Welcome to episode 379 of the Microsoft Cloud It pro podcast recorded on 07/01/2024. This is a show about Microsoft 3 65 in Azure from the perspective of It pros and end users where we discuss the top or recent news and how it relates to you. We're back after vacation with a new Azure topic to discuss in this week's episode.
Today, Ben and Scott take a look at Azure verified modules, a new initiative for Microsoft to consolidate and set the standards for when a good by and or terra module looks like. My wife broke my Michigan coffee mug. I had to get a new Michigan coffee, Michael while I was up there on vacation. Mh it's a little bit of a pas. Did you replace... You probably can't get, like, an Em branded mug. I'm still in love with my amber mug. Your. I
do not have a number. I just have a great big, so I have realized... I have a great big mug. My mug is like a 16 ounce or 20 ounce mug. My coffee does not stay hot, but I don't run out of coffee as quickly. Like, my wife broke, and I switched to a little coffee mug, and I'm like, I ran out of coffee way too fast. This is way too many trips back down to the coffee pot. On a daily basis. I need my big coffee mug back. Yeah. Amber does make some big bugs. I have, like, big travel mugs now and
all sorts of things. I'm scared to get the travel mug though because I am 1 of those people who absolutely loses my water bottle, like anytime. Have in my backpack and I travel anywhere. Yep. Then. So I don't want to have... What's already an overpriced funky toy, which is absolutely delightful. Like, don't get me wrong. Having always hot coffee at your desk is absolutely the way that 1 should lift their life. But, yeah.
It's like, I don't wanna buy a hundred and 50 dollar tumble and then just have it, you know, not actually do the things that it needs too. So... Yes. Like make it home from a trip. Like, like, make it home from a trip. Yes. The the number of water bottles that I have donated to the shuttle bus at the airport is untold. And those, like, most of the ones I I kinda gave up. I doing la water bottles. I don't know if you ever
seen those. They're the ones that have, like, the little Uv light built into the top. So I was doing those for a while. Okay. But then I was losing those, and those are, like, also cost money or water bottles like, not like, oh, this was a 5 dollar water bottle at Target It's more like oh. This is a hundred dollar water bottle in Amazon. So after losing 2 of those. I'm done. I just... I'd have to be that person who buys a 20 dollar bottle bottled of water at the airport once I'm
inside it now. How how Do you like, set them down next to your bag instead of putting it back in your bag or they fall on at your bag? My bag doesn't have, like, the they just fall off the side. Like, they're just in the little thing on the side because I put them in my bag. Right? They're they're attached to my bag and, like, in in the in the little little pocket on the side.
So what you really need is instead of cheap water bottles, you need a bag that has a deeper, larger, better water bottle holder on the side of your bag so that they don't fall. My gosh. Oh, my gosh. Yes. So that's the fix is rather than hundreds of dollars of water bottles I need a new multi hundred dollar backpack because I just I have enough of those. I mean, you've already out. You've already spent 200 dollars on water bottles, Like, at this point in time, a already.
You've sort saved you Well, you still would have the water bottle. I don't know. Yeah. Right. I've I've I've already got a really really fancy 10 bucks 2 backpack. So Anyway, neither here, nor there. Why don't we go ahead and get into our topic. So you've been on vacation for a while, I was a poor c and was not able to, secure any interviews in the intervening times. So we missed an episodes. So we'll have to backfill at some point and make that up. But anyway, let's get back into things today.
We got more Azure stuff to talk about. Yes. And I won't say you were a puerto cohort c because you did... We did hit Microsoft to year end my vacation, Microsoft year end, all collided to create the missed episode. So It's funny. How much is an employee, the fiscal year affects me? It's also and I just distinctly remember this from my consulting day is working with partners. How much Microsoft is go close in bags partners as well. Oh, like, yes.
