 Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Jay. Hey Happy new year happy What is it? Are we allowed to still say that 21 days into the year still January still January? So that's my rule of thumb is while we're still in jail while we're still in January and you meet somebody for like Almost like the first time in the year. You were allowed to say happy new year Wonderful. Well, happy new year to you, too. It's been a while since we did this and it's amazing like, you know Calendar turns, you know, we we get into 2022 and Not a ton has changed between then and today, you know, we've got some updates to share But the world is still what the world is, you know, we just got to keep moving forward and hope that We can stay, you know, at the same speed as the rest of the world now, you know, yeah, well, it's the the speed at which Things are developing is glacial like the temperature outside right now but also They fatigue is definitely there for online viewing but so we would try to make it interesting Keep it fresh have a good vacation You know, I did I took a little bit of time off. I had a birthday, you know birthday Thank you turn 43 years old Got a lot of work done, you know around personal stuff enjoyed some time with my wife just Took it easy. I Didn't go anywhere. I didn't really do anything and we had obviously a big surge of Corona virus here in New York City so it meant kind of like locking it all down for a little while and You know, luckily we're in a good place here that compared to where we were about a month ago And I'm very very thankful for that. Well, that's I had a good vacation to accept for The the week of Christmas where I did catch the the rona the human malware So I was out of commission for about a week. I don't wish that on anyone Wasn't as severe as some other folks that I know who I've also caught it, but the difference is I'm fully vaccinated. So I did get it and it was Not pleasant, but it wasn't As severe as it could have been so yeah, my wife got it And somehow another I did not I don't know how I you know same house You know same air same bed the whole nine yards somehow another I didn't get it, you know knock on wood I must have some really really tough antibodies or something going on there, but hey I I heard there's some big news that just came out this week I was just gonna say considering we all have to kind of isolate and stuff like that to the the gaming industry has gone Gone way up because what else are you gonna do when you don't you can't go anywhere It's turn on the Xbox or your PC and load up your favorite game and this week we have We can't go around that we have to talk about that news That's Xbox a or Microsoft is buying Activision Yeah Big big deal because like there's so many Super popular games that are part of that acquisition Overwatch Diablo Call of Duty, of course roll the croat Warcraft, which I feel like it's just been around forever Candy Crush for you like you know who want to sit there and do it on your phone And then Starcraft, which is another one that I feel like people have been playing that since like 92. Yeah It's unbelievable. But yeah, big deal something like 68 billion dollars with a B folks billion dollars. Yeah Crazy, I know Phil Spencer who's the CEO of Gaming Said, you know, we're gonna build a future build the games you want I know the head of Xbox said that also any commitments with Sony are gonna be You know still respected and honored because they need to You know help the gaming industry thrive regardless of platform That was a very cool thing to see. Yeah, it was it was great and you mentioned COD. I'm I'm a part of a group online Called BNG. So no was it? Bad gamers unite BG BGU bad gamers united where we kind of go online every once in a while and do like Game parties where we trash talk each other more than we trash talk our other teams and have a beverage of some kind and So that has helped me go through the pandemic But How about we get to the news? Sure. Sure We've had a quite sorry we've got quite a few weeks off and there's been a lot of Announcements since like the week after Christmas So we had to kind of pick and choose what we want would and you went with I think pose grass Can you tell us more about that? Yeah? Anyone that knows me personally knows that open-source databases are near and dear to my heart. I really kind of Spends a lot of time around another open-source database and postgres is is still, you know, when you're talking about important Big big technologies that people really rely on Postgres is there and so a couple years ago. We bought a company named Cytus that make hyper scale Version of postgres. It's a software as a service or a platform as a service, whichever way you want to Describe it. So, you know, what's the it? Pro kind of fit here Well anybody that knows that they have to have some data governance or compliance When it comes to your application has been through the process of certification Especially of the data centers the data platform at rest data things like that. And so Microsoft announced that Azure can now Say that it's been certified to be compliant with APRA the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority The DPP digital production partnership out of the UK the Prudential Regulation Authority All the way down to the motion picture association So, you know that there are a lot of big groups that have now essentially said this is a platform that you can run on that meets our standards and If you don't know much about it, there's some great documentation around the the Cytus service It's built for Azure this particular version It allows a horizontal scale across multiple machines sharding so you can partition out your data It paralyzes incoming SQL queries Across the service for faster responses on large data sets. So, you know, let's say you have a huge data set relating to your customer Relations software or a customer relationship software You'll be able to quickly access it index it get all the scaling that you need