RunAs Radio

Lots of news around NanoServer - what's it all mean? Richard chats with Jason Helmick about NanoServer - but first, a quick discussion around a comment from a listener on the ongoing evolution of PowerShell. This ties nicely into the broader topic of Microsoft getting opinionated about how NanoServer should be used, which is to say, designed for containers. Jason talks about containers being light...

Windows 10 has been out for two years now, are you ready to move? Richard chats with Steve Thomas about the latest tools Microsoft provides to help you migrate your clients over to Windows 10. Steve talks about the Windows Upgrade Readiness tools that are part of Operations Management Suite. Not using OMS? Don't worry, there's a free version available for Windows Readiness. OMS brings your readine...

Change is scary, how do you keep people from resisting? While at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with fellow Kiwi Rob England to talk about his experiences bringing DevOps practices to very conservative organizations - like the New Zealand government! The conversation starts out with the idea that DevOps is not just for unicorns, that is, companies that are all about leadi...

Ready to go off the IT rails? Mark Minasi is back! Richard chats with Mark about his favorite subject at the moment - automated vehicles. Mark takes a humorous poke at the role of computing, cloud and sensors that should bring automated driving to fruition. Are we really ready for this tech? That's a big shift in the workforce, a change in the cost of technology and a change in how we all travel....

DevOps for Mainframes? Really? Yes really! While at DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Rosalind Radcliffe and David Rizzo to talk about how mainframes can be part of a DevOps practice! The conversation starts out with Rosalind talking about the modern mainframe, which in IBM parlance is all about z/OS operating system and hardware. It's not just CICS anymore; Java runs there...

How can PowerShell improve your help desk? Richard chats with David das Neves about his work improving the efficiency of a help desk by writing PowerShell scripts. Not the most obvious role for PowerShell, but David walks through the process of finding common tech support requests that can benefit significantly from automation, rather than mouse click - like uninstalling and reinstalling Java! Thi...

ITIL and DevOps together? Yes! While at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Akshay Ananad and Kaimar Karu of AXELOS to talk about how the DevOps practices apply to service management. ITIL was born in a slower time for IT, but the core axioms are still relevant - you just need to focus on service rather than technology. The conversation also goes to including your service...

How is DevOps evolving? While at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Nicole Forsgren to talk about her latest data finding and analysis on DevOps. The conversation starts with a discussion about making good reports, including who the data is collected from. Ideally you'd want a fully random data set, but as Nicole explains, that's not possible - you have to go with as lar...

More questions answered at SQLIntersection! Richard hosts a panel discussion of Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Bob Ward, Brent Ozar and many other SQL speakers from SQLIntersection. The questions are far ranging this time around, talking about business intelligence, data science, reliability approaches and a record-setting answer on data partitioning from You-Know-Who!

More database services in Azure! While at the Build conference, Richard sat down with Jason Anderson and Sunil Kamath to discuss both MySQL and Postgres coming to Azure Database services. Sure, you've been able to run MySQL and Postgres in virtual machines on Azure, but why would you want to maintain an operating system and patching yourself? Jason and Sunil talk about all the cloud aspects of a d...

Azure Stack is coming soon! While at the Build conference in Seattle, Richard sat down with Jeffrey Snover to dig into the latest developments around Azure Stack. If you like cloud architecture but are not prepared to go to the public cloud, Azure Stack offers many of the capabilities of Azure but in a private configuration. Jeffrey talks about the various scenarios that make sense for Azure Stack...

What's the latest on Exchange 2016? Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Mike O'Neill about some the things he's seen lately in Exchange world. Mike talks about the hybrid world of mail these days, with on-premises Exchange servers working alongside of Office 365 Exchange Online. The conversation also digs into the affect that feature testing in the cloud has had on the on-premises edition of Exchange...

