 Hello and welcome back to another episode of AZed Update. I'm Anthony Bartolo, joined as always by Sarah Lean. Sarah, how's it going? I'm good. Thanks, Anthony. How you doing? Good, good. Another busy week. I thought we would get a reprieve after Ignite, but the countdown for Microsoft Build has already started. T minus seven weeks. Wow. You know, I get it while working from home, but the amount of activity that we're doing hasn't stopped, so definitely vacations are in order after this is all done. It's actually getting warmer here in Toronto. We're hovering around 16 degrees now. I think it's 45 Fahrenheit, which is pretty warm. All the snow is melting unseen green grass. I think producer Pierre still has three feet of snow outside, which is, you know, because he's further north than I am. He's saying four feet, four feet of snow still outside. How about you, Sarah? How's things where you are? We had thunder and lightning last night, and we've got rain and wind. And yeah, it's much colder here in Scotland than it is in Canada. Isn't that the weirdest thing, right? Usually you're here in Canada. Oh, you live in an igloo. You had drive a husky. No, no, no, hold on. No, crazy. Lots of news to talk about today. The first one, you know, we're going to jump right into it, and then I want to have this discussion with you. You've done on the administrative piece before, the administrative role. When you've come up with a situation with a node not working like it's supposed to not working to spec, what has been your course of action in regards to that? Panic? Oh, is that not the first real of it? Oh yeah, guys falling, hands are waving, running around. People are calling, screaming at you. Why is this not working? What's going on, right? The chat room is just talking about that too right now. It's crazy, you know, when it happens. Obviously there's a course of actions that we go through in understanding what's going on. Check the logs, see where the failures reside, what have you. I wanted to bring this up today. Mark Rosinovich shared a blog post with everybody yesterday with a new project called Project Narya. Now, there was another project that was before this one, which is Telegrade, and the Telegrade project was to install resiliency in nodes spun up on Azure. Telegrade was the first step. Now, Narya is the next step where you're incorporating intelligence to work with Telegrade to ensure that your nodes don't go down. Producer Pierre, if you can quickly share my screen. The big thing here is that with the intelligence put into play, it doesn't just build on the resiliency piece of your nodes, it also takes into consideration the course of action that it can take to fix a node going down and what steps it should take so that it causes the minimal amount of impact. So in the scenario that they're showing here, you have a notification that there's a probability that a node will go down due to disk failure or disk issues. And so Project Narya actually goes in and does some analysis in regards to what course of action can we take to automate the ability to migrate the node and repair that drive without incurring any downtime and doing it automatically based on what's made available to it with the least amount of impact. And this is really cool because it's incorporating artificial intelligence to have that making that decision and to not just take it down but to do so in such a way like if it's a sensitive application that's on that node without taking down the organization, migrating to another cluster, enabling that application to run seamlessly and then correct the situation with that failed disk. It's a really cool premise and they're actually in testing of it right now. It's not in production. This is part of a think tank that they have when underneath Mark Rosinovich in terms of solutions like this. But definitely something that's awesome to read and we've shared it in our blog as well for people to take into consideration and provide their feedback to in terms of how to make this better. Sarah, what's your thoughts? I think it's pretty cool. It'll definitely help you in those situations where something happens and you might be in your bed or whatever and stuff isn't, you're not actionable right there at your desk. I think I'd be interested to see how it impacts your design of your applications in your workloads because obviously it's great if you can just migrate your workload to another node but how does that perform if you've got, I don't know, the additive of static IP addresses, how does all of that work and how will that machine learning actually learn from you and can you teach it things or does it just automatically learn? These are the kind of questions that are going through my head but initially it sounds like it will help you on the face of it to be honest. What's great about this is you hear a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and the elimination of jobs because of it and what have you. This is a prime example of the enhancement that artificial intelligence brings to the equation when looking at something like resiliency of your nodes. You're seeing this type of implementation on security threats, addressment through Azure Sentinel. You're starting to see this capability being incorporated in a lot of the services that Microsoft provides to not only ensure uptime but to ensure I feel secure with my deployment here on Azure to ensure that there is that relative uptime, I'm not going to be impacted in my business or impacted very slightly in regards to my business and it's not the sake of adding AI for the just the sake of adding AI. It's responsible inclusion of artificial intelligence to benefit everyone which is really cool and it's great to see this now becoming more broader, a lot more accepted throughout all the services that Microsoft is starting to offer. Yeah, indeed. I'll be interested to see how it goes, even if it does become a product because I think at the moment it's like