 Hello everyone, and welcome back to another edition of Wired Vibrid. This week we're going to look at something a little different, something that we haven't looked in the first few episodes previews. So stay with us. Hey Michael, how you doing? I am doing well, Pierre. How are you doing, my friend? I'm doing good. But I am wondering what's going on with the Azure updates where Azure networking is not announcing anything this month. You know, I don't know, you know, maybe, you know, it's hard to say, you know, most people, this is the beginning of their fiscal year. This is the middle of our fiscal year, and you know, perhaps they didn't pay the squirrels or they could just simply be that it's the beginning of the year. People are ramping up from, you know, a lot of stuff was delivered last fall with Ignite. You know, we've got Build coming up in a couple of months. And my guess, I do know some things we'll be sharing probably in the next episode or two. There are some things coming down the pipe that we can expect in the March and April timeframe. But you know, I think right now, you know, a lot of teams have just been, you know, really getting back to work and trying to get stuff shipped out. Yes. But there is one announcement that was given earlier this month, but it has nothing to do with a product for, say, but it's some training. Training. Yes. So the Azure networking group is putting together a Azure networking and network security bootcamp, which is like a half day, nine o'clock to 12.30. Multiple people are going to come in and do some training and do some demos. You can ask questions. It's going to be one of those like online with Q&A, like constant Q&A during the session. The good thing with this one is the sessions are going to be running in three different time zones. So it's like nine to 12.30 PST, then it gets replayed in Indian standard time, and then it has replayed, not replayed, but rebroadcasted like it's live with Q&A. It's not like they're recording the first one and playing it three times. It's actually happening three times in three different time zones to try to cover as much as we can. That's awesome. You can see there, you had me at Lego. So yeah, I'm not discussing the bootcamp giveaway because I'm hoping nobody else goes in and then I can get all of the Legos. I must have missed that memo. I need like, I need an eternity gauntlet on my shelf in the back there. I got one over there. All right. So that being said, the URL for the security bootcamp will be down here. There is going to be like a replay, of course. You can watch it on demand after the fact, but it's on February 22nd. So it's in about a week from now, from this recording. So hopefully we'll get this published before it goes live. We should probably tweet that out or wait, I'll be tweeting it out. I've already put it on LinkedIn and some tweets. Hey, Michael, what do you have for us this month? Well, you know, this month we're talking about public preview stuff. And one of the things that came out last fall and something that I think is super cool, especially for a lot of people that, you know, you and I know who our audience is. And yeah, we've got a lot of people in the enterprise, but we have a lot of SMB, small, medium-sized businesses, small organizations. We've got Azure Firewall basic SKU is in public preview. And this is super cool. What this does is it gives you the benefit. You could be a mom and pop shop. You can be maybe you're the only IT person, but you're running workloads on Azure. This gets you access to enterprise grade firewall as a service in the cloud native for your workloads. But at a price point, that's not really going to break your bank. Anybody using standard and premium, you know that it costs some money. But again, you know, you put the price on security. One breach pays for itself. But this is one of this is a great product that's going to it's easy to install allows you to have the things that most of most of those size organizations need, such as filtering traffic, being able to monitor through Azure Firewall manager, having access to threat intelligence as far as being alerted using Microsoft threat intelligence. So you got access to a lot of really cool stuff that's going to help protect your network at a nice price point. Yes, I think that's pretty cool. And that's a great way of doing it. Yeah. So, you know, this is going to, you know, one of the big limitations, you know, we're going to have the documentation you can take a look at. You can take a look at the pricing. You can see there's going to be a link to a blog post that has a nice laying out. What's the difference between basic firewall and standard so you can see, OK, maybe I need, you know, some of these DNS things. Well, you're going to have to go to standard then. But if this meets your needs, what's in here, it's going to be good. You are limited to 250 megabits per second as far as the traffic. So if you're doing a ton of traffic, a lot of traffic, you're probably going to move up. But if you're doing more than that, chances are you're probably closing in on being an enterprise and probably stepping up is the way to go. But, you know, definitely great, great for you to check out. It is in public preview. So all of those things, you know, as far as SLAs and that sort of stuff comes to mind, but it's definitely something you can take a look at in your test environments. OK, perfect. And I'll remind anyone that public preview means it's like the new betas. Not necessarily for use, not for use in production. Please don't do that. This is for testing, for proof of concept, for trying out, making sure that it will fit with you and to allow you a mechanism to give us feedback on to this beta or preview service of whether or not it's running in your environment and what we can do to make it better. But right now, you mentioned SMB, so that kind of leads in. It's almost like you're leading into my own point. For my public preview, the IP protection skew for the DDoS protection. So DDoS or denial of service attacks. In the past, there's been parts of like a greater kind of like network protection of your resources. But when you're a small enterprise, small SMB and you only got like one or two IP addresses that you want to protect. So maybe you have two IP or one IP addresses in front of your firewall. Make sure you have a firewall for your workload. You want to protect that one IP. You don't need to protect every IP on that network. Well, the IP protection is now becoming its own skew. So you're going to have the network protection, which is was the old DDoS protection is now becoming a skew and IP protection is becoming another skew where it only protects the IP you enable as opposed to protecting all of the IPs through Windows. Not Windows, the WAF web access web application firewall had a brain fart there for a second, popped the clutch. And anyway, so that's becoming available or in preview right now. So it's provide DDoS protection for individual IPs, protecting your entire organization or or just one IP is up to you back to giving you more power. And of course, as we mentioned with your first point at a different point. Yeah, very cool. I think this is going to fit really, really well in for that, you know, small, medium sized businesses. Even I can see some, you know, some larger organizations that that may use that because they might, as you said, they might not have a ton of workloads and they might not have to do these. This allows you to be more granular and to be able to fine tune that. You know, I think it goes I think one of the things that we're kind of seeing we've seen this in some of the GA stuff we