Excellent support for multi-tenant apps real-time operational for those of you who might have something like signal R And you need to have a data source and they're doing real-time applications So you're using standard connection libraries So it's not like you have to create your databases and access them with a special one No, you're using what you are already using you just go ahead You're migrating your data into a platform that you don't have to manage anymore So for those of you who are interested and you know, you have some governance and Other issues that need to be, you know met in order to be compliant Here is a service for you someone made a service just for you. Yep and I'm always Concerned because in some of my previous roles I had to deal with a lot of like the Bank of Canada for example was one of my accounts that I dealt with and Every time they're taking a they're looking at a project and they're making Decisions and that's just an example. There's just I'm not saying that that's what they're actually doing right now In case they're listening You're looking at the technology and you say ooh, I this is this is the best scenario for us in terms of technology if you're looking at stuff like the compliance in that particular industry if you don't have the SEC and the ops fee and All of the other compliance you can't use that technology for in that industry for banking or for financial services So the fact that we all of a sudden Provided I think is what so one two three four about ten new certifications on top of the ones we already had Speaks volume as to the how secure and how well managed that that offering is so Yeah, so many doors and anybody who's been through the process of getting something certified like, you know I've done PCI a number of times in the past for you know credit card transactions personally Like information it takes forever It's a lot of work the audit process is really really intense So to know that we had all these different types of certificates that are now adding you know compliance to this particular product That's that's big news it is So what do we got next Pierre next we have? Azure monitor Azure monitor Actually there this month For Azure monitor. There are probably like six or seven different Announcements, but we had that we only have half an hour. So I had to kind of pick a couple that I thought were really good and Number one is a what's generally available is a new improved rule a creation experience. So if anybody's ever had to create rules and alerts for Log analytics or as it's known now because we love switching names of our products for no particular reason Azure monitor logs The process was not the most friendly You have to go create your query here You got that like link at the here and then create your action group here and then what you're gonna do with it Like it wasn't like the most straightforward process And a lot of people kind of complained about that we we've heard the feedback So they they went back and they revisited how it is and now it's actually Been pulled out from a form that you fill out and you have to know exactly what you're putting into the form to now It's a wizard. So a wizard will now allow you to create your alerts and your rules and your alerts much much more straightforward and simplified So that's they the number one Notive not notification, but the announcements coming out of Azure manager Monitor sorry and of course if you're not really that familiar with Azure monitor This is another Platform as a service for monitoring so that you don't have to go ahead and configure monitoring on your own You can monitor applications based on whatever runtime you're using So if you want to get the information about that Java no JS performance, you name it There's SDKs. It'll allow you to slurp data in make a take a look You can monitor monitor your infrastructure, which is always super important So you can keep monitoring data on your VMs your kubernetes clusters your storage your database And then of course, you know, we don't talk a lot about it nowadays It's because we just assume that things are gonna work and that's network So you can do network monitoring so you can diagnose issues that may happen with your VMs You can get packet capture Sometimes that's super super needed when you're having say an application being DDoS You can analyze security group log flow logs to see what's being permitted and what's being denied And just gain some visibility over your entire Network that you have deployed for Azure and so, you know The big keys for Azure monitor are insights so you can find out how your applications containers VMs Monitoring solutions are running. You can visualize everything with dashboards views. You can import it into power BI or workbooks You can set up responding services for alerts and to trigger autoscale Function and then you can integrate this service into say event hubs You can use logic apps so that you can actually kick off say run books or something like that and you can ingest and export APIs so if you need to gain Insight to your from your data on how your applications your servers networks are performing better to use a service that Is tried and true and trusted and put through the ringer to make sure that it's always working always available to you and able to Integrate with all your like favorite tools, so you're using Grafana in flux TV Datadog or Splunk. Let's say you you're doing multi cloud. You need to be able to aggregate into all these different services You can just set it up. Yeah, but even with the multi cloud With Azure Arc, so Azure Arc for server Azure Arc for databases and for containers and stuff like that you Through Azure Arc, you can centralize all of your logs and monitoring into Azure monitor So it is really a perfect hybrid Monitoring platform and it's also a platform. That's used by other Microsoft Azure services like Sentinel users Log analytics, but in the background so it underpins a lot of other services, so it's really really