Welcome to episode 338 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on June 12th, 2023. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Asher from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this week's episode, we start off discussing wrangling your email after vacation, as well as the deprecation of the classic exchange online admin center. We also talk about how some changes to the Apple Developer program in
installing iOS betas could impact your users. Finally, we close out the show discussing some Azure announcements from Build for a k s. You and I go to work today. We. Gotta work. Scott, I've been on vacation for the last week. I don't feel like working. I should, I've. Not been on vacation. I got stuffs to do. But I did new. Products to launch. Nice. I made it through all my emails, all 1500 of them .
So normally on vacation, I'll be honest, normally on vacation I still check my email because frankly I don't like coming back to 1500 unread emails. It's easier to kinda sort through 'em as they come in, just spend 15 or 20 minutes a day sorting through 'em. But I went on a cruise. I refused to pay for internet on a cruise or international roaming on my cell phone. So I did not look at email and then I got home and I would've looked at my email. In a way it was nice to not deal with it.
How big of a, I guess kind of pre-filtered email management person are you? And I guess for context? Uh yep. I've been going through, we, we've been working on kind of new onboarding documentation as we hire new folks on the team and one of the things that happens, I think in general, like as a Microsoft person who works with customers, but then being on like the product side as well, you get a ton of email that may or may not apply to you.
So you really do need to kind of apply a little bit of a lens to it. So on day one we spend time with folks and we walk them through things like configuring email lists. We provide them a specific set of DLS like hey, you might want to send these distros to a subfolder and triage them every other day once a week, that kind of thing. I'm a big fan of the Scott Hanselman having two inboxes, so an inbox and an inbox cc. So I can kind of manage things that way.
I'm wondering if you do anything similar. I do and that actually made a big difference. So my 1500 emails were across two different email accounts, but I sort into multiple folders. So, and I do it a combination of ways. I have a third party product that actually was a sponsor of the show, I think a while back. SaneBox and SaneBox uses some intelligence to sort my email. So my email comes in, I have my primary inbox that I do use the focused inbox as well as the other.
I have an actual Outlook rule that puts anything that I'm CC'd on into a CC folder for the same reason I figure if I'm CC'd on it, it's an fyi, it's not something I need to act on right away. Yep. And then same box has some additional things to sort emails that are related to bills. I have a finance folder, bills credit card stuff, all of that goes into a finance folder.
And then they have like this automatic sane later insane news folders where like all the newsletters go into the news ones and it does a pretty good job. And then saying later is like, not stuff I was CC'd on, but stuff that came to my inbox but tends to be still not necessarily news focused but unimportant emails, whether there's a bunch of people on it, all that type of stuff. I do get some emails from Microsoft as part of the M V P program that's also some distribution lists.
All of those emails go to a different folder so I can sit down when I have time and sort through all of those. And then I have a couple rules on my personal email just to sort, so those 1500 emails were sorted across like eight or nine ish different folders. So it w it made it a lot easier to just churn through all of 'em, like most of the same later in the same news stuff. I skimmed it and just archived it all, deleted it all, skimmed cc skimmed the personal email.
Really only paid attention to my inbox, which truth be told, only was like a hundred, maybe 150 of those actual 1500 emails. Gotcha. Yeah, that's a good one. I think lots of people miss it. Like we all deal with email and I, I'm always interested in the way others do it. I really, like I said, I'm a big fan of that inbox CC thing. If you trolled around on Scott Hansen's site, he has another kind of set of tips where you split up emails from externals,
emails from internals, things like that. Like that was a little too much for me. But the CC one and some decent kind of, I think like regular scheduled grooming to go through it has been a good way generally to do it. And then you can set that expectation with people too. I know like you know, not everybody follows the same email etiquette that's out there . So like you mentioned, hey if I'm on the cc, it might not be important to me. I live by that one, but not everybody else does.
So sometimes I meet with people and have to ask them like, is they go, did you do that? Yeah, no, I haven't even seen that yet. Oh, well I emailed it to you just now. I'm like, where ? It's not in my inbox. Well I ccd you. Oh, so it's not important for me. Well what do you mean no, I emailed you like no. Oh I, I got it.
The other one that we have to do, you know, folks are considering like onboarding guidance and the Outlook, Microsoft 365, office 365 space is a, as a remote employee, like I really appreciate this one is that Outlook capability to end meetings early or start them late, but it needs to be configured manually by the person on their mailbox, like when they pop in.
