Episode 386 – Exploring DevOps Tools: Maester, Pester, and SCUBA - podcast episode cover

Episode 386 – Exploring DevOps Tools: Maester, Pester, and SCUBA

Oct 10, 202438 min
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Episode description

Welcome to Episode 386 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, we explore three powerful tools designed to improve automation, testing, and security in modern development and operations workflows: Maester, Pester, and SCUBA. Whether you’re a DevOps engineer, PowerShell enthusiast, or security professional, this episode is packed with valuable insights on how to streamline your processes and strengthen your infrastructure using these powerful tools. Tune in to level up your automation and security game! Like what you hear and want to support the show? Check out our membership options. Show Notes Maester Installation guide Maester Tests Entra ID - Security Config Analyzer Tests Writing custom tests Pester Use the What If tool to troubleshoot Conditional Access policies Secure Cloud Business Applications (SCuBA) Project https://github.com/cisagov/ScubaGear  About the sponsors Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

Transcript

Welcome to episode 386 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on October 4, 2024. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. Today, we explore 3 powerful tools designed to improve automation, testing, and security, and modern and operations workflows with Microsoft 365. These tools are Maestro, Pester, and ScubaGear.

Whether you're a DevOps engineer, PowerShell enthusiast, or security professional, this episode provides insights on how you can streamline your processes and strengthen your infrastructure using these powerful tools. Tune in to level up your automation and security game. What's my upload? 924 with an upload of the same, 900. It is not my Internet. I can confirm that. When you left and came back, did I come back? Okay. Let me I don't know. Technology

woes abound, Ben. Technology woes abound. Yes. Because back to my Teams issue, your face is now covered up by my audio panel where I select my microphone and my speaker because apparently, in my tenant, in my client, on my Mac, some combination of them, for whatever reason, if I minimize my audio selection pane and go click on another window, Teams loses my audio. Like, completely gone. Telling you, it's a feature. It explodes and disappears into thin air and

Scott can no longer hear me. I come back to Teams, I click the little arrow, my audio panel drops up, and my audio magically returns. Ironically, with all of this, do you know how I knew that was an issue when you couldn't hear me? Besides me, like, waving my hands and going, is it you? Is it me? And yeah. Because my laptop, my MacBook Pro, and my Mac Studio both do the same thing, which means it is not an isolated issue. At least it's consistently bad. You got that going for you. I suppose.

The other thing I have noticed though that seems to be consistent with it is it's when my audio interface is plugged in. So this may be a 3 pronged issue between Teams, a road Procaster 2 audio interface, and Mac OS because I was just on a meeting right before this and my speaker phone was working just fine. Although, Teams did crash once in the middle of main meeting and my Mac completely crashed and rebooted in the middle of the meeting. Can't necessarily attribute that to

Teams. That being said, it was working fine on my USB speaker phone, and my audio interfaces seems to be the problem. It was very similar on my MacBook Pro where it was an audio interface that it didn't work with, and it seemed to work better if I use, like, the built in audio or AirPods. Either way, it's just weird, and I should probably submit some feedback, but I honestly have no idea how to record this to even

submit feedback on how this is broken. I got no good ideas for you there other than call up your favorite engineer on the Teams team and show them. Let's get on a call. Try and do a call, but it's gonna be a rough one. Can we do it in Zoom so it just works and it's ready to go. But It's weird. I do have a ticket open for another Teams issue and that Teams freezes every time I try to switch audio devices. Could be related. End of the story, I just have some weird audio issues in Teams right now.

Boy, we'll get it all sorted out, and we'll we'll figure it out. Anyhoo, yeah, why why don't we get going with our day today? Where should we go? To security and beyond with tools. We can go wherever you would like to go. Easy enough. Alright. So we've been talking about security. We'll stick with our plans, Scott. We have an agenda as long as my audio holds out for you.

