to put forth and somebody else has already stolen that or is using it elsewhere, there's that conflict and now I can't use it and I have to change my convention and I may forget because I had to create one on the fly. This makes it a lot easier just to remember services that I have named and deployed. I have colleagues that have forgotten what they've done and they find out two years later, oh, I forgot about this, it's still spinning in the background. It's a big deal, right? It sounds like it's small, but I know from a perspective of naming conventions, especially if you're creating staging environments to build out for solutions, if you don't know what you've created in terms of your architecture from a naming perspective, then you forget and you leave it on because you think it's part of production or what have you in there, you're incurring that cost. So much easier to have a handle on what you're doing in terms of your resource spin-up and not worrying about what's happening on the other side of the globe in midst of the same subscription, right? I know that probably happens quite frequently too. Yep, everybody's got a demo resource or a demo workspace or a demo VM in their subscription somewhere. Oh yeah, I have many and I get to hear it from Rick all the time. Why are you spending this much money? Turn off the services. I know, I know, I know. So I have been actively doing that to make sure that I don't get that call saying, you're over again, I know, hell, let me fix that. Let's continue on with the news. Next up we got some IoT news, Sarah's favorite. I'm waiting for the eye roll. She's laughing, okay, cool. So here's the thing. Yes, I talk about IoT a lot on the show. I know a lot of people follow. IoT is for developers. Let's take a minute here. IoT is for everyone. IoT is for the enablement of an organization to capture information or to provide automation in real world implementations of doing stuff, right? Whether it be traffic handling, whether it be catching a mice, you name it, there's a full gamut of apathras, things that you can do in IoT. The real reason I'm doing this segment today on IoT, specifically around IoT central updates is the update that was released for March is specifically targeted to assist operations. We're talking about the ability to understand the health of the devices that have been deployed, what templates have been sent to the devices themselves to run specific operations, the application usage monitoring capabilities. So understanding if the uptime on your devices and running the applications accordingly, even better still, there is now specific documentation dedicated to operations in your deployment, management and securing of IoT, right? So if you have your instance of IoT, you have this full on gamut of tool set and documentation that comes along with it in terms of best practices for architecture, best practices for security deployment. I just actually did with the defender team, there's the full on defender offering specifically for IoT. I've been saying this for a while. IoT is the new hybrid architecture because these devices are on premises. Yes, I said on premises, Rick. On premises and it's the ability to capture information and digest information on the edge. That's in essence a server on the edge capturing this information. Why shouldn't that have the same security requirements, management requirements, what have you before it pushes up the data to the cloud, right? This is important in terms of having an understanding, having the documentation and reference material there really something to look at in regards to everything that's going on for IoT, especially now in that everybody's working from home and requires the capture of information from external sources. Sarah, thoughts? I always roll my eyes when you talk about IoT, Antony, because it's not something that I am on board with yet or haven't figured out how to do, but I think from a management point of view is something that someone has to look after and make sure there is the general kind of, what's the right word I'm looking for? The management profile and everything across the board is being done, so yeah, it is something that I really need to have a look at and actually understand and not just roll my eyes at, to be honest, Antony. It's all good, it's sorry to call you out of that. We're on episode 14 of season two, we've got lots of time to get you on board on IoT, so don't worry about it, we're good. Next up in the news, you're up next, Sarah. So yeah, I want to change tact a little bit from the Azure news to the things that the team have announced regarding the surface. So this week we had a new surface laptop announced, so surface laptop four, and there were also a bunch of accessories launched with that. Now in terms of the surface laptop, it has all the features that we still love. So all the ports and the connectivity, all the fancy colors, I think there's even a new color being, but what it also does is allow it to be more serviceable. So I think this is something that a lot of people have asked about. So within this new laptop, the hard drive is more serviceable and the keyboard is also serviceable by I think it's an approved service center. I don't know what that means and I don't know how that's going to work globally and things like that. But in terms of being able to replace that, I know when my mom was looking at the surface laptop, she actually picked one of the models that didn't have an Alcantara keyboard because she was worried about it potentially getting dirty and then it kind of ruined the look of the laptop. And I know a few of us have had those concerns as well. Although I think my colleague or our colleague Sonia has an awesome tip. She uses Alcantara, I can't say that word. She uses the same thing she uses to clean her car because our car's got this and she uses that on her keyboard and it works. So yeah, that's an awesome tip that I need to follow. But in terms of keeping that clean and being able to service those kind of keyboards, this is a great feature that we're seeing towards the laptop. And we've also got the announcement that you can pick the processor. So you've got the Intel chip or an AMD chip within this laptop. So that'll be interesting to see the configurations once they start to drop within the stores and stuff like that. In terms of the accessories though, there are some cool things that have come out around the accessories. So there was a new surface headset or headphone set. So the Surface Headphones 2 Plus for business, I think is the official