So it's a little bit weird when we get a new employee in and all of a sudden 25 minute slots start going out as 30 minute blocks or like full hours and you're like, I can't get up from my desk and do anything. It actually is nice to have just the, the built-in break there and you can catch it on either side usually like no matter what's going on. So you're never at your desk more than like 50 minutes, which is good. Yes, I have those built into, I think mine all end five minutes early.
I would say the trick with that is to actually end five minutes early. So the meeting is still scheduled, but it gives you that prompt and it's like your meeting is ending in five minutes and you're like, oh, but it's five two or it's ten two and my next meeting doesn't start till the top of the hour so I can really go that extra five minutes. Like you still have to be dedicated to actually quit five minutes early then because we have been so trained to go to the even hour
or the even half hour. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very true. You still gotta train the human behavior out. All right, uh, now that we got our onboarding tips out of the way for the week, what do you want to get into next? So. One that I just saw, this was not on the ones I sent you Scott, but thanks. We are. Both Apple. People. Keep me on my. Toes. Yeah, keep you on your toes.
We're both Apple people and if you are an Apple person, apple announced a whole bunch of stuff this last week while I was gone on vacation around new versions of iOS, Mac os, all of that. Don't upgrade to 'em yet. And Scott, don't let me upgrade to 'em yet.
I've already seen a few articles about some software we use and I thought of this because the Intune team actually put out an article as well already that essentially says Intune mobile application management, that type of stuff is not supported on these beta versions of iOS, iPad os. And they will not declare support until it becomes generally available.
They do test betas, they will try to find issues, but they already have put out there that mobile application management isn't working correctly for Outlook Mobile and iOS 17 beta, the Max OS policy does not block Outlook mobile on the beta release. They did give a couple links too to GitHub for Android and stuff. If you do find issues with the beta, if you wanna be one of those brave souls testing this out.
But just a reminder for all of those people like us that are Apple people and maybe like to test betas and a reminder to myself to be careful with those. , it's actually a good call out. I don't know that it's just people like us anymore. So Apple has changed the, I guess the kind of governance or rules for betas. So in the past, especially for these early ones, you would have to be a member of the Apple developer program to be able to get
access to them. And the Apple developer program was a paid thing. Like generally you knew if you were doing it right, you were spending a hundred bucks a year and because you were spending a hundred bucks a year, you were gonna have access to these things before they came out in public beta. So you had these dual release train of developer beta and public beta one being gated behind, you know, spend a little bit of money.
Developer betas are ung gated right now , so you do not need to be a paid developer anymore. So a lot of people I think freaked out when 17 popped because it was showing up for everybody, including non-developers. Uh, cuz now if you go into like about software update, you know, general software update, there's a just a a click level menu that you can go into to say show me the betas. And 17 is definitely in there for iOS,
iPad and Mac as well. So you know, in that spirit of like, hey, tell your users not to do this kind of thing, like might actually be more necessary than it has been in the past. And my understanding was that's gonna be a standing change. Like it wasn't like, oh somebody misconfigured something and it lit up and then it went away. It's like, no, the terms of the developer program have changed. Where to get access to developer betas, you do not need to be a paid developer in the program anymore.
Yes, I did see that because I saw the same thing that you said. Everybody freaked out. They're like, oh, apple messed up. iOS 17 developer beta is out there for everyone. And I saw a correction to the article that said, no, you still, I guess you still have to be a registered developer, but you don't have to be a paid registered developer. So Correct. But there's really like no gate there, right? That's right. Anybody with an Apple, ID go create to account, sign up to be a developer. Yeah,
you don't, you don't need like a DBA or a special number. There's no tax id, anything like that to get going with it. So. Yep. And I s it's uh, yeah I suppose people on iOS. iOS is a much bigger ecosystem than Mac os, so they're very well maybe a lot of people with an iPhone that are thinking about upgrading just to try it out. Yeah, if you have an iPhone and all of a sudden you're excited that this is available, be careful. And this also comes from experience with past betas.
I have absolutely hosted stuff up before in wished I had not done the beta , but now I have two machines. Scott and I did update my iPad. I did go to the 17 beta on my iPad just to try it out because it is a non, my day-to-day work does not rely on that iPad working as it should. . Your left hand knows not what your right hand does. Yes. Like you open this with don't let me do this to I've already done it and that I. Have not done it on my eye.