I have some projects right now that it's like, is anybody out there and anyways. Funny thing is, your projects must be done to get invoice. But it does help when the folks on the other side aren't third in invoice. Right. Well, in when you're dependent on, like, feedback to finish the project in order to invoice. Oh, interesting scenarios. But... Yeah. That's my there. Our interesting topic for today. This is something you introduced me
to since I was on vacation. Let you pick a topic, and I will come up with something for the next 1, But you brought up Azure verified modules. As a topic for today. This was interesting. There is a whole page that we put. On as your verified modules, With a Youtube video this as, what are they? How can I get involved? Where can I learn more? What value do they offer? How do I use them? I have a Youtube logo in the way. No. Where do I use? Where do I use them? And what problems do they solve?
So instead of going and watching this Youtube video? Scott is going to tell us the answer to all 6 of those questions in today's episode.
Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your office 3 65 environment are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity, intelligent is here to help much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, intelligent helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligent keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business
running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you a small organization with just a few users up to an organization of several thousand employees. They want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft cloud technology. Visit them at intelligent dot com slash podcast that's INTELLIGINK dot com slash podcast for more information or to schedule a 30 minute call to get started with them today.
Remember intelligent focuses on the Microsoft cloud, so you can focus on your business. First of all, what are Azure verified module, Scott? What our Azure verified modules. So Azure verified modules are a new ish initiative. From Microsoft to offer customers basically vetted ways to work with infrastructure as code. That align to best practices from Microsoft for things like Azure. Hence Azure
verified modules. So if you think about being a customer who does infrastructure code, maybe you're doing terra form, and you've been using existing modules from Hash corp. Maybe you're using bi, things like that. And you're finding that the kind community modules that exist today around things in Azure, saying, like, just, like, from Mah hash Corp, in the terra form module registry.
And don't always lie the best practices and and you need to do some additional work to make them get where they need to land. This is an attempt to kinda provide the community a set of modules that are aligned to those best practices. They are built by Microsoft out in the open. Right? These are all Os. You can continue to find these on Github, like you find many of your favorite kind of bi
examples and and terra form modules today. But they specifically align to guidance from things like the well architect framework. So, like, if you think about you're a customer who does a bunch with virtual machines. So maybe you're using the existing compute modules from Hash Corp around virtual machines. Well, over on the other side here, you could also kinda take a run at using these verified modules.
And leveraging them in your day today. So they'll do all the same things so that the existing community modules do. So, you know, if you're talking about, like, a virtual machine, that's, hey, I need to be able to create a windows or a Linux Vm, along with whatever common associated resources are there, things like knicks and disks and Ips and all that kind of stuff. So so that would be in these modules as well. And you kinda look at it and you go, like, alright. Great. So there's a module for
virtual machines. Like, I've got Azure Rm virtual machine, maybe in the existing registry today. Why would I use Av compute virtual machine. Well, compute virtual machine, like the Azure verified module, it will offer you the same, if not more functionality. And again, it aligns to kind of best practices from things like the well architect and framework.
And as these continue to mature, because they are built and designed by Microsoft and by folks who work directly with tooling, like virtual machines, storage, app services, functions, all these things day in day out. You also have a path to support ability potentially in the future. So my understanding is, like, the intention of this project is over time, these become things you can actually reach out to Microsoft for
support. So if you go to a aka a dot ms forward slash av, that will take you to the Azure verified modules page. Is ultimately just github pages. So it's Azure dot github dot io o forward slash azure dash verified dash modules, and it can kinda walk you through all these things. So what are the existing terra form modules, what are the existing bi modules that exist out there for each of those subsets. So for bi and terra form, things are broken into resource modules.
They're broken into pattern modules, and then there's also utility modules as well. So the the intent over time is, like, yes, you would have, say for, like, compute for virtual machines. You will have that compute module, and that would be a resource module. Like, that's something that's actually in, like, the Microsoft dot compute resource provider, and then you would have pattern modules.
