RunAs Radio

Richard chats with Troy Hunt about some of the crazy things being said in the same of security these days. Troy's first story involves a UK cell phone company that decided that short passwords made their customer experience better - insanity! This event a number of others inspired Troy to start @infosecinsanity. Follow to see some amazing bad security statements by companies that really ought to know better. The conversation also digs into the state of affairs around SSL, why CPUs have the cycles to encrypt everything and the need to use a decent certificate in the first place.

Richard talks to Alan Sharp-Paul about the challenges of building a DevOps culture in your organization. Alan talks about the problem just defining DevOps - it's approaching the abused word state with so many organizations piling onto the term. The discussion digs into the early stages of DevOps culture, focusing first on discovery: Do you really know how your infrastructure is set up and configured? For sure? How do you check? And what about drift? Providing visibility into how your systems actually work starts the conversation about making them better, and those conversations start you down the path of a DevOps culture. Have a listen!

Richard chats with Microsoft Evangelist Scott Klein about the Microsoft Azure Management Libraries (MAML). MAML wraps up the REST calls to Azure to allow you to do a huge host of cloud tasks, such as provisioning new instances, monitoring, configuration, maintenance and more. Yeah, it's a dev library, but it can build things that the operations people want! Scott discusses three pretty powerful scenarios for MAML: automating elasticity/scaling, testing in the cloud and creating Software as a Service apps. You can get more info from Brady Gaster's Blog Post on MAML.

Richard chats with David Tesar about DevOps for the Microsoft-oriented IT Pro. DevOps has been a big thing in the Linux/Open Source community for the past few years, and it's starting to really resonate in the Microsoft world also. David focuses on the core ideals of DevOps - that it is first and foremost of culture of building better systems faster. Resist the tools and focus on the people! Not that tools don't have a role, but without culture, the tools can't help you. David has a blog post of IT Pro Learning Resources that points to other interviews, conference sessions and a Microsoft Virtual Academy course on getting started with DevOps. Check 'em out!

Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Clint Huffman about his book the Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide. Clint is also the genius behind the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool on CodePlex. See a theme here? Clint is focused on understand why things in Windows (and elsewhere) go fast or slow. And he's willing to share his insight! The book focuses primarily on Windows challenges, and also references the Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA). Between PAL and WPA, you have all the tools you need to understand Windows performance better - and they're free! But the book isn't free, and you should buy it. It's real world advice from a guy who's been there and done that.

Richard chats with Stephen Rose about how Windows has continued evolving with some thoughts on what future versions might look like. Windows 8 brought the tablet to the Microsoft space, and with it a chance to explore how different form factors fit into the enterprise. Stephen talks about the cool kinds of retail projects he's working with that are taking advantage of these form factors. This naturally leads to a discussion about what new features might look like, how the experience can continue to be improved, managing more devices, more portable identity and configuration, and whole new areas of work. Lots of interesting thoughts on the future of Windows!

Richard chats with Steven Murawski on the day he is leaving Stack Exchange to join the Chef team as a Community Manager. So naturally, the conversation turns to Chef. Chef is a configuration management system that comes from the Linux world - it's scripting language is Ruby. But in the past year, Chef has added Windows to it's repertoire with support from Microsoft and Desired State Configuration. Steven mentions a free DSC EBook you can download from Powershell.org to help get you started on DSC. There's also the Learn Chef site to get you started on Chef. It's early days for Chef and Windows, but things continue to improve - Steven also mentions John Ewart's book Managing Windows Servers with Chef as a starting point for managing Windows and Linux servers side by side.

Richard talks to Jeff Stokes about the role of User Access Control (UAC) in making Windows client machines safer. Safer? Actually, the conversation starts out with the reality of UAC as it first arrived on the scene in the Vista days - an annoyance that was immediately turned off. But Jeff digs into how UAC is a part of the compatibility features of Windows. The discussion then turns to a broader discussion of the security features in Windows: Taking the time to understand them will save time and money in your organization. UAC is not the enemy!

Richard chats with Steve Thomas about Microsoft User Experience Virtualization (UE-V). The conversation starts out with a focus on Application and Desktop Virtualization - while server virtualization has become the norm, App-V is catching on more slowly. Steve talks about how the back end of desktop virtualization has become more like the cloud, being very elastic and flexible to better utilize resources. On the front end, things are even more interesting. UE-V provides portability to the relatively light-weight things that are important on the desktop, such as configuration settings, favorites, printers and so on. Like Active Directory Profile Roaming, but without all the baggage. You should check it out!

Richard chats with Chris Jackson about his experiences working with large organizations migrating off of XP. Once you've done the hard work of taking an inventory of all your organization's applications and platform requirements, how do you use that information to benefit the company? Chris talks about moving over to a more template-driven approach to software delivery using System Center Configuration Manager and the Deployment Toolkit. Then the conversation turns to web browsers - how hard is it to get the latest browser into your organization? Chris discusses the various built-in compatibility features in Internet Explorer as well as the thinking around building a continuously evolving application platform. Let the latest features being offered in the platform benefit your organization!