important the other piece of news about Azure monitor is that they regularly release updates to the Azure monitor umbrella service so in this case particular Azure log alerts the version for logs You can now know also I have a lot more resource centric alerting The rules management at scale so you can have thousands of rules. I Know that if you have a large corporation, you probably have thousands of rules It gets a little harder to manage when you've got that many so they've been Improved that experience and of course as I mentioned the wizard based alert creation experience so lots and lots of new functionality in Azure monitor to benefit everybody and anyone using it Yeah, absolutely and for those who need another service that will help keep your websites online highly available and Doesn't need a ton of infrastructure configuration. There's a new announcement for enterprise grade Static web app service. So Azure static web apps. It's in a public preview To give you enterprise grade edge capability. So If you want to increase your websites page load speed Enhanced security optimize reliability for your global apps. This is the service for you It combines capabilities of Azure static web apps as your front door and as your content delivery network that the CDN service To a single secure cloud CDN platform There's some new key features and so I think one of the biggest ones is that global presence 118 plus edge Locations we want to be able to have our static apps because the whole point is they should load quickly They should access API's past So having that 118 plus edge locations because the Azure network is so well distributed across the planet Just only adds to your reliability of your application protective Proactive protection against DDoS. So, you know, I mentioned before, you know DDoS is happen they could happen to you and When a DDoS does happen the mitigation process can be quite difficult. I remember Having to set up like a reverse kind of proxy to be able to capture certain Packets so that we didn't get DDoS is on our applications. This was years and years ago We had to do everything manually nowadays, you know, we've got these services that can just oh Yeah, I noticed a ton of incoming since sin floods on on your your application or or someone's You know trying to do what you know, like a ping of death, which is whatever you want to call it People have that proactive protection nowadays without having to do it themselves It's it's a turnkey process and then for those of you who have reached into the IPv6 world or the HTTP to protocol world And I know you're out there There is native support for end-to-end connectivity for both Which is big because you know, it's it's what like 2022 We've been told for like the last 15 years that IPv6 is the next big thing so whether you're you're really Paying attention to IPv6 or not. It's it's really important for you to know as far as a business That you can make sure that this is ready for your IPv6 connections. Like I know that personally my router Had goes IPv6 first For my home computer internally. Yeah. Yeah, okay Yeah, well any external like if I try to do like what is my IP address like it'll always default to IPv6 first for that external Finding out what my IPv4 can be like alright a couple of things that I have to do but Let's compare it the way things were a lot of times back in the day as we used to say if you needed to remote into your home Computer you needed to know the IPv6 all that wasn't really a big problem But anyway, I'm getting off topic There's a lot of new great things that you can use with Azure static web apps It's a service that automatically builds and deploys full stack web apps to Azure from code repos so, you know, you basically can use almost like a get off to workflow of Making a change having it trigger a new build And then having it run through either actions or get help pipelines to build your app Supports a lot of static site generators That will help you kind of put some scaffolding You can build apps with angular reacts felt view blazer All these things that you know, you typically would have to spin up a server that Have load and then have to configure a CDN that have to configure any sort of Liability services like a load balancer not anymore front door turnkey CDN turnkey Authentication services they're right built-in So if you need to have some sort of off before people go into the site you can use it there Yeah, I'm really exciting mostly about the the front door part of it I find that it makes the managing the end user experience or the Stakeholder experience connecting to your app where they connect to the closest endpoint to them the fact that you can Manage where your application can get accessed from so if you've got any kind of Regulations where it can't be accessed outside of your country for example You can deal with that all of that good stuff in in front door Is I wanted to just show this really quickly you can see this is kind of what it looks like In a traditional front door Configuration where you've got you know your website your edge location and all these different regions With in the network that front door manages so adding that into your it solution just makes it a little bit stronger makes it capable of Having additional reliability, and I always like to say the liability Is your reputation so making sure that you're you're available you're reliable people that that's what they want Yep, and speaking of reliability We know that and everybody on the because I'm looking like Andrew Jared Paul and digs BTW from on twitch If you're an IT you know that nothing is 100% guaranteed so you got to make sure that you're covered you got to make sure that you've got your your data replicated that you have a good business continuity plan that you have also a good backup and Over the holidays I flattened my machine and I thought I had a good backup of all my drives turned out. I missed one so I Failed and now I'm gonna learn from that and I've adjusted my backup routine