So a pattern thing might be to give you an example, like, a policy assignment, a role assignment, maybe you're instant shooting, landing zones, things like that. Things that are actually, like, patterns for deployment versus individual resource deployments and things like that. And then you'll have utilities as well. Yeah I don't know where the utilities are gonna bake out. There's actually none published today
for either buy or terra form. I imagine utilities could be, like, quick helpers in the future. So, you know, maybe things to adhere to you say, like, naming standards. Across the board or adhere to tagging standards, things like that could potentially be available there. Tl, these are, again, official Microsoft driven modules for buy up and terra form that customers can come and kind of pick up today.
And and when I say pickup up today, it's it's probably pick up today and more, like a Poc see sense, than production sense, and there's probably somebody out there on the Av side who's screaming at me right now. But the reason I say that is Lots of these things are relatively early. Like, like, don't get me wrong. They they absolutely do work and things like that.
But, like, for example, if I look at the service bus module for terra form, it's currently at version 0 dot 1, like, most of these things are, like, 0 dot one's, 0 dot twos, 0 dot 3, things like that. And some are kinda rapidly maturing. So I saw, like, Av was all the way up to 0 dot 7 already. Virtual machines iterating rapidly. They're up to, like, 0 dot 15. Eventually, these things make it to, you know, 1 and they're out the door out the door and really
ready to go. Got it. And I'm assuming that prior... I guess kind prior to this or up till now, maybe Microsoft has been contributing more to the community modules through terra form. And I'm assuming they've kinda pivoted they're not gonna... If they were doing community modules before. This is kinda now Microsoft's focus for Azure or for Terra form for Buy up is that, these are the modules that Microsoft will focus on that Microsoft will update.
Kinda like you said, these are gonna be the ones that are always going to be up to date. They're gonna have the new functionality probably first unless somebody else beats them to it out on the community modules. But then you're gonna be running in a little bit more of an unsupported module, not really knowing how that particular community member updated that module. Yeah. Supports... Always always a weird kind of funky term. Right? Like, some folks in click
support, like, oh, great. I can just, you know, call my Microsoft rep on the phone. Like, if I'm that kind of customer. So support ability here really does kind of follow the same flow as existing community modules. Most of these things are built in the open. Like, when I say most of these things like, existing terra form modules that are outside of Av. So they're built in the open. They're on Github, you can go open an issue. So let me take, like, again, I'll compute as
an example. Oh, so the difference would be, you know, you run into an issue with your deployment with the compute module. And you're using the existing Hash court module. Well, you go out and you're running do an issue with that. You're gonna go out to github. You're gonna open an issue, and that is going to be triage by a whole ton of folks. Right It could be folks from Hash Corp. It could be folks from Microsoft, could be community support, just like, you know, via other contributors to
that module or that re... That repo on Github things like that. So there's really no, like, Sla there when it comes to portability. It's also not clear like, you know, where the issue goes. Like, say you open up an issue for the compute module, and it turns out, like, oh, that's a thing in a core Sdk on the Microsoft side. Like, maybe it's something that needs to be fixed and, like, 1 of like the resource manager Sd sdk for compute to actually get it going.
So if you're in Hash Corp world, well, that means somebody at Hash corp needs to know how to reach out to the folks at Microsoft or that customer then needs to go and open a support request. With Microsoft Microsoft goes. Oh, great. It's a community module from Hash Corp. We can't help you, but we'll see if we can connect you the right folks. All those kinds of things.
So from that perspective, like, yeah. You've got community support with the Hash corp stuff and and with a bunch of the community modules that are out there. But who is supporting that and having an Sla behind that really is a fuzzy kind of thing. So in E land, the intent is, you know, that, at least in the early days, you know, go ahead and open an issue on Github. So you're in this same flow. You're you're you're gonna get Hub repo. You're
opening an issue there. There's a little bit more of an expertise around Sla there, though. And this is all published out on the Av side if folks wanna go and take a look there. Yeah. If you go into the Lion and how, where where the Sla stuff. Got it. Yep. And go down below definition. So there's a link in there. At the very first bullet under verify definition, scroll it. Oh, I want to our radio for folks. Yep. There's module support there. So this will kind of spell out what module
support is. So you're still gonna go to github. You're still gonna open an issue on Github, and the module contributors because it's gonna be in kinda individual contributors, these smaller, like, feature cruise, v teams that are responsible for these things. They're responsible for Triage. But then there's also a backing team kinda, like, to get about it as maybe, like, a governance board or something like that that sits behind this. That steps in with another set of rules.