research stages to a certain degree so it might be that the team decides that it's maybe not as impactful or isn't as polished not to downplay it or put them off but these research projects are great for trying things out but then will they actually come into fruition? It'll be interesting to see how that progresses for sure. So let's get started with the news and Sarah, you're up first. Yes, so I want to talk about the Azure VMware solution or ABS as you might have seen it called which is the solution where you can take your VMware environment and kind of migrate up into Azure without necessarily changing how you run it so you can take your VMware skills with you and then add on bits of PCs to Azure on top of it but what I want to talk about today is then the announcement that it's been extended into another data center region so the Southeast Asia data center within Azure now has this capability and this is a kind of important milestone I think for the ABS team because this is the 10th region that is has for support of that solution. I think when it was launched last year at Ignite there was four regions that supported it and over the time they've added it up but this new announcement brings it up to the 10 milestone so it's always good to get into double figures when you talk about the support so it's nice to see that the team are growing this and hopefully they'll be more support for different regions and data centers over the course of the next couple of months. What do you think about this solution Anthony? It's really great right and the fact that you can you can migrate your on-premises implementation of VMware to the cloud. I did have a quick question just just for confirmation when you're saying deploying to another region does that mean that your instance of the VMware solution actually resides in the Southeast Asia data center so that you know there's some rules in terms of localization of specific data is this the case you know with this announcement? Yes yes so if you're in that region you know and you need to have that data sovereignty within the Asia region or APAC then potentially that's there. I know we also have support in one of the UK data centers so great for those UK customers that are having to comply with some of the the needs around your data sovereignty, GDPR, all of those kind of fun compliance needs. And that's the thing right compliance is is key here and it's the reason why Microsoft is opening these services to other data centers around the world because the request is coming in from you our audience in regards to I need to have the data localized within my country or within my geo and so having this capability being extended in terms of a service on the specific data center hugely impactful and it's awesome that to see this continue to grow. Next up in the news there was an announcement that a lot of people missed at Microsoft Ignite it was the announcement of Windows Server 2019 Azure Edition which supports hot patching. Now we heard a lot about hot patching capability and the fact that I can actually go into virtual machines and apply hot patches without the requirement of rebooting the machine itself it's now offered in an on-premises or VM offering of Windows Server currently in beta or in general previews or not not private previews available in general preview. Rick Claus actually wrote an article to highlight the differences between the standard version of Windows Server and the new offering Windows Server is spinning up in the VM on Azure itself and the the differences in terms of patching so the ability to hot patch an Azure edition of Windows Server without actually taking the server down or requiring of a reboot this is big and it's something where currently in testing and it's offered inside of the blog post there's a link that you can sign up for to go in and try out the Windows Server Azure Edition to test it out yourself. I'm guessing hot patching is going only the first instance of the differentiator that's going to be for this offering of Windows Server. Sarah your thoughts what do you think about this whole new offering of server specifically that's Azure Edition called out for? I think it'll be interesting to see where the team take it and this is obviously something patching is obviously something that we all love to hate you know when patch Tuesday rolls around it usually means a round of overtime 3am in a data center or stuck at your PC so it is obviously something that you know customers have been asking about to try and fix it trying to make it better and so it'll be interesting to see the uptake and let you say it'll be interesting to see where they take this edition of Windows Server and what other features we get in the Azure Edition so yeah we keeping an eye on this one for sure. It's interesting that you know we've created this new new offering Azure Edition and it's very important and we say this a lot on the show go out test out its functionality make your opinions and suggestions heard of the product team this is the important piece right the hot patching piece is a great solution that's being added to this version of server but you know Microsoft wants to hear from you what else is required what else needs to be added in respect to this Azure server offering for sorry it's Windows Server offering for Azure they want your input they want to know what should be added what should be taken into consideration when doing this deployment why would an organization deploy this outside of hot patching what requirements would you be looking for so definitely check out Rick Claus's post again it's available on itopstalk.com and then go through the link sign up for the general preview and then make your opinions heard. Sarah you're up next. Yes and I want to talk about Microsoft Teams we probably all spent the majority of this last year inside Microsoft Teams I know for sure that's where I've been spending a lot of my time and what the team announced at Ignite was