Our agenda is security tools because we have been talking about security in various forms, fashion, Azure, Microsoft 365, Sentinel, reports, log analytics,

all of those things. And truth be told, we started down this path because we had some questions from I don't know if it came from listeners, if it came from Discord, if it came from a combination of the 2, really about some of the third party tools that have arisen lately around I would say a lot of it's security testing and hardening, reporting, all of that against Microsoft Cloud Environments, and that led us down like a 4 week

rabbit hole of just built in security. And we have finally arrived at a discussion around security tools. Here we are. We've made it. Which one would you like to start with? Would you like to take a pick? Take your pick. I think there's a bunch of different things out there that we could potentially talk about and

take a look at. So when you're thinking maybe in context of what are the tools that can help me do my job, there's certainly things like, we talked about Sentinel last week, which arguably is both like a tool and a security service. You got that whole cloud based SIEM thing going on. Really, what we're talking about today is, like, tools that you can install on your client, and you can run them, and you can potentially manipulate them and and move them forward.

That might be something like if anybody's ever heard of Bloodhound. There's things like Scuba, the secure cloud business application stuff. And there's also one from our buddy, Merrill, over on the Azure Cat team and the Entra I guess it's EntraID cat or EntraCat? Isn't it Microsoft Entra? Aren't we supposed to always preface it with Microsoft? I don't know. I can't keep up with these things. That CAT team. You keep me honest, Rory. That that that CAT team. So,

Merrill has been busy on the side. He I think when we had him on the show a while back, he talked about a bunch of the tools he built, and this is another new tool that he built, which is called Meister. So why don't we start with Meister as our first command line, hey, you can pick this up and run with it kinda tool. There we go. I think I had an audio glitch, Scott, because I had to go do something. Yes. This is out there on GitHub.

And if you're in Discord watching this, we can have some of it on the screen too, but we will place the show notes or place the link for Maestro in the show notes. This is a open source project. It's meister.devin. It's m a e s t e r is, like, the home page for it, and they have a lot of instructions, guidance here on how to

get started. So I actually was testing this out and using it for a client today and went through, like, the whole process of setting it up and doing an initial run of it in 15 or 20 minutes. So it uses Pester to do a bunch of tests. So if you go to the website and go to the docs and go to the installation guide, you install the Pester module in PowerShell, and then you install the Meister module. So this is out in the public PowerShell gallery, so you can do install module for both

Pester and for Meister. You go create a directory to run your tests in, and then you do an install Meister tests that goes and pulls certain modules, certain content down into that directory. And then they even have all the connections in there. So you can go do connect to Meister, and it'll go connect to your environment, may prompt you for some permissions from app

some app permissions. So I will say the 15 to 20 minutes is, like, assuming you're a global admin, and you can just click to approve Next, your way through it. Next your way through, and then do an invoke Meister. And then it actually just goes and runs all the tests. They also have some optional stuff, so it includes some optional, CISA tests, and those are skipped if the connections and modules

aren't there. So if you wanna get, like, the whole gamut of tests, you should also go install the AZ module. And I saw some stuff on here. Realistically, you don't need all of the AZ module, but it isn't defined in here what it needs. Some people are like, can we limit this so it doesn't take 10 minutes to install all of the modules that are part of AZ and limit it just to what we

need? Probably go figure it out. And then the Exchange Online Management module because Exchange Online is where all the security and compliance PowerShell things are, which, again, fascinates me. That's still all bundled in the Exchange module and the connection to Exchange Online. But if you install those, you'll get some additional tests that require those additional permissions, those additional connections to the cloud. But then you just go connect to all of those. There's a I

would say there's a couple different ones. There's a connect dash meister that just does, like, m 365 connection. If you install Exchange AZ, you can do a connect meister dash service all, and it goes and connects everything. Sorry. My wife just waved at me, and I don't know where she's going. She's leaving. I can't remember if she has Squirrel. Oh, I know where she's going. Okay. Yes. Absolutely, squirrel. Anyways, once you connect and invoke it, it goes and actually just uses PowerShell.