talked about in the public preview. We're really seeing Azure start to. Move out its features is that OK, it starts with one area. And then, you know, you got your standard, you got your premium. But, you know, for a long time, we've heard that SMBs have felt like they're not on the bus, that we're not thinking about them. Yeah, we've been thinking about you for a long time. It's just a matter of getting to that point where those things can be rolled out. And I think we're starting to see a lot of it is based on your feedback. Absolutely. Oh, comment below. We'll make sure to pass it on to the product group. Absolutely. All right. So what's your your third item or your third item, the third item? So my third item is now in public preview, you no longer have to log into the Azure portal to be able to use Azure Bastion. So we have to really the public preview release of Azure Bastion supports what's called shareable links. And this is pretty cool for a number of reasons. So basically what this does is creates a link. You get that link to people and then they can connect to your VM workloads and they don't have to go into the Azure portal. You might be saying, well, Mike, why can't I just log in the Azure portal because we don't want everybody logging into the portal? We don't want to give them the access. This way, you can give more people secure access into your VM workloads and maintain the security of your Azure portal. So it's not just your it's not just your VM workloads. It's your on-prem machines as well. We've on IT obstacles and link below. We wrote an article on how you can use Bastion to kind of simplify remote access not only to your cloud workloads, but to anything that you're running on-prem as long as your on-prem environment is connected to your cloud environment through some kind of express route or side-to-side VPN. Yep. So super easy to set up. A couple of caveats. You need to be running standard version of Bastion. Yep. So if you're running on basic, you can do an upgrade of that. You know, so it's going to be browser based. So it gives you access to RDP and SSH. Super cool. I will throw out the the warning here. OK, public preview. If you turn Bastion on, it's on and it's pricey. Not that it's not worth it for your organizations to be secure. It totally is. But if you're just playing around with this and you, you know, turned on Bastion and you got some VMs and then you go on vacation and then like a month later. You're going to get a bill. You're going to have a bill. So if you're just playing around with this, want to check it out. Install Bastion into the virtual network where your resources are. Play around with it. And if you're not going to use it anymore, delete them all. And hot tip here. Put them all in the same resource group. Every time I do a demo, I put everything in the same resource group and I delete the resource group and ninety nine point one percent of the stuff will get deleted. There are certain things that very few, though, they're very few. But for the most part, that's that's the best tip I have for organizing your resources by resource group and then go to town. So resource group is nothing more than it and then a collection of resource that share the same life cycle. So you spin them up together and you destroy them together. You update them together. It doesn't mean that an entire workload needs to be in one resource group and another another workload is going to be in another resource group. You can, if you want, but it's how you organize your resources so they share the same life cycle. It's easier that way. Absolutely. So what? Very cool. What else you got for? What else you got for the bastion? I've written a bunch of stuff and I've got one in my demo environment and it saves me tons and tons of time. My last item is Azure Resource Topology. When you're looking at Azure Networking. You go to the portal or you go to like PowerShell or CLI and you have that list of resources that are available to your network or on your network or that has an IP address or that are connected. They're associated with the NIC that's connected to. It just becomes really, really hard to define or to visualize how you can like the interconnection between this resource and this resource. And am I jumping from one resource group to another? Is there a network security group on that subnet versus that subnet or all of that because it was never really designed to be like visual and we get that. That's a blocker. So now with Azure Network Topology or Azure Resource Topology, it allows you to visualize all of your network but across resource groups, across subscription and it just gets you a better experience for inventory management, for monitoring, for healthy to see whether or not you've got a healthy environment. Like if one machine is having an issue and you're monitoring it as part of the topology in network watchers, for example, it'll come out and say like with a little red X in the visualization that that one's having a problem. That's super cool. So visual person, you know, that's and I always thought like that's one of the benefits of like for Azure Migrate. One of the tools is the visualization and I always thought this was wonderful. But now it's actually part of network watcher and it's part of network insights. So it's in preview right now. It's a new experience so you can drill into the machines and to drill into the software or the virtual networks. You can see them in greater scopes where from some in the past, it was like only within a virtual network or only within certain location. Now it's it's a lot more comprehensive in terms of visualization. So something to look at if you're running virtual networks, lots of them in different subscriptions, different resource groups. Take a look at the Azure Resource Topology and I'm sure you will find it as useful as I have. Awesome. Yeah, I got to I got to check that out. I I, you know, I read through the the preview notices on it. I haven't had a chance to kick the players on it, but it's definitely on the list of things to take a look at. So that's awesome. So we're cool. We covered some awesome stuff today. So one other thing I wanted to, you know, just kind of throw out is one of the things we did talk about public preview. It is not production and things change. As you probably know, like the Azure portal, which changes like almost every week, stuff in public preview are going to change based on the feedback that we get from you and other people that are running this, what works, what doesn't. So use this as a way to be able to see whether you think this is going to fit in your organization, but don't build anything specifically based on a specific thing that it does. Yes, because we can't guarantee it's still going to be there in a month or two months or three months. Yep. And, you know, that's that's the same way with any beta. And the other thing I just wanted to mention, remember, subscribe, hit that like button, share with your friends and make sure to check out the docs that we have associated with it in the show notes, because that's where you can find all the great information about all these. That's right. And if something does change in the preview, it'll be documented in there. So absolutely go to their book market. If you're working with it, we go back and check. If it's new, you'll find you'll find it very useful. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, Michael, for taking the time with me to go over those previews this time and maybe next year or next month. We would have an actual GA announcement, but for now, hopefully I'll see you next month in the cloud. We'll see you next. Cheers.