some of the new features that's going to make it easier for us to present and kind of collaborate as if we were in the same room with our colleagues or our audience this this feature that I'm actually talking about is rolled out internally so we've had a sneak peek of it and I believe it's rolling out to the general public this month so you should hopefully see it appear in your teams edition but what it allows you to do is have a much richer experience when you're sharing your PowerPoint presentation inside Teams and I'm a big fan of sharing your PowerPoint natively inside Teams so as that it can save on some bandwidth and save having you know big clunky PowerPoint open in a couple of screens on your laptop and set up at home what this allows you to do is actually see the PowerPoint slide that the audience can see see your notes and then control it much like you can do just in PowerPoint itself natively and one of the features I was using this during the week to present to a customer one of the features that popped up was little pop-up messages of the chat so on top of my screen it wasn't down the sidebar that you usually have within Teams chat and because I actually had chat shut down I hadn't I didn't have that section open and the messages when people were saying that they were having some issues seeing the slides ironically enough was alerted to me and it was just a pop-up box it didn't didn't really distract me from my presentation I was able to see it instead of just having that little dot I'm sure we've all had that little red dot over the chat window and then you have to go and click and then you have to go and read these messages were popping up and it was quite seamless actually interestingly enough it wasn't my end that was giving the issue to the slides it was the other person they had to shut down Teams and come back in but yeah I love this feature and we're also going to see some new features coming out in terms of I think they're calling it presenter mode and where you can actually superimpose yourself on top of the slides what's what you're seeing on the screen here and it's a bit like green screen technology from what I can tell and putting your face on front of your slides instead of having a separate box so that the audience are watching the slides and you at the same time if they want to see you and the slides at the same time so it's definitely going to be interesting to see where the team's team are taking this product and I think unfortunately we're going to be stuck at home for quite a bit still so making the features more rich for us as presenters and audience members is definitely exciting to see and have you had a chance to use this at all Anthony or what do you think oh I you know I love the ability to have my notes available to me without the whole confusion of which screen should I be looking at I have a three screen setup and I always have that challenge in regards to okay I'm sharing this PowerPoint presentation sharing it from the application specifically I you know I want to see my notes not because I'm going to say line for line what's there in the notes but you know I want to make sure these are the items and topics I want to cover right some of the people do read line by line but it's another story altogether so you know I want to have the the part the points there in terms of what I need to know what I want to make sure I want to cover when I'm sharing the slide the fact I can actually have it now inside of teams that for me is a big one because I don't have to have a confusion of okay I need to light it up on this screen and on this screen my portrait mode is we're going to have my notes I don't have to worry about that anymore it's all available inside of teams itself the other piece is like you said when there is a issue that's happening with the presentation and people are chiming in about it on the chat I don't get to see that because the chat is hidden while I'm presenting because I'm presenting the specific screen so to have that ability to have the pop-ups that others can't see the pop-ups as they come up so I can get notified when there is a problem or if somebody's raising their hand for a question and it doesn't disrupt everybody else from seeing the presentation itself that too is a big thing because then I can you know make a choice of hey you know what if I answer this question is a great segue to another aspect of my presentation that's awesome as well the green screen piece it's really cool you know I know we saw a lot of you know Scott Hanselman has shared his ideas in terms of how you take OBS which is an open broadcast system and embed that into your PowerPoint he may have had a hand in helping the PowerPoint team build this out for teams it's a really cool feature the only thing is that you'll have to take in consideration when you're building out your decks to leave that section of the deck open right so it's another consideration that you have to put into play I myself just you know having the box share with my my image while I'm talking with the PowerPoint presentation is enough but if you want to get fancy like this it looks really good and it you know it's seamless I'm wondering if you actually have to go out and buy a green screen to accomplish this or will it use the technology and know you know that you're the individual I haven't tested that yet but something to definitely look into it will be interesting actually because the technology currently within teams is actually pretty good when you use like the blur feature I wonder if they're building on that to kind of cut out your background instead of blurring it and putting it on top so but yeah it'd be interesting to see for sure let's continue on with the news next up there is the new offering on azure monitor for live view of data within a container so now you have the ability to go in and actually see what resources are actually being utilized and monitor those resources using azure monitor to get