And this is where we can get into this a little more scattered about customizing it, but it runs all those built in tests, against Exchange, against Azure, security compliance, spits them all out into that folder you created. So I should go look at in that folder that it creates, it creates like some HTML files, it creates JSON files, it creates some markdown files, but all of those spit out a really nice HTML file that gives you a summary of

everything. So for instance, the environment I ran this against, it ran a 145 different tests. It gives me a dashboard that says it passed 63 of them. It failed 63 of them, and then there were 19 of them that were not tested. I did have some issues connecting to Azure in this particular tenant, which might be some of the

ones not tested. And then if you it gives you a couple of graphs that shows categories too around, like, at management policies, default settings, consent policy settings, and then it gives you a list of all of the different tests and even what policies against security frameworks these align with and if you passed it and you failed it. So this one, the first one was authentication math method, FIDO 2 security key state,

and that one was passed. Something else further down was a FIDO 2 security key and force key restrictions. They don't have key restrictions enforced, so that one was failed. And it'll go through and look at Microsoft Authenticator settings, MFA settings, authentication methods that are enabled and disabled, admin consent, app requests, MFA. Those are some of the Azure AD ones,

Exchange. It'll look at things like DMARC and DKIM, SPF on your domains, external warner external sender warnings, conditional access policies. All of those are some of the different tests that runs. The nice thing is next to each one by a pass or fail. It gives you a little view details where you can click in, and it'll tell you this one. Activation of global administrator role shall require approval. Your tenant has active assignments without a start date.

So this one, there's some global admins that aren't pinned, they don't have an active start date, and it gives an explanation. Then it also gives remediation actions. So if you wanna go fix this, here's this one has 9 steps to go in and fix it, and then it also gives you related links to Microsoft learn document nope. This one goes to the enter admin center, then it gives you links to the, CISA I don't know. What is that? The number, the virtual number, the article number. This is 7.6,

highly privileged user access. A link out to the CISA gov documentation around this and then some additional reference links as well. So it gives you a lot of information, not just about what you passed and failed, but how to remediate it and why and where this particular best practice or security guidance comes from.

Yeah. So this is a really cool tool, and there's a lot of moving pieces, but all the, like, work has been done for you by Merrill and the others who have contributed to this project alongside them. You mentioned that Pester is a required dependency for this. So Pester, for those that haven't run into it, is a a I've traditionally used it as like a unit testing framework for PowerShell, but it's really like a mocking framework. So you can go do and potentially write unit tests for

hey. I have a functions that I I don't know. I I wrote a function that returns the list of 50 US states, and you wanna make sure that function actually returns 50 states and not 49, not 51, not 52, things like that. So you could write a pester test against that given function, and it would tell you basically, hey, does this thing pass, fail, and what's going on there? So they're doing a very similar thing.

They've just taken that unit testing mentality and applied it to the logic and known set of rules for valid or preferred configuration for all these items and things like M365 services, like entry ID or for exchange. You could extend this out and write your own tests for, really, anything that could be managed in PowerShell or talk to over a REST API because you can always just do, like, an invoke web request on the PowerShell side of things and spin it up.

So there's this deep set of tests that you've described, and they're all documented on the meister.dev site. So there's a section down at the very bottom of the docs for test overview, and you can go in there and actually look at the individual tests that are run across these various dimensions for basically, like, Meister based tests, the CISA tests, anything that coming is potentially coming out of scuba, things like

that. And you can either run these tests as is, or you can take them and you can edit them because these are all just pester tests that are authored in PowerShell. So once you wrap your head around the way that pester tests are composed and how you describe a test and how you put it together, and a test can be a a bunch of different things in pester. It could be like, hey, the mock out of something. They can do you can do what if types of things happen.

You can do things like, hey, should this be this way? So it has all these kind of descriptive words that you can write tests in context of that and and then go ahead and run them. And then the really cool thing is so this is all built for you. This is ready to go and you'd potentially have to rationalize, okay, what are the set of tests that

I wanna run and things like that. So you just mentioned the outputs that come out of this, where we have things like that markdown file, that HTML file, so all that context from running the test that then become makes it actionable and and shows you the pass fail state of those tests. The way this thing is set up is because it's just PowerShell, you could run it from your laptop, like, you can run it from your Mac, you

can run it from a Windows box. Like, it's gonna be in context of, can you install, like, the Exchange modules if you wanna do, like, the connectivity with the testing with Exchange, things like that. Yep. But because it can run from anywhere, the other great thing that they've done is they've put guidance out there for how to

automate running these things. So if you're gonna go down the path of saying, hey, let me run an assessment across my against my environment, One of the general things that you would look for is running that assessment multiple times and then gauging where you go. Does my score improve? Does my pass rate improve? Things like that. So you can take all this and you can wire it up inside of, say, Azure DevOps and an ADO pipeline. You can run it inside of Azure Automation

