RunAs Radio

Happy New Year! It's 2020 - the future is here! What is the career of an IT Professional going to look like in this decade? Richard flies solo, pulling together a summary of the past few decades and how they will shape this new decade just starting. Don't expect any crazy predictions - the IT industry moves carefully, with logical progressions. In some ways, you can expect more of the same - more...

How do you share company data outside of the company? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard talked to Joanna Podgoetsky about Azure Data Share, a new tool specifically designed to make it easy to share data outside your organization in a controlled and measurable way. Joanna talks about the various Azure data sources you can use to share data, and how to provide access to it for individuals and appl...

You know about DevOps - but what about MLOps? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard talked to Damian Brady about how Machine Learning projects need to go through the same kind of lifecycle as any other software project. Damian emphasizes how important good instrumentation is for MLOps - because it can be hard to tell how well a given machine learning model is working. And good instrumentation often...

Python and SQL Server together? Julie Smith says yes! Richard chats with Julie about the strengths of Python in various tasks around databases including ETL. Julie talks about the tooling available for doing data extraction, transformation and loading - you can find existing Python implementations on most tasks you need to do! And as of SQL Server 2017, Python is directly supported, so you can cal...

Gene Kim is out with a new book - The Unicorn Project! Richard chats with Gene about his latest book - a fictionalized story of an organization struggling to build software that is critical to the survival of the company. The conversation explores a core aspect of The Unicorn Project known as the Five Ideals. Think of these ideals as a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when it comes to teams building so...

Are you managing your infrastructure with code? Richard chats with Josh Duffney about his current toolset for writing infrastructure as code, including PowerShell, Chocolatey and Ansible. Ansible is an open-source project from Red Hat that includes some retail components if you need them. Josh dives into the playbook model, how Ansible helps make testing that infrastructure code easier, and the ch...

Collaboration continues to evolve - how do you do it? Richard chats with Heather Newman about the tooling and techniques that have changed over the years to let teams work together remotely and in-person. SharePoint has been around a long time, but do you remember Groove? Heather talks about her current favorite stack including Teams, Planner, OneNote, OneDrive and SharePoint, all working together...

What is Microsoft 365, and why do you need some? Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the superset that is Microsoft 365, encompassing Office 365, Windows, InTune and more. Stephen talks about how Microsoft is organizing the products that work together with the cloud to be productive, making it easier for folks to put them to work and take advantage of all the features. This includes the latest i...

Does DevOps make sense for DBAs? Richard chats with Kendra Little about how DevOps practices have spread throughout the development process - and yet somehow, in some organizations, the database folks aren't all that involved. Kendra talks about what practices work for those responsible for the care of feeding of data, including things like source control and automating deployments. Can it be done...

How do you keep your groups and teams in Office 365 under control? Richard chats with Tony Redmond about Office 365 and how individual users can create their own groups, essentially on demand. In large organizations, this can lead to a huge proliferation of so-called dead groups - how do you manage them? Tony digs into the policy tools, and what really constitutes a dead group. The conversation al...

Your organization is using Azure - but is it under control? Richard chats with Phoummala Schmitt about policy, compliance, and governance in Azure. Often moving to the cloud starts as an experiment - and then suddenly it's live! While it's great to work through governance in advance, it's not always possible. So how do you get things right? Phoummala talks about account management, monitoring util...

Can deploying software and updates enable a hack? Richard chats with Mikael Nyström about doing secure deployments - and this leads to a conversation about how modern hackers are exploiting systems today. Modern hackers can break into machines, but security restrictions limit their ability to exploit - until an administrator logs into the machine. Mikael talks about limiting your use of super-user...

Are you compliant? What does that even mean? Richard chats with Erica Toelle about the various security and compliance features in Office 365. Erica talks about regulated industries such as oil and gas that have very specific rules around reporting and regulations - but every organization can benefit from the security and compliance tooling! Document retention, inappropriate communications across...

Are you using SysInternals? Richard chats with Sami Laiho about Mark Russinovich's masterwork. Sami talks a bit about the history of SysInternals and how Microsoft came to acquire them and Mark - and the tool development continues! Process Explorer and Monitor are the best known of the suite of over a hundred tools - and they focus on diagnostics. But once you know what an issue is, there are more...

Is your cloud secure? Richard chats with Paula Januszkiewicz about what it takes to secure your cloud - that is, the cloud services that you're paying for. Paula talks about how cloud services are not automatically secure, that many security features are off by default and it takes time to figure out how to configure them to help protect your accounts and services. And since cloud products are rel...

How are you managing mobile device? Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about the world of mobile device management and how it continues to evolve. Jeremy talks about the balancing act between supporting Windows-centric concepts that group policy did extremely well alongside what it takes to manage the broader diversity of devices today - and in the future! If you want to dig deep on MDM, check ou...

It's 2019 - has DevOps 'crossed the chasm'? Richard chats with Nicole Forsgren and Dustin Smith about the latest DevOps report, showing that in all aspects of software development and operations, things are getting better - but not evenly! The conversation digs into the latest research showing that it is large enterprises today struggling the most to improve development and delivery of software, w...

What is it to teach, and what is it to learn when you're in IT? Richard chats with Don Jones about his on-going work on his book Be The Master and how it has evolved since its first publication in 2018. Don talks about how readers connected with him around the book and discussed their own efforts in mastery and teaching - which encouraged Don to revise the book! Remembering how we learn helps info...

Office 365 has a ton of features - how do you manage them effectively? Richard chats with Martina Grom about the various aspects of Office 365 that affect the way the folks in your organization collaborate with each other and get work done. As Martina explains, there are great tools inside Office 365 to make it easier to apply policies and governance around the various services that Office 365 pro...

How much is the cloud costing you? Richard chats with Corey Quinn about his work as a consultant for cloud billing - finding ways to reduce the cost of cloud while maintaining the quality of service. Corey talks about his focus on AWS, but every cloud has similar problems - instances that aren't turned off, over-provisioning and more. In the end, you have to take the time to understand what your o...

What do you know about software-defined networking (SDN)? Richard chats with Claudia de Luna about her work in SDN, including implementing Cisco's Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI). While the physical topology of your network isn't all that different when technology like ACI is in play, your apps see a much simpler network, and strict controls over what your applications can connect with. S...

What questions do you have for the SQL community? While in Orlando at SQL Intersection, Richard hosts the semi-annual question and answer session for SQL at the end of the conference. Panelists include Bob Ward, Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Brent Ozar, Glenn Berry, Kevin Farlee, Pam Lahoud, Pedro Lopes, Ben Miller and Tim Radney. Questions around SQL Server 2019, reporting and integration services, run...

Does Windows still matter? Richard and Paul Thurrott spend the better part of an hour debating back-and-forth about the state of Windows and the need for Windows. Microsoft has split the Windows team and largely concealed its revenue from reporting, so we don't know how Windows is actually doing. What do we want from Windows today? Is it just part of the plumbing now?

Ready for a new Windows administration console? Richard chats with Haley Rowland about Windows Admin Center, a browser-based administration tool that puts a graphical console over top of PowerShell commands to your on-premises servers and workstations - and your Azure-based resources as well! Haley talks about making hybrid cloud easier, using Windows Admin Center to provide coherent connections b...

Is it time for a new Windows Terminal? Richard talks to Richard Turner about the announcement at Build of the new Windows Terminal. The conversation starts with: Why? Richard explains that the ConHost.exe based console of Windows has hit its limits - the need for backward compatibility exceeds the ability to make changes to it effectively anymore. A new open source project has been developed to al...