Like, if you open an issue and you don't get a response in 3 days, that core team is gonna step in, and they're gonna come in and start to kind of move those things along They're looking for bugs versus security issues, which potentially have different triage points along the way. And then theoretically, like, most of these module maintain, if not all of them should have direct hooks back into the right folks internally at Microsoft to go talk to. So, like, the way I learned about Av.
I'm a Pm in object storage. And we actually had the community that's building these modules approach us and say, hey, we're thinking about doing this. What's the right way to do it. What are the things that you find or maybe gaps in the existing terra 4 modules. So I'm like, well, this is awesome. I I get a new scale unit for my customers?
They potentially get a better experience. And then if there are bugs or things that are in here that are surfaced, the folks who build these modules like, in my case, the, you know, they have a direct line back to me to ask questions or help get triage. Like, So saying storage land, there was an issue in the underlying, like, resource management Sd sdk for storage, that's something that I own is in my wheelhouse. So potentially, I can help move that along as well
from my side. So When we talk about things, like, hey, like, this is a official Microsoft driven initiative, it's Microsoft up and down from the publishing on way to the back end and and support ability and kind of re reach out and res sourcing and all those kinds of things. So that's what excites me about it. Because in my world, I'll speak just from the storage side.
I don't have anybody on, like, my developer experience team that's doing these things and building terra modules, but infrastructure is code is clearly important to my customers. Like, I get a lot of questions about it for my customers. So now I've got another team at Microsoft who's actually stepping in. They're building these official, you know, Microsoft Driven modules. I have line of sight to work they're doing. They have line of sight back back
to me. Should they need any help blown the way or guidance or things like that. I think it's a really cool initiative. It's definitely early days. Like I said, like, lots of these modules are in there, like, you know, 0.1 0.2 0.3 kind of thing, but they're rapidly maturing. And I think you'll see a lot of investment here. You know, as we just talked about, like, the new fiscal year coming up as the
new fiscal spins up, Like... It's it's gonna be something that folks lean into, you'll rapidly see new modules come out across all these dimensions of, like, resource modules, pattern modules, utility modules, things like that. It's all moving fast and it's kind of an an exciting thing to watch from the outside. Yeah. And if you go in and look, like, I was looking at terra form. It looks like they have lots of plans.
Forum them because it also gives you when you go into, like, the terra 4 modules or the buy up modules, you talked about resource pattern utility,
how many are available. So for, like terra form, there are 39 resource modules that are already out there, A 0 that are orphan, which within that support article, we just referenced it talked about orphan modules essentially being modules where the owners, contributors just stop responding to it, and a module it could get orphan because nobody's managing anymore, and then they also have proposed. So there's 93 proposed resource modules. If you get 17 proposed pattern, 1 proposed utility module.