Why would you run Linux on Hyper-V? Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Kevin Kelling about his experiences working with a customer that had tens of thousands of virtual machines running Hyper-V - enough that the licensing of the VMs became an issue! And since Windows Server Data Center edition allows for unlimited Hyper-V instances, the effort was on to make those Linux-based VMs...

How do you build sustainable PowerShell? By testing it! Richard talks to Adam Bertram about his work with Pester, the testing library for PowerShell. Adam talks about building mature PowerShell scripts, that is, scripts you're willing to share with others. As those scripts become important parts of your application deployment process, they end up in source control and need to be tested before bein...

How do you get identity into the cloud? Richard talks to Joey Snow about his role helping folks with Azure Active Directory. Azure AD is more than just extending your on-premises Active Directory into the cloud, it provides single-sign-on to a variety of SaaS applications, and not just Microsoft ones either! Joey talks about the different techniques available to get and protect identities with the...

DMA vulnerabilities have been around for ten years - are your machines in danger? Richard talks to Sami Laiho about his experiences trying to close the exploit that is Direct Memory Access. This technology for rapid data transfer has been available for years with FireWire and Thunderbolt, and now exists in USB 3.1 as well. The problem is that it has been two-way memory access, so connecting two ma...

How can automation help you? Richard chats with Jennelle Crothers about her work automating tasks with Azure. So what does automation mean to you? Jennelle talks about automating the delivery of resources to internal developers - whether that be on-premise or in the cloud. This is part of a DevOps practice, being able to use templates so that development is using resources configured as close to p...

Can Group Policy help protect your user's machines? Definitely! Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about his on-going work with group policy, including his cool tool, PolicyPak. Jeremy talks about applying least privilege principles via Group Policy, including a case of a patch from June 2016 that may have broken some of your group policies because the machine that has to apply them doesn't have...

What's the Delivery Pipeline and why should you care? Richard chats with Steven Murawaski about his work at Chef, helping organizations get more effective at delivering software. Steven talks about how the latest generation of platform tools such as containers, that while helping to automate the delivery of software, are not a panacea that eliminates all the challenges of said software. You still...

How do you get started in data science? Richard chats with long time data scientist Rafal Lukawiecki about practical data science. Rafal starts out focusing on the most common data science scenarios - understanding your customer and their needs. This goal is more complicated than it appears, often the questions first asked are not the questions you'll actually need answers to. But asking them is i...

Johan is back, and still doing deployment right! Richard talks to Johan Arwidmark about best practices and clear thinking around deployment. Johsan starts out with the idea that with the speed of updates coming these days, you really need to have a good lab. While it's awesome to test on native client hardware, it's not always possible - but testing in VMs is still a good idea! The conversation al...

The oil and gas industry is in the cloud! Richard chats with John Paul Cook about his work bringing various Azure technologies to bear on the oil and gas industry. Contrary to popular belief, the oil and gas industry loves software and has embraced the cloud to increase efficiency. John talks about utilizing various Azure products to do data collection, including the IoT Hub. But the fun really st...

Stephen Rose is back and in a new role! Richard chats with Stephen about his work on OneDrive for Business, which is one of the great cloud-enabling products out there today. Stephen talks about the automation in OneDrive for Business with Office 365 that gets rid of big email attachments, instead automatically embedding a link to the file into the email - the file itself lives in OneDrive for Bus...

PowerShell? On Linux? Why would you DO that? Richard chats with Tim Warner about the recent announcements around making PowerShell open source and available on Linux and Mac OS. What does this mean? The Linux world has been script-driven since it was Unix, so does PowerShell make any sense? Tim talks about coming up with common ways to manage both Windows and Linux machines, and where PowerShell a...

It's 2017, do you know where your config manager is? Richard chats with Microsoft PFE Steven Rachui about his experiences helping companies manage substantial System Center Configuration Manager infrastructure. With the 2016 edition, the ability to handle rapid updates to Windows 10 is key and introduces the concept of Current Branch, as opposed to going with a more conservative stable edition of...