 Hi there and welcome to another edition of Tuesdays with Corey. Today I've got quite an interesting conversation to have about plan maintenance. So over the last, gosh, maybe more than a year, we've not done any plan maintenance in Azure that's required a reboot. Some technology that we put in place called VM preserving updates. What this ends up doing is it means we can do our under the covers maintenance without impacting customer VMs. So customers had to of course do their own maintenance if they were patching or what have you to their running VMs, but we were able to update the host without that. Now in that amount of time, because we do expect we'll need to do maintenance with the reboot at some point, we've actually built a bunch of technology to make sure this was much, much easier. So Ziv has been in charge of building and so we're going to see an awesome demo. So the gist of this is we basically shifted from customers being told, here's a window and then we sort of reboot them and we used to pick weekends and so on and try and avoid and what we learned is some customers, that was great timing, some customers terrible timing. So the change that we've put in place is now we will enable customers to pick their own time, is that right? Yeah, and even more actually. And even more. And even more. So Ziv, why don't you walk us through a little bit about what you've built here and what this will help customers be able to do. Sure. So the experience has three parts. The first is better communication. So it's not just an email to the subscription admin. Now you can actually create activity log alerts and configure alerts to get more recipients to this email or text messages. I see. Or even webhook to automate with whatever platform you have. So like right now, we don't have planned maintenance going out right now, but right now customers could. We happen to have one in one of our cannery clusters. It's a test one. Let's just be clear. Let's just be clear. So everyone's like, what? Why don't I know? We have one that's set up that allows you to go test it. Correct. So it allows you to go configure these notifications and play with this experience so that customers know that when we do have the real one, they're all set up and ready to roll. Is that correct? Right. So exactly. So first step, make sure you know how to configure activity log alerts. And so where have you gone here? Sorry, you've already. So I'm part of. You're like three steps ahead of me. No, no, no, okay. It's impressive. One step at a time. I'm looking at the Azure monitor. I'm looking to configure Azure monitor. You went in and now you click on it and I configure a new alerts to great. And the alert, I call it the maintenance notification. But the important point is that you see that the alert is set type maintenance maintenance across all of my resources in this all services. And I'm taking the action group called personal notification, which will send my personal email. I'll get the personal email. I'll get a text message. You can. Oh, you can set that up with text message. Yes, yes. Is that right here? I need your phone number too. Okay, go ahead, put it in. So you go to action groups. Action groups, cool, personal notification. The personal notification. There you go, one SMS, one email. I see it. Yes, and you can see my hotmail account, my text message. And do you really want me to add yours? Fine. Yeah, you don't need to share my phone number. All right, next time, I think. But basically in terms of. Not that I don't mind, please. In terms of channels, we have email, text, and webhooks. Okay, great. And webhooks, of course, with something like Event Grid, can do pretty much anything. Anything. Yes. All right. So still in Azure Monitor. Okay, great. Let's cancel this one. Okay, great. So that's how you set it up. So customers will be like, hey, look, I'm nervous. I want to know when this is happening. I don't, you know, the wrong email is my co-admin, whatever. This now, you can configure it to know no matter what. Correct. Actually, we've heard that in many cases, the guy who is the subscription admin. He's sometimes not the guy who's tracking this. He's just the guy with the credit card. So everyone needs to go do this immediately. Yeah. Because this basically will alert you right away. Yeah. Okay, great. Next, there will be a plan maintenance dashboard. Okay. Which is currently not active on this subscription. Okay. But the important thing is like, from the dashboard, basically I'll be able to go and see all the VMs which are going to be impacted by this maintenance. I see. Okay. Another easy way to do it now is just to look at the list of VMs. So that's in the, which dashboard? That was in the dashboard under Azure Monitor. There's going to be a dashboard that says plan maintenance. Okay. Okay. All right. Now, I switch to the VM blade. Okay. I see all of my VMs. I just filtered for one of my subscriptions. Okay. And guess what? I have a new column, a new default column called maintenance state. Look, you got two VMs. Where did it go? I got two VMs ready to go. And actually, two VMs which already completed. And then the others basically were saying don't not impact it. Others are not part of this maintenance. They're not part of this. Got it. So clicking on the VM itself, I go and I can see a new ribbon say, hey, you can start maintenance between those two dates. And again, this is a test class. This is a test. So it'll be actually a longer period of time than two days. Yes, we are looking for more than a few weeks. More than a week, right? Yeah, definitely. Clicking this one, I get the actual timeline. Okay, look at this. The exact timeline. Got it. So basically, what Azure tells me here is that I