but Azure backup is one that regularly also provides updates and This month what Azure backup as provided is A way an updated way to automate the backup procedures on your if I on your in your environment So they've released a whole bunch of command commandlets and CLI Updates that you can Run your backup schedule your backup Restore your backup like all of the management of the backup of each machines can now be much more Straightforward when you're looking at scripting that environment. So if you're if you have an environment where you you're gonna be scripting or you're doing and I know some people that What they do when they have so they're they're critical systems They as part of their back their patching routine, for example before right before a patch They do a backup or an image backup of That machine So doing that, but now I can be scripted a lot more easily. So it's not a huge News, but it's something if you're if you've had to script the management of your Backup and restore for all of your environments. It's going to be significant in terms of impact on your life. So oh and Andrew says also that Oh, oops. Yeah ransomware as well. So when you have to like bypass If you bypass some backup procedures, you'd set them up for them And it's gonna help a lot I have seen some really nasty ransom situations with open-source databases where you know, they didn't Close up their their network connectivity. They didn't add authentication and because of that, you know It said hey if you want your data, you got to send us like X amount of Bitcoin and Certain companies that this happened to they simply didn't have backups of their entire database and that Maybe it's because they didn't know how to get it done. Maybe they thought oh, this is gonna degrade performance or you know This is cheaper. We don't want to pay for the backup Well, you paid for not having the backup you always pay the bill always comes due Yeah, and and a lot of times that can kill a business You can lose all your customer information You can lose all anything that's all you need to do when you get something deployed and You know, you're taking traffic. You've got to consider what happens if this goes away if this fails If this has a bad insert If your database becomes unusable, what do you do? Yep And so having backup services, especially native backup services within Azure really really tremendously important So we wanted to give some shout out to some really cool things that are going on in the community and one of them that I thought was really interesting is Open Source day that Microsoft's gonna be doing it's Tuesday, February 15th It's it's all virtual and it's a digital event that's committed to open source It's going to celebrate one of the 30th anniversary of Linux because Microsoft loves Linux So you're gonna find out how to optimize your Linux performance good But for our Windows friends out there Microsoft still loves Windows as well. Oh, yeah, those licenses certainly make it so There's developer tools open source database talks The latest on AKS like I know Brendan Burns. He's gonna be one of the speakers Sarah Novati Novotny is the director of open source strategy and ecosystem. She's got to talk and then the the actual Keynote is by our own wonderful Satya Nadella who's gonna share some of that information about that 30th anniversary of Linux Very very cool. I'm actually quite interested. I'm actually I've actually blocked that time off in my calendar Of course that can change but of course, you'll all probably be able to watch it in in replay But that time has been I've registered in so if you were interested go register yourselves Well, no, we're also another shout out want to do it real quick is to Johnny chips himself Check out. He's got these little great interviews that he does. He does news updates about Azure and dev ops and all these different subjects. I really enjoy what he's doing I just wanted to give a little community shout out to him He loves to be able to do his own community shout outs and I thought I would just reciprocate So thank you, Johnny. I hope to be talking with you soon. Yes, and John we've had actually Johnny on our show not this particular show the show that's later this afternoon Testing in production, which is today at noon with Jared Jared is in the chat at the moment so Jared and I will be discussing some stream content and All kinds of shenanigans so if you want to join us it's today at noon Eastern time nine Pacific I'm not quite sure what time that is in the Europe's but I'm sure you can figure it out check it out everybody then of course we always do our Our module of the week for Microsoft learn place to get free education on different Microsoft products services And this week we're showing the introduction Azure front door. I thought it was timely Check out how to actually know when to use front door how to use front door why you would use front door So take a look at this module. I think you'll really get a lot out of it you'll Figure out how you can use WAF web application firewall things like that to just help reliability and security of your your website No, the way I look at it if you have anything any workload that is exposed to the internet Azure front door can be of benefit to you In terms of controlling the access to it making sure that the experience is great You mentioned DDOS mitigation and all that stuff Azure front door is is something that We should as operations in terms of making sure that our systems are Operational and accessible at all time is a great thing So I really really Recommend that you go and try that one out if you have not already, but if you haven't go check it out anyway Alright, so hey, we're right at the end of it, huh? That's right. And I'd like to Say thank you to the chat for joining us again this morning. So Andrew Jared Paul. Oh and our boss mr. Claus is now in the chat room as well and Thank you Jay for joining me again this week and we will see you Next week have a great weekend everybody. See ya