name. And this headset is going to be officially certified for Teams use. Now I always get a bit edgy when people say that it's definitely you have to have a certified Teams device for Teams. It's great to have it because it gives you that extra functionality. I know the headset that I actually use for Teams meetings has the mute button on it and it actually makes the, you know, I can answer the calls, I can unmute with the headset. And those are great features to have but you don't necessarily need to have a team certified headset to use it. But this new headset is going to be certified by for Teams and it has a dedicated button for Teams on it. And there were two other headsets as well announced. I think these were separate from the Surface range. I think they were calling the Microsoft modern headsets. So as Anthony's showing you on screen here, there's a one that's got a wire and one that's wireless. So again, exciting options there for people on different price points as well if you're having to do the calls. We've also got the speaker, which is a USB-C plug-in speaker. So you can plug that into your laptop and then has omnidirectional microphones again certified for Teams use. So again, probably will be great when we have the chance to go back into meeting rooms and we might have to adhere to social distancing and have to shout across a meeting room to be heard on these calls. So these kind of speaker phones are probably going to be used much more. And the last accessory I think we announced was a new webcam. And it feels like an age since Microsoft launched a webcam. I think we've probably all had one of the webcams in the past, but this new modern webcam is another option that you have. It has a privacy filter. So it's got a wee slider you can pull across. So if you don't want anybody to see you, then it's got that as well. It doesn't have Windows Hello, which is a feature I would have loved to have seen in a webcam to be honest from Microsoft. But hey-ho, you can't have it all. What would you think, Anthony? Excited by this, getting the credit card out to use it by any of these or? Well, I know Thomas is asking Isadora right now for permission to buy a lot of the accessories. I am in the market for a new headset. So I'm currently using the Samsung earpod pros. I love them, but the only last an hour. So I have enough juice to do this broadcast and then I have to charge them again. So doing something with the headsets, I had the Bose headsets in the past and they were great and all. I had some challenges with compatibility. So I'm very intrigued to see if the team's headset works also on Xbox. Then it would be a yes for me. So then I have the multifaceted use of the headsets themselves. Actually, good question came out of from regular IT guy. Is the headsets good enough to replace the Jabra units that you use, Sarah? It depends who's paying for it, to be honest, because I love my Jabra. If there's an offer of budget going for a new headset, then I'm all for that. There you go. There you go. I'm also intrigued by the webcam too. I remember the first Microsoft webcams that came out, I think they were life services webcams. I too, I would have liked to have seen the Windows Hello integration into the webcam. I think that one is something that, that's why I got the Brio, I got the Brio 4K. It does the Windows Hello piece, but it's also a really good camera. I'm hearing that this is a very good camera, right? And it comes down to price point, right? In the day and age that we're in right now and everybody working from home, this camera makes sense from a perspective of it's a low end price point. So it's an easy entry level for people to purchase and get on board with. And it was a shortage for a long time too of the webcam, the webcams too, right? So Microsoft coming to market with a webcam, it's awesome. It's a low price point that can get used. Windows Hello would have been nice, but maybe that's another future iteration that comes out, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think obviously there's a need for different price points. I think like you said, the Logitech Brio has Hello built into it, which is great, but the price point is a bit scary sometimes when you have to buy that, whereas potentially a webcam without Hello is also suitable because of the quality of the video. And let's face it, that's also the main thing that you buy a webcam for, the quality of the video. You don't want a webcam that's got all these fancy features and gives you a horrible grainy picture. So for me, that's why I haven't upgraded to the Brio because I'm happy with the quality of my webcam and I can deal with the lack of Windows Hello and I'll type in my password if I need to. There's always that you can do, right? And there's other technologies too, you can do the thumb scan, even with the password, you can use Microsoft Authenticator application on your device to do a two-stage authentication, which is goal if your business requires it. So there's a plethora of opportunities and capabilities that you can have to do authentication. Let's continue on with the news. Sarah, what's the largest file size you currently work with? I don't know, I don't know. I've got lots, I've got lots of big video files because that's all I've been creating this year. So a lot of what we're seeing in terms of file sizes in respect to specifically around machine learning and artificial intelligence data capture, we're starting to see into the terabytes of data. And that was a challenge in terms of usage of blob storage because blob storage used to have a cap of five terabytes. What's interesting that's been announced, it's currently in preview, it hasn't gone to production yet, but an increase from five terabytes to 200 terabytes for blob storage for a single object. So this is one single file can now be supported in Azure blob storage up to 200 terabytes from the previous five terabytes. That's a 40 times increase of availability for storage. As I mentioned, this is currently in preview, this has not gone to production yet, it's currently for testing. I would love to see those in the chat room that have that requirement for file size, machine learning, AI activities, media. I know media can get up in file sizes, especially when you start looking at 4K video, right? There are instances where that gets really high. I haven't seen the 200 terabyte limit hit in augmented reality or mixed reality, but that is another possibility as well. It's been interesting in terms of that climb. Again, during the times of us doing more