can complete maintenance in this window. Otherwise, Azure will schedule it. We'll forcefully do this up there. Okay, got it. So clicking the start maintenance here. It's like a little bug there in the experience, but that's fine. All right. And so you started this. I started this. This is still in preview, right? Yeah. The VM is currently being redeployed. Okay. And so now what happens here just to walk me through this? So now what you've just done, you basically said great. I've scheduled the maintenance at this point, right? So now this is going to take a reboot in 20 minutes. Come back up. And it will then be moved to a machine that's already been updated, a physical machine that's already been updated. So basically, it allows you to control your reboot. Maybe you go on there, you do other maintenance on the VM itself, so you can sort of organize it and clean and do everything all at the same time. Correct. Actually, we heard customers asking for this feature because they have a single instance VM running in production. That's right. They want to be careful with it. Because they need to negotiate the exact window with their customers. No, they want to fail over to their customers totally. Actually, where their downtime is Friday night versus... Yes, they want to take down everything. Yeah, that's right. We've heard that quite a bit. So OK, that's very cool. So is there a way to script that, though? So if I want to not just do it in the portal, can I do it through scripting? Of course, whether you use a PowerShell or CLI, or even the REST API, you can discover the window. You can discover and script it. So you can write your own tools around this and so on. OK, very cool. You want to give it a try? And to discover, well, click the button, you mean? Click the button, write the script. I mean, I'm not going to write a script right now. I'm not going to write a script right now. I mean, I'm very good at writing script. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that. Point is, we want to give customers an option to play around with these things. OK, so yeah, this is important. So we don't have any plan maintenance going right now, right? And like I said, we actually haven't had anything for a while, more than a year. And so we basically have said, look, we're going to get this work done before the next maintenance goes out. So we're ready at this point. And so what you're basically saying is what we've decided to do is we're going to run a test run, right? Correct. So there's no plan maintenance going through right now, so no one get worried about this. But we've got a test run coming up at what? The beginning of October, right? The first one? No, actually the last two weeks of September. So the maintenance is the last two weeks of September? Yep. So people need to go in now and get a VM deployed in only one specific region, right? So West Central, US West Central. US West Central. And we will be running basically a maintenance experiment there. So it's a real update package, right? And so customers should go in, get a VM deployed in West Central, connect to the activity, go into the Azure Monitor, connect to the activity logs as you've just walked through. And will we have a document that sort of explains all this? Yeah, the document will go live before that. OK, perfect. They'll go in, get the monitor. So then what, September 17th or what have you? Is that right? Gosh, it's coming up. It's coming, coming, coming. OK, then they'll see the notification, the alert on their email or their text message or whatever. And then they'll have that window to go do the actual reboot and they get a chance to play with it. And if they've missed the first day, they actually will see that the VM by default will be scheduled for maintenance. Permins. So if I come in. Will that be another notification that they'll get at that point? Yeah, we're thinking of running few more test notifications for customers to experiment with. OK, great. So we will just call them. So we need people to try this. Go get it now. Go get it now. Yeah, go get it. Go get a VM in West Central, one VM and go let us know what you think and get the alerts going. And then we'll end you have a way for people to give feedback to you or what's the deal? I think the regular whatever user voice or just send us feedback directly or send query feedback. TWC. That's good. Yeah. So yeah, there you go. So if you've got question comments or feedback, hit us up on hashtag Azure TWC. Are you, do you have a Twitter handle? Can we get you on the? Yeah, Zeev Ruff, Z-I-V-R-E-F. OK, and you're running the feature. So it's up. It's all up to you. So awesome, the great experience, super informative, really important for people to go try this out. It's coming up here. So in the next like week or two or next week, roughly, they need to need to get going on this. So go try it out, get a VM deployed in West Central, play with this, sign up for these, sign up for these alerts and have a good time with that. So, all right. See you next time. And then we will in maintenance in the future, we'll come back and give people heads up. So with that, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Zeev. Great feature, great capabilities. Hope we never use them. But obviously, I'm glad they're there for if we need to. So with that, thank you so much. And thank you. Have a wonderful Tuesday and whatever day it is. And thanks so much. Bye-bye. You ready? Always. So I'll kick it off and explain the background. Does that make sense? And then I'll hand it over to you. Go for it. All right. Are you ready? Yep. Yep. Good. All right. Whoa. Blah, blah, blah. Is this the time? Yeah, the tarantula was denied a bank loan. All right. Here we go. All right.