an understanding of you know what resources inside of the pod are actually being utilized and under kubernetes this is a big one because prior to you had the general overview in terms of the kubernetes running and not understanding hey is there something inside of kubernetes that is causing problems with the application now you have the actual view itself to go into the kubernetes and and and see in the pod hey what is the resources that are running here's a potential failure I'd like to see this attached into project narja to see if there's a mitigation piece that could occur inside of the kubernetes pod itself I think that would be a really cool idea sarah your thoughts yeah I think when I've talked to customers about monitoring of their clusters and stuff I think the big issue it was sometimes with the monitoring is it's maybe five five seconds or five minutes wherever it may be there's that delay so they never know what's happening so it's nice to see the product team taking some of that feedback on board and giving that live view and that live overview because let's face it you don't want to wait five minutes to find out if you've just hit a command and push something and brought down your whole cluster because by the time the monitoring finds out your phones are going to be ringing and people are going to be shouting so live more known is always a big big win and have it have it go right down into the container itself that's huge just to have that understanding of the operations that are in there you can use that for you know diagnostics if something goes down forensics if there's a hack that's occurring to increase efficiencies right like there's so many capabilities there's so many opportunities that you can have with you know the live view of your resources inside of the container it's something where you know kudos to the azure monitor team to extend that functionality to get the reporting that deep inside of your kubernetes deployment as well which is really cool yep let's talk about events so first up there's a new show that's out there it's actually been out for about two weeks now it's called hello world and it goes live every day at i believe it's a one one no sorry 130 pm eastern standard time it is a show about you know things that happen to microsoft services that are created at microsoft it's a daily show so it's every day from monday to friday at 130 there's a bunch of us that are hosting on the show so it's a great conversation in terms of what engineers are doing at microsoft in terms of services and what they come on to to showcase and highlight in terms of capabilities you get some you know behind the scenes in terms of how is ignite created how is build created how is that all supported there's you know challenges that are issued in regards to how are you using specific services so do definitely check out this show next up and it's actually happening today it's it's actually not patch and switch we understand that producer pierre is actually going to have his own show today alongside producer steve who's actually in the chat room as well which is really cool i believe the show is called production and testing it's a show where they're going to actually go through as your services sorry testing and production instead of the opposite way i was about to say testing and production as we're doing right now sorry sorry producer pierre my apologies testing and production it will go live if producer pierre since you're around one it's 1 p.m today eastern time correct uh noon noon eastern time and he haven't been studying all the information wrong and i have the notes so producer steve and producer pierre will be on the air to do testing and production and they're going to be talking about as your services and running through them and testing them out and it's going to be an interesting show so definitely join in and apparently they're going to have some surprises too they might be doing some crank calling of patch and switch but that's that's we'll see we'll see if that goes on next up there is a digital event so in conjunction with the announcement of the offering of the vmware solution in southeast asia now there's a digital friend of you know how do you extend the cloud with the azure vmware solution so if you're testing this out and definitely a lot of people in reddit have reached out uh in regards to the solution itself asking for more information here's a great event that's that's coming out on march 23rd that's actually going to walk through as an introductionary how do you utilize the solution how do you migrate your on-premises implementation of uh vmware to the azure vmware solution what you you should take in consideration what you can and cannot do uh so definitely check this out check this event out as well lots of events talk about jeez the next one up data dog so the data dog solution uh is an add-on to the azure monitoring solution which we talked about today in terms of kubernetes now going down into the container and understanding the resources that are there as well this is a solution that both on top of azure monitoring to provide more insight uh in terms of what's going on through your azure monitoring solution for reporting so it's the whole ability to say you know i can get a graphical representation of the uh monitoring results that are coming in that i can see emits the data dog dashboard so this is another event that's coming up it's actually next week march 16th um definitely check that out it's going to be another interesting endeavor to see the extension of azure monitor into new capabilities and new visualizations and what's going on sarah thoughts all the events that we have this result there's a lot there was a lot of events to go through today well that's just it right so ignite's done and now you have all the events that are coming out there um and the fact that we're connected everybody's connected you can view this at any time i know we say it in eastern time