I have not done it on my phone and I have not done it on my primary work computer, nor will I do it on either of those. Famous last words. It's on my test devices. Scott, only test devices. ish. All right, fair enough. Thank you. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
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business. Another one, just a quick call out, I saw this one too. These are a couple of the ones that jumped out to me. The Exchange Admin Center or the Classic Exchange Admin Center in Exchange online Office 365 back in September of 2021, Microsoft announced that this would be deprecated for our customers in the worldwide cloud in September of 2022. That time has obviously come and gone feature parody and all the other work is now officially complete.
So the classic exchange admin center will be deprecated in a worldwide environment on June 20th, 2023. You have a grand total of 18, no eight days a week. By the time this podcast comes out, you'll have like two days and your classic exchange admin center will be gone. You will be using Modern for everything. So if you have been relying on classic exchange admin center and knowing where everything is in there, you might wanna try out the modern one and start learning where everything is in
the modern one cuz stuff has shifted. Yeah. I thought there used to be a note in the docs that said it was going away and I was, I was just looking pulling them up cuz you know they're still all out there like they don't have any notice on them that it's going away right now. Which is kind of like, oh yeah, you should probably have something there that tells people to move along a little bit.
Like I appreciate that all these teams put things into places like tech community like that makes sense but they should really be in the official docs too. Like I run into more and more and more people who don't even know tech community exists, which is kind of sad cuz there's some good stuff out there if you know how to dig through it. But uh, yeah like this stuff just needs to be in the docs. .
I would agree especially because I consider Docs to be the official stuff like cuz other people like tech community can be a wide range of people that have posted there. I would say to your point, tech community isn't always a hundred percent accurate because it's open to a lot of different people being able to post. So Docs being that official Microsoft documentation, approved documentation, all of that, it should absolutely always be in docs.
Yeah, there's stuff that isn't always appropriate for docs that can be augmented by tech community. I've noticed what we're starting to do a little bit, and I've been trying this out myself, is putting out the kind of the amount of detail that I can on the doc side and then linking out to tech community posts that are authored that maybe provide you a little bit more prescriptive guidance, right? So like one of the challenges is when you're doing these things is everybody's
gonna have a different situation. So you know, quite often, like at least I, and maybe it's more so on like the Azure side than the M 365 side where it's a little bit more of kind of like a kind of boxed or or on Rails experience is you're just giving people building blocks so you don't always want to tell them
how to build the Legos. Like sure you could build your optimist prime Lego set, but what if you really wanted to build, you know, one of your Ferrari cars in the background, like you could do that as well. So we try and avoid a lot of that and docs, or at least I try to, but there are times I want to tell people like, listen, you should be building Optimist Prime right now.
Like Ferrari's aren't where it's at for this thing, right? Like you need, you need a transformer, you don't need a, a single card to get done what you need to get done.
So for stuff like that I'll, I'll usually work with like our docs team input like a link in that says hey for more information or, or for like more details on these scenarios, like boom, click out here and then, you know, as I can get away with uh, with the more prescriptive guidance out in tech community or things like that, I absolutely, I absolutely do it. Yes. And Sean in Discord just said in by docs we obviously mean Learn because that Rena was necessary. Yes. Uh, [email protected].
Not to be confused with docs.microsoft.com or I still talk about it as like docs MS and just really screw people up. Which cuz it was never like a real Docs MS was never real property, but it was a great way to shorthand it, at least in my head. So yeah, it's uh, it's a thing you can, you can learn everything on Learn. You can both learn and get your documentation should you wanna go. Oh, I learned. Yes, I do miss that separation between Docs and Learn.
But all that aside, what else do you wanna talk about today, Scott? What other interesting news do we have? Maybe. A couple more follow ups from Build for some new things that came out that folks can take a look at. So one that was kind of interesting to me is Azure Linux is now a supported container host operating system for a k s, well I guess it has been, but it's, it's ga it's kind of ready to go and out there and it's based on CPL Mariner.
So I don't know if a lot of folks have heard of Mariner, but Mariner is CBL Mariner. It's an internal Linux distribution that Microsoft built to kind of shape it to, uh, HyperV or hypervisors and even like, kind of like the custom ish version of Hyper V that runs inside of Azure and things like that. So CBL Mariner is also what's behind things like Cloud Shell, you know, we've talked a lot about Cloud Shell in the past to be able to spin that up.