where PowerShell can be consumed. You could run this thing in a container and just sidecar it and have a container that spins up, spins down on a defined schedule, things like that. So you can really take this and treat it, 1, as a point in time, k. Give me a snapshot of my state today, but then you can also take it and automate it and operationalize the whole thing end to end if you want to. And it's all very consumable as far as, like, the reports that it puts out, so you had that HTML view

up earlier. Yep. It's not like going into the rich Power BI report with a bunch of slices or things like that. It's basic HTML, but you could just have that running automatically in the background, say, like, once a week or once day, whatever your flavor is, and you could constantly be checking the output of that HTML.

You can put your manager to it or your manager's manager, your boss's boss, and they're gonna be able to figure out what's going on and see the big blocks for oh, I had 7 passes yesterday and 10 failures, And today, I've got 10 passes and 7 failures, so we're incrementally improving. So I I think from that perspective, super powerful. Maryland team have done all the heavy lifting around translating best practices across these workloads from both the lens of Microsoft

and from external entities like CISA. And they've already written all the mocks and all the tests out there, and then you can go in ahead and extend to your heart's content. Right? So if you don't want that global admin test run, great. Delete it or just don't run it. You want to change the logic of that test so that logic maybe ignores a couple of your break glass accounts or things like that, great. Go ahead and change it. It's just a PowerShell unit

test written in Pester. So as long as you're adhering to the Pester framework, it's all very straightforward. It's super slick, super turnkey. Like, I would recommend, like, folks, like, even if you're just, like, a PowerShell geek and you've never done Pester, this is a good introduction to Pester as well, like, without having to go and do a bunch of other weird stuff on the side. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365

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So I've started doing this for a couple clients now of mine, and that's where I've started even diving into this more as they're like, hey, Ben. We wanna do, like, weekly check ins with you, where you go set this up, you run it, you review the reports, we meet, we discuss what failed, what passed, do we wanna do anything about it, do we want not wanna do anything about it. And I had a call with one of my clients today about it where we looked at this and it's

absolutely our plan is to go in. We're gonna set this up maybe in Azure Automation, maybe Azure DevOps. So this is running on a regular, probably weekly basis, and there were some of these. We're like, like, giving your scenario, how your company works, it's showing failed, but we don't necessarily want this one to be failed because you have a valid reason for it to be

set the way it is. In some of them, we actually found where they were, I would say the recommendation is actually to be a little bit more open than what they were. There are certain things that they actually just locked completely down. They turned it off, and the best practice is to not actually have it off, but to have it where, like, users could request access or it goes through a workflow that's technically, we passed it because users, they don't even have to go through a request because

it's just completely turned off. But going in and starting to customize this, tweak it, and building from that a list of here's what we should do in your environment to adhere to best practices, to make sure it's secure. And like you said, you can do it they have guides in here, fresh automation, DevOps, and then they even have one in here for email alerts. So if you want to email this report out regularly, they have Slack alerts. Apparently, we can do email alerts in Slack alerts, but we can't

do Teams alerts. Maybe that goes back to our conversation earlier and yeah. We should just have easy webhooks and we don't. Yep. I'm saying, yeah. But then even some custom tests. You could. Like, you can at the end of the day, like, this is a framework that's been prebuilt for you. They said you just go download it, leverage it. But then, yeah, because it's all just a bunch of PowerShell

files. Right? It's just text files. Like, you can go see it all, you can manipulate it, and you can turn it into your own needs. So where this thing potentially focuses on, like, that that Microsoft 365 stack and the things that are going on there, I think this also fits very nicely into the world of Azure where maybe you wanna extend it and you wanna write some unit tests around configuration of your management groups and application of policy

within those management groups. You want to create something about, like, resource governance, an application of the right roles or a known set of roles in identity and access management. You want to do, like, a policy test kind of thing. It's all there. It's just sitting there waiting for you to pick it up. And like I said, as long as you can write a PowerShell script, you're off to the races. Yep. Super cool, super

powerful stuff. I've played with Pester in the past, and I've used it here and there. I never would have thought to use it for something like this. And it's just it makes perfect sense once you think about it. Oh, yeah. This is a natural fit. I never would have thought about it myself, and it's super cool that Merrill and team did the work to bring

this out into the world. So when you wanna go help me write some custom tests, Scott, I already have a list started of custom tests I wanna write for my client or like you said, for Azure, it would be super cool to start writing some extending this to some of those tests. It's super quick to pick up.