So it does give you kind of a look to both in terra form and I'm assuming they have the same thing for bi. Where they have, what's available orphan proposed. I will say there's a lot more buy something than terra form, but it it does give you a little bit of that map in terms of kinda what are they hoping to have out there what's coming or at least what would they like to
see built. I don't know can anybody go out there and propose a new module or those things that are essentially open be an issue of we need a module for this, and Microsoft is reviewing those and saying, that's a good idea. It's been proposed. Now we just need somebody to go in and build it. Do you know how you propose a new module out here? How do you propose? I was just looking... Like here's a So So there's some governance things that go on here that I'm aware of. So 1 is... And I
kinda... It was it was in that support that is modules have to have an owner. So there has to be somebody who is accountable, responsible for that module development and maintenance. Right? In that world, only Microsoft F t's full time employees can be module owners. Okay. So you can't have somebody from the community come in and and say, I wanna spend a new 1 of these
up. It has to be an F t. And the reason behind that is this needs to have that measure of, like, Sla and sport ability behind it, So there's an enforcement mechanism. You need to have the enforcement mechanism and be able to provide that long term support that's required by this whole initiative of error As verified modules. So you can absolutely, like, contribute to these things without being a module owner, but as far as like, being a module owner, that has to be an f t. So you could make
proposals. I believe it's just on, like, the main E github home. I they have, contributing. Yeah. Sorry. I figured since I had it up here. I just interrupt. So if you go into contributing they have a process overview, and there's a module proposal issue that you can
create. So if you go to Github and go create a module proposal, Then it gets created and it has to be approved by the Av team and it has the whole flow chart here of someone who has an idea, check the module indexes, does it already exist orphan, what have you then it gets reviewed, and based on that review process, the Av core team will triage it and then go through and either approve it for creation or reject it. And then there's the whole process it goes through if it's been
created for approval. So I did find it. Well you were starting to talk there that they have the whole process flow chartered diagram if you do have an idea for a new module and what that process looks like. It is... I will say this is quite a process. To get to even that 1 release to your point about not just anybody can go out and do this, not anybody can go, just create them and manage them Microsoft has a well defined process for how this works. Yeah. It's actually, like, really well
thought out. Like, if you go to this website and looks through it. Like, there are design specs. And so there's, like, specifications that need to be followed for building of new modules, so that could be things like, for, like, a terra module, consistency in cross referencing, other modules, you know, there's code style guidelines that need to be followed, like, how do you do, like, tertiary tertiary operators, checking for k, like, all those kinds of things. So it is all very well
spelled out. It's thought out. There's kinda clear guidelines around these portability thing, who's responsible for what, who does what? Even all the way down to, like, Ro charts for you know, how these things compose and, like, what are the various teams? So, like, what's the difference between, like, the module owner and a module contributor? How do you product groups like folks like myself, fit into you that world? It's all there. It's pretty well.
Pretty well thought out. So, you know, whether you are a buy up or a terra form customer or you're doing both that you're just interested in infrastructure code Azure and how it compose and and how it's looking. I think this is an interesting 1 to go look at. Yeah. And if you are interested to in getting involved. I did see on the homepage that the Av team had its first external community calls. So I'm assuming this is very similar to Lake cow, some of the P p
stuff works. I know P p, they have regular community calls. So they just had their first community call back at the end of May of 20 24 on the 20 first, and then they do have a dedicated page. To these community calls that we can put in the show notes. So they'll go in and They occur quarterly so that people can get a chance to participate, they switch between time zones each quarter. To
kinda spam those time zones. So open the floor to attendees to bring up questions, ideas, stories, ingenious, suggestions, or just your cheerful presence Scott. So they do all regular regular calls starting what May. So if they're quarterly, there should be another 1 coming sometime June July, August, ish I would assume? And these also have been showing up. So it was
interesting. When we were planning this, I saw a monthly update from January 20 24 on the Azure tools blog, And I don't know that I saw many, like February March, but they just had another monthly update in May, where they talked about community calls there was some updates on module summaries in terms of where they are and building modules which ones are still in development, some more resources around it for bi, bi, all the terra forms stuff, So there are blog posts