Like those are ultimately just Mariner containers at this point. They use TDN F to do all the installs, private RPM repos, like, like all those kinds of things. So C B L Mariner has been kicking around for a while now it's open source out on GitHub, like anybody you can go look at it, all the specs for it are out there, all those kinds of things. It even talks about how RPM packages are built, how they come through.
It's got X 86 ISO images, like if somebody just wanted to spin it up in, you know, VMware or Virtual box or, or something like that and kick the tires really quickly. But being a kind of Azure optimized version of Linux, it's got all the things that a Linux kernel would need to run an Azure successfully. And really that's about it without all the other like Croft on top of it. Okay. Hence you've got like Cloud Shell that does all the additional installs and things.
So that's out and kicking around for AKs now G So when you spin up a new a k s cluster, you can say I wanna go with Azure Linux, which is this CBL Mariner thing under the hood and you'll kind of have a Microsoft first party optimized version of Linux as your container host os. Okay. Uh, so I, I thought that was a good one to see out and about and kicking around. Yeah, you know, the, the more Microsoft leans into it, it's, it's an interesting one to watch I think from the outside.
Okay. Because up until this time did you have to use, you had to use Ubuntu, right? That was the only Linux distro four a K s I. Believe so. Or where it, it was a boonoo for a long time, but yeah, now Mariner's out and about, it's, it's well baked and, and kind of ready to go. So yeah, I recommend folks, uh, take a look at it and I'll have some links in the show notes and all that stuff, you know, Frane here in the chat we'll have some more as well. All.
Right. Interesting. I did not, I don't know that I ever realized Microsoft was even working on their own Azure Linux os. Yeah. It's interesting to watch. So I think my first exposure to Mariner wasn't necessarily on the a k s side of the house. I actually ran into it through Cloud Shell. So I was interested in cloud Shell, you know, you just go into the portal, click a button and boom, you get a Linux container, it's got power shell. Yep. Pre bootstrapped all, all that good stuff.
It also has a bunch of other tooling bootstrapped into it, you know, it's got uh, AZ copy and it's got SQL command, it's got all the c l I installed for Azure, it's got PowerShell installed and like, it's really just kind of like this nice like little tool in the toolbox, right?
To get you moving forward if you're an Azure customer. So I, I went down the rabbit hole one day of thinking like, well what if I wanna run cloud Shell locally, like, you know, you can do the things in like VS code where you can spin up cloud shell and connect to, you know, a version of Cloud Shell that's running up and instantiated in the portal. It's still running in the cloud. I was like, it's just a container. I should be able to run it locally.
So I wanted to go kind of go down the rabbit hole of seeing like, can I run it locally or if I can't run it locally, what are the other things that I can install along the way with it? And it turns out, yeah, it's just Mariner and Mariner can be spun up super quick in a docile pod man, like, you know, however you wanna get it up and running kind of thing. So yeah, it's a pretty nifty little thing running around out there. Very cool. Oh, what else do we have? All.
Right, since we're talking containers, let's talk one more about containers and this will probably take us to time. So if you're running containerized applications in the cloud, one of the things that you often run into is that you need some form of persistent and or persistent in shared storage across those containers.
So that could be something like maybe you're standing up a sidecar for logging, okay, and you want, you know, I'm, I'm running, I don't know, three pods with my application and I want all those logs to write to a central application. So bring 'em down, funnel 'em in, get 'em all into the same storage place so that I can go look at 'em later from a single pane of glass kind of thing. So that might have been a need you had.
You could also have a need just for spinning up and destroying volumes like over the life of your pods. Sometimes you want them to be persistent like, okay, this pod is gonna be up and running sometimes, but when it's not up and running, I still need that volume to be around. Like it can't be 100% ephemeral like when my pod spins back up again. I kind of want it to maintain state and get to where it needs to be. So we've had a couple of things out there kicking around.
We've had a CSI driver for storage for a while. Let you work with both BLOB and Azure files. There's a cozy driver out there that's in beta that will let you do things like more management plane operations. Like hey, let me spin up a container in a storage account or create a storage account itself like as this pod spins up,
but like they're kind of disconnected. One's management plane, one's data plane and then you didn't get all the niceties that you needed or maybe access to all the things on the backend that you would want when it comes to block storage and getting backing storage into and and exposed to a set of pods, uh, within a Kubernetes cluster.