Again, these are all just pesters. So as long as you understand, like, the keywords for pester, you're not writing maybe, like, a function in PowerShell, but you'll do you'll describe an action and describe a context kinda thing. You can do that. And then they've structured it in a way where, they follow pester best practices where so every pester test ends with a suffix, like it's just a PowerShell file like a PS one script, but it's always something dot tests dotpsone.

So when you install Meister, there's going to be, a folder there for your custom tests. You can just dump those PowerShell scripts in there, And as long as they follow the the syntax and and what Pester, expects, right, like that like dot test dot psone suffix, those will go ahead and run on your next run automatically.

Yeah. Even looking to your point about it being super simple, looking at their guide on how to write custom tests, the fact that the documentation can be this short for adding a custom test to a file, I get based on what you're testing for, you may have to write more PowerShell, but this is super straight forward to go in and start implementing your own stuff. The other thing that's is super cool in here is there's a bunch of conditional access,

what off What if. What if tests. I don't know if you had a chance to look at any of these and how they compose together, but you can do things like do, like, conditional what if statements against would this user ID be impacted by a given policy that you've implemented or things like that. It's, again, just super turnkey and super powerful at the same time. Like, I I I love stuff like this, and

it's all open source, like, it's free. I I I love that you're picking it up and running and and taking it to customers and extending it out that way. That just shows, like, how kinda turnkey it can be. I wonder if you could do these conditional ones. I was looking at the conditional what if tests should contain and I'm guessing there is a way it queries that, runs the that blocks Azure. So this is testing if

there's the access there. If you could somehow test where if you have certain what if tests, if a user is connecting from a certain IP address with a certain risk level to and maybe this is doing this and I'm not reading it quite right, where in that report that you get weekly, did conditional access get changed in a way that your what if test starts to essentially, a contextual access test for a certain scenario becomes invalid because someone made a change

to it. Would this show a fail in there where all of a sudden these users aren't getting prompted for MFA? Do you know what I'm saying? Where you're actually testing what ifs as a part of your weekly run. That's actually what this is doing. Is that what this is doing? Okay. If you look under the hood, so this is using the test MT conditional access what if commandlet. Yep. And that cmdlet is not part of

Meister. That cmdlet is part of the official tooling that Microsoft gives you for actually it's like the official what if tool to troubleshoot conditional access policies from Microsoft themselves. So it's just it's using the same underlying things, same set of rest APIs, all that kind of stuff. So I should have known that. Yeah. This is super easy. So if you've ever done what if tests for conditional access inside of, like, the native portal experience, then that that's effectively

Yeah. So so that's effectively what you're doing is you're just running those same tests. You're just mocking them inside of PowerShell. Got it. And then you're looking for in Meister, when that test runs, what is the results of that test? Is it a block? Is it a fail? Is it ignored? Is it not applied, etcetera? Joshua

Sharfstein

You're basically looking for a truefalse to come out of the what if, right? What was the the expected outcome was pass or pass fail kind of thing? Yeah. Matthew

Bunnieski

Nifty. Maestro, absolutely something you should go check out. The other one, let's do a little bit of a comparison, Scott. We have a few minutes ish sort of 5 minutes. 5 minutes? Yeah. Let's do it. Let's push it. Right push it in it. So this is another one is scuba gear. I'm gonna go pull this website up. Oh, seriously? Let me tell you what I think about Bastion lately. It's right up

there with Teams for me. Scuba gear is another one that is out there that I would say is very similar to to Meister, only this one comes straight from CISA. So they wrote their own cybersecurity testing PowerShell module that is also open source out there in GitHub, and it's an assessment tool for Microsoft 365 tenant configuration conforming to the scuba, which is the security cloud business application baselines.