also starting to show up about the Azure verified modules on the Azure tools blog under the tech community site. So we can post a link to a couple of those blog posts as well. If you're interested in finding out more about community calls getting involved. There's some Youtube videos out there as well that Microsoft and John Sa have published around Azure verified modules as well that we can link to. Yeah. It's actually very, like, thoroughly
thoroughly documented. So I would recommend most folks, like they start at a k dot mask forward slash av. That takes you to that github pages site and from there, you can spider her out and find all the information that you could possibly need. I think. Hopefully it it. And if you don't find it, just send Scott an email. Send... Scott don't don't send Scott email. Scott. Send back email. Ignore all his emails dot com. No replies, Scott at no some domains dot com. Yeah. Anyways,
anyways. Yeah. So so that's kind of a a quick rapid fire overview of Av or Azure verified modules. As we sink further into acronym suit. Not to be confused with an Azure virtual machine. Correct. Yeah. Those are reduced V. Those are just Vms, not Av. Yeah. Go by. And can they compete Av because you got Av and Av and yeah, all sorts it's other Av already. Yes. All, the acronyms. Alright. Well, thanks, Scott. Very interesting, excited to look at this. This is 1 area. I have not Del
dove dived. Much into. I've done a little terra form. I've done a little buy. I have not done a ton of it. It's been on my never ending list for a long time. Because it is interesting. I am always like, I'm always blown away by kinda how popular terra form is. I think it's easy to be in the micro... But to be in the Microsoft ecosystem and think, like, oh, this is just another thing out there, like, why aren't you doing arm templates
or bi or whatever it is. The reality is that there's kind of like this just gravity to terra form. I mean, it's it's a massive ecosystem. It extends well beyond Azure. So if you're a multi cloud customer, like, I totally get it. And it's a thing that I think everybody would be well served to not be an expert in, Like, you don't need to an expert in it, but you do need to know enough to be dangerous.
If you are on the infrastructure side of the house or you're doing devops, doing infrastructure as code, like, all these kinds of things. Like, if you're doing resource deployments through these through this model, terra form is definitely definitely something that is worth knowing. Like, it's a massive ecosystem, there's tons and tons of stuff going on there. And you won't be the only person doing it. Right? Which kinda makes it, like an
easy decision to make. Click. You're not forging into some new world they're going on a crazy adventure by saying, like, hey, I think we should use terra form for this instead of instead of an a a straight arm template or a bi template or en illumination and a shell script or something like that. Like, it's a big ecosystem. Yeah. It also works really well. 1 thing... Yeah. And 1 thing that caught my I too on this recently, I must not have been an Azure verified module module.
But someone did come out with a terra 4 module for Enter recently too. It must be 1 of the community modules. And Yeah. Again I I don't know how it's gonna go at bought brought my car Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's m 3 65 versus Azure. Like, I would say, like, this initiative is definitely Azure verified modules. It's not Microsoft verified modules or Microsoft cloud verified modules. It's it's Azure. So ent continues to sit in that weird space.
Right? It's kind of a a gap bridge between Microsoft cloud. And then Azure specifics. So I imagine over time, like, even if there's not an official inter module over here, like I said, like back to, like, the patterns and utility modules, things like that. Yeah. I I bet there are helper, helper things that come out. And some of those helpers already exist for buy. So for, like, buy, there's pattern modules today. For dealing with things like policy assignments, role
assignments. So, like, being able to affect policy changes on your resources, being able to affect, like, our back assignments, things like that, Though those do exist. Yeah. Here's an authorization role assignment in terra form. So there's some of those very interesting. Stuff to play with. More stuff. Add it to the list more stuff stuff. You never had enough. Never. I knew I knew you were looking for more. Alright. Well, thanks. Thanks for adding more
to my list. And with that, we should probably wrap up because I just got back from Vacation, and I also have a list from coming back from vacation. Separate from my list of stuff to play with from Scott. Alright. Well, well, once you get back to your other list, and then we'll get back to our regularly scheduled programming here. And now that vacations and things are starting to wrap up from June, July. Just in time for 1 of to probably go
on vacation again. Probably you. I'm done with the vacation. That was... I got all my vacations done in June. So alright. We'll enjoy Scott. Enjoy the rest of you today, and we will talk to you again soon. Sounds good. Thanks, Ben. If you enjoyed the podcast, Go leave us a 5 star rating in itunes. It helps to get the word out so more It pros can learn about Office 3 65 in Azure.
If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.