zone uh but definitely check it out for your time zone is there any events sarah that you're interested or intrigued by in terms of what's going on there's so many i think i'm speaking at a few as well it's just the the selection is great it's just thinking fast with events so i think it's key just to pick the ones that you're focused on and make a mark on the ones that are on demand as well and make make a priority of all your time because there's tons of events tons of content so yeah um i try to prioritize the live ones and get the best out of those ones and then the ones that are available on demand afterwards i save them for you know when i'm when i'm bedging out on my couch and watching on my tv so what's interesting though is that and i've seen you do this a lot you don't just go to the events that are in your area you go to the events worldwide right so you know bedging out on your tv as you said possibly watching the one that's being done in australia or doing or watching the one that's you know in other parts of the world it's cool that we have that ability right and this whole yeah virtual plane that we're on right now i hope that doesn't stop you know you know once everything is done you know we still have that ability to to view what's happening in other parts of the world because i always glean a lot of information and ideas in terms of how people do things differently i know it's interesting as a as a meet-up organizer myself the Glasgow Azure user group um it's interesting to see the transition from what we did or traditional in person events and now we've been doing virtual events and they've been enabled us to get speakers from outwith of scotland and have a more diverse and larger selection of speakers lots of people have asked that when we return to in-person events that we do a hybrid type of event um as a meet-up organizer that is going to be logistically quite challenging especially given that we are a non-profit organization you know we don't have budget to bring in webcams and all the kind of stuff that you need to be able to do all of that so it's going to be definitely interesting to see how we try and adapt um but again i think it's going to be one of those things that if people can't accommodate the virtual thing then you you shouldn't get angry because there's obviously a lot of organization as well behind that um so yeah it's definitely going to be an interesting time to see um i'm saving up all my stickers for when we come in person though anthony because i'm looking forward to the sticker exchange well i have about a year and a half's worth of stickers that i need to give away so definitely i'm looking forward to the sticker exchange as well uh let's do a quick shot out to the chat room there's a lot of people participating here uh hello to Andrew McCollum uh we have paul jensen we have producer steve on the on the chat as always uh we have producer piera chatting with producer steve on the chat i guess they're preparing for the show today at noon uh we have our closest joined us today uh so hello to everybody that's chatting in the chat room they're talking everything from the azure vmware solution to project now yeah uh nar yeah which they're talking about as well which is really cool i'm getting ready for testing production there you go with producer pier they're talking about it with everybody in the chat so do check them out at noon today uh it'll be on twitch tv uh under the passion switch uh branding if you want to check that out last but not least the azure sorry the microsoft learn module of the week this is a big one um this is there are one two three four five six windows server learning paths so not modules learning paths what does that mean per each learning path there are eight to nine modules available i can't tell you how much work it was done to get this completed hats off to oran thomas to get this out the gate this was a big one and it was something you know that you would ask for in terms of hey where's all the windows server stuff and oran has delivered in droves in in in regards to this um do check it out a lot of people have been amazed by the content that's been available on here uh if there are any gaps or any suggestions to shore this up definitely you know go in make your voice heard uh and make your suggestions we're definitely you know available to go in and make changes as required sarah have you have had a chance to go through any of this yet um not yet it's on my to-do list oran has has made sure it's on my to-do list so i need to make sure it's on my to-do list well that's fine right like i i too i have not uh gone through it as of yet uh i i've gone through a couple of the just the introduction areas and just to see what's going on uh i love the hands-on piece and the step by step you know it's it's a great resource to just even just to practice and see what the differences is between 2016 2019 you know it's a great refresher to a lot of you know what i used to do back in 2003 has changed so much to where i just dated myself so you know the the the it's a great refresher for those that have been in the in the field for a while and it's great if you're you're learning it in terms of you're spinning up new vm's using windows server what you should do what you know what you can do what's changed from previous editions uh really great offering wow it's been a busy show today it's been a lot of information sarah if people want to get a hold of you what's the best way to get a hold of you i am techie lass on most social media platforms so that's where to find me and if you also want to find her she has her youtube channel as well uh it's also under techie lass if you want to get a hold of uh producer pierre you can do so on twitter at wired knuck and if you want to get a hold of me for some reason you can find me on twitter as well at wireless life sarah it's been a great show have a great weekend and have a great weekend everybody and we'll see you next week