online, working from home, requiring that readily access to information and data, it's interesting to see how even computing and storage and everything that's going on is changing to adapt to what our needs are right now. And so this comes at no surprise that there was this increase, especially with the increase of machine learning and data being captured in that respect. Sarah, your thoughts? I think it's awesome. I think, like you said, there's a need to afford these larger files. I'm just worrying about how you actually sync that up to the cloud or how do you transfer that? And if you have such a big file and you want to migrate it, how long is that going to take you and how much bandwidth that's good? So those are the questions going through. But it's great for those companies that obviously need it. And like you said, there's a lot of video companies that use Azure natively for all the video processing and things like that. So yeah, definitely a good feature that I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to use, but I definitely don't have a 200 terabyte file to even test it with. So I'll have to take the team's word that it does work. I think Pierre has a collection that's about 200 terabytes of all the times that he's beaten me on the online games that we've been playing, especially called the 2DS the last little while. So he's probably got a lot of imagery in a single zip folder that's about 200 terabytes. So yep, it beats you again. He's laughing in the background because he knows it's true. Let's go do a quick shout out to those in the room in the chat room. There's a lot of people in the chat room today. This is really exciting for a one-year anniversary. So Andrew McCollum, how's it going? Luna Jernberg, Robert Jr.'s in the house. We have regular IT guy. We have producer Pierre in the background chatting away online too. Paul Jensen, how's it going, sir? What else have we got out here? We have Brett Coleman online. We have, I keep on saying producer Steve. Audio guy Steve in the house, Jared Shockley. A lot of people chatting, which is really cool. They're actually talking about the Alcatara tip that you gave in terms of using the cleaner for the keyboard. That's a fantastic idea. So it's really cool to think about. Let's talk really quickly about the events. And I want to do a quick shout out to everybody who's at the Global Azure 2021 Bootcamp because we're actually streaming live right now on the Bootcamp as well, which is really awesome. We've not streamed live in the midst of an event before. So right now, a quick shout out to everybody who's attending the Global Azure 2021 Bootcamp. Hello to everybody. And thank you for joining us on the show today. It's exciting that this continues on. Even though we're in the midst of the pandemic, everybody's working from home, we still have the ability to connect with people. And I love attending the user group meetings across the globe. And that too provides me that insight in terms of how do other countries and other people implement the technologies and services that we offer and what they teach me in terms of that enablement is so cool to learn all about that. As well, Hello World is the daily show that you also see on Learn TV. It happens here on Learn TV at about 130 Eastern Standard Time every day, which is a great show. Again, daily show that they go through, life at Microsoft in terms of services, in terms of enablement, really cool show to check out. It's also been a Fortnite. So Patch and Switch are gonna be on the show today. And again, we have a regular IT guy, no other ways known as Rick Claus and Jared Chocolate, otherwise known as Audio Guy Steve in the house. This show will be on live today as well. It's at 9 p.m. Further than that, we have the Microsoft Learn module of the week. And I don't know why producer, producer Pierre is telling us to go faster, but okay. So to tie into the announcements of the 200 terabyte blob storage utilization, there's a great learning path called the Architect Storage Infrastructure in Azure Learning Path. And this actually goes towards your AZ-104 certification. So it's a great study module to go through. It talks about the purpose of your requirements around storage, what you should take in consideration for blob storage or for architectural storage, creating the account, setting up the explorer, the abilities to set forth the encryption and security policies made available. Sarah, how is your storage expertise? It used to be good. I don't know if it's as good as it is for cloud. I used to be very good at doing the on-premise rough, but cloud, I can adjust, click a few buttons and hope it's the right thing. So I probably need to look at this module and look through this learning path and actually learn a few things and upscale myself and get rid of all those bad habits that I have now when I build demos and show people things. I've been taking a lot of care at it right now, especially on the database side because I'm trying to do a lot more flat file database implementations, especially around the mixed reality piece because there is a requirement for latency to be still low in extraction of data. I learned that the hard way doing a couple of projects back in the day. It's interesting the science behind it in terms of you have to know your transfer rates, you have to know what type of data you're gonna be pulling from your storage for access to what. So a lot of learnings there, you can't be the expert at everything, but it's really cool to have this learning path available. Sarah, if people want to get ahold of you, what's the best way to get ahold of you? You can find me at Techie Lass on Twitter or my blog as well as Techie Lass.com. That's where I'm at. And if you want to get ahold of producer Pierre, you can do so on Twitter at Wired Connect. And if you want to get ahold of me for some reason, you get me on Twitter as well at Wired This Life. Sarah has been an awesome anniversary show. Thank you very much for always being here, which is awesome. And thank you producer Pierre for keeping us honest behind the scenes. He's been drawing stuff. I don't know what he's doing in the background. It's been an awesome show. Thank you all for joining us on the show. One year, it's been an awesome time. It's just flown by. I can't wait to do another 10 years of this down the road. Sarah's like, no way, but we're going to try. We're going to try as long as Rick allows us to continue doing this, which is really cool. Everybody have a safe and happy and great weekend. And we'll see you all next Friday.