So Azure container storage is out in preview now this was announced back at BUILD and it's kind of all about bringing support for persistent volumes with in in your Kubernetes pods with multiple types of backing storage, you might have needs for say various IOPS IO on top of your containers, things like that. So with Azure container storage you can have this backing storage mechanism. It can actually be one of three things.
So disks have been there for a while and you could always do disks with maybe some limitations around what SKUs of discs were available. But now you can also do elastic sand and you can do ephemeral discs and spin those up. So you end up in this world now where you spin up your a k s cluster, you spin up a storage pool, which is gonna be that collection of storage resources.
They're all grouped and presented as just as unified entity over to your a k s cluster and then they do all the heavy lifting for you right at that point it's just exposing persistent volumes back from that pool to your pods. And then Azure Container storage as a service handles all the translation. So if it's gotta talk to a disc, it knows how to talk to a disc if it knows how, if it needs to talk like ice guzi to elastic sand, it knows how to do all that.
Basically it handles like all the protocol translation stuff for you so that you don't need to, you don't need to worry about that, right? Like if it's like N V M E versus ICE guzi like doesn't matter to you. All you're doing now is just saying like, Hey I'm mounting a persistent volume out of this pool and it's gonna be up and ready to go for you rapidly.
Nice. And it sounds like, I mean especially with the elastic sand being there now, it provides some nice advantages in terms of scaling iops, scaling out of, I was just reading through the article here, scaling out for some of those of those stateful pods helps with some of the value management but gives you a lot more flexibility and a lot more options. Sounds like primarily from the scaling perspective when it comes to that
storage. Yes. Uh, I think it's been a little bit of an issue, right? Like how, how do you consider IOPS at scale or you need to like rapidly burst IOPS across, you know, multiple pods on the same volume, things like that. Like it's hard, you know, ultimately like a disc is a disc, right?
So having more optionality there is good. Like something like elastic sand and, and its ability to kind of have a base set of IOPS that's order of magnitude higher than anything that you can get in a, a single disk or at least a single disk that like us me mortals want to pay for kind of thing. , I think that's nice to have and it makes things just super accessible for everybody.
So I would recommend like folks like if you're doing like csi things like that today or you're just getting started with a s and you're like, huh, how can I get, you know, better stateful management on the storage side out of this from like a first party lens. Like, you know, like I'm using Azure Kubernetes service, like what's the Azure storage thing that I would use? Container storage is very likely one of the things that you would want to look at.
I'll put a link to the docs in show notes for everybody out there. There's quick start guides, like how to get everything installed up and running. You know, you've certainly gotta get a cluster up and going. Do you have to install a Kubernetes extension? So you'll, you'll be off on the command line installing the Microsoft Azure container storage extension. It is again a preview so you know, you know certainly like preview support, all those kinds of things they apply.
There's also a little bit of an FAQ that's over on EL docs. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Uh, kind of walk through like what are some of the differences between Azure container storage and the CSI driver regional availability. Cuz it is a preview, it's, it's potentially limited in region. How does billing work? Things like that. Awesome. Thanks. Very cool. Always nice to get some of those more options. This is not a land I play in much, Scott. Another one.
You keep bringing up stuff that's not going on my list. This is not currently on my list of things to dive into because I, I would say of all the Azure services a k s is probably one of the ones I'm still the least familiar with. Just does not apply to most of the work I do day to day. That's surprising. I play with containers all the time. I don't think I have, I still tend to do a lot of Microsoft 365 stuff and containers don't tie in a lot to that.
And a lot of the Azure stuff is still a lot of EMS networking that type. Maybe I need to add containers and set aside like a few days to just really dive into containers in my free time. Oh see. It's back. On the list. Back on the list. We made it with containers as a whole, but we should probably wrap up. I have everybody bugging me coming back from vacation. Everyone thinks I'm free right away Monday morning when I'm back from vacation. All. Right, well we'll let you get back to it.
I see you're wearing your Super Dad shirt today, so I am deploy the superpowers. You'd be all set. Sounds good. I will see what I can do and I will also try to sort throw my blog posts so we have even more good stuff to cover later this week when we record again. All right. Thanks Ben. All right, thanks a lot Scott, and we will talk to you later. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes.
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