And this one is very similar to Meister and how you set it up that there's a scuba gear module out there in the PowerShell gallery. So you go install module scuba gear, you initialize it, which goes and downloads all the dependencies. You can go run, see which version is included, and then you invoke scuba gear with the product names. And I just passed in star, but you can pass in various product names and this one is slightly different in that it does include

I'm just gonna go to it, Scott. Nobody's looking at this. It includes I have my tenant name and ID displayed in here. I was gonna keep it in so nobody knew,

but since nobody's watching it. It includes products, so this one reaches a little bit further than Meister does in some of the tests where it looks at it still says Azure Active Directory, enter, but then it looks at Microsoft 365 Defender, it looks at Exchange, it looks at the Power Platform, SharePoint, and Teams, and does something similar where it runs tests and then gives you passed, warnings, failed.

And this one also says manual checks needed where it couldn't automatically determine a certain condition, and it'll go in and tell you how to manually check for a certain security setting. So same type of thing, spits out a bunch of HTML markdown, etcetera, to your computer. So you could also set this up to run-in a DevOps pipeline or something else. Once you click on a certain category, just pick power platform, it goes in and says, here's the control ID for power platform.

What do you want? The ability to create production in sandbox environment shall be restricted to admins. Trial environments are restricted to admins. DLP policy to restrict connector access. NondeFAULT environments should have at least one DLP policy affecting them. Allow inbound, outbound, connection allow list should be configured,

content security policies. So it gives you the same type of thing where a control ID, what the requirement is, what the result is, a criticality, should be done, shall be done, so recommendation versus requirement, and then a few details around I would say not as many as Maestro does. Maestro gives you, like, step by step. Some of these say, under details,

the requirement is not met. So you're gonna be on your own to go figure out what do you actually have to do in this case to go in and configure it. Other ones do have, like, the manual check ones. Usually, in the details, say it doesn't have the capability to check. Here's some instructions on how to do the manual check. This one, it also breaks it up into a bunch of different HTML files. So, like, Power Platform has its own, SharePoint has its own, Entra has its own, Defender has its own.

And when you get into some of the things like, Entra specifically, there's gonna be some redundancy there. What I have thought would be interesting is to actually see if you could somehow take some of these tests that they have in scuba gear since that's all open source and take Meister since that's all open source and somehow combine them to include maybe some of these additional SharePoint teams power platform checks into the Meister checks so I could just have one tool that gives

me everything? Yeah. You could. So Meister has a subset of the CISA tests in there. Yep. And those tests are actually coming out of CISA control IDs, which then all map back into the scuba project. So you're looking at effectively, like, that subset for SharePoint online, Exchange online, things like that

that come out of CISA. But if you want, the nice thing that the Meister folks have done, if you go read their documentation, so if you hop into the CISA section for the Meister docs, they will tell you what they have implemented and what they haven't implemented. And in some cases, like, they'll give you the reason why they haven't turned it on. And for a lot of this, it's because they're focused on native tooling and kinda what's available to you.

So scuba might go out and use, like, a nonstandard way to test for something within a given service, say, like, SharePoint online, And just knowing and having chatted with Merrill in the past and things like that, I bet one of the, like, the guiding principles here is, hey, this stuff just needs to be, like, in the graph and ready to go and easily retrievable. And if it's not, then we'd be doing it in a nonstandard way, and we don't really wanna show folks how to do

it in a nonstandard way. I'm sympathetic to that. So if you go read the Maestro recommendation, so you have the page now for system controls for Microsoft SharePoint online. It'll say, hey, here's all the control IDs, and it'll just straight up tell you, like, oh, this one isn't implemented. And for any of them, you can just click the control ID, and it'll take you over to the scuba GitHub site, and you're just landed into that markdown file.

So you could see, like, what the test was going to test for and how it was gonna come out. And then if you wanted to implement said test, yeah, you can absolutely do that. But it would be on you to implement it at that point. If you really want the world to be your oyster and have it all in one place, potentially some more work to do there. I I would bet that the Merrill and the folks who did Meister wouldn't mind if you just wrote some stuff up for him and contributed back. It's all

also just on GitHub. Right? This is OSS, so you can go put a PR in if you want for a new test, or if you write a a new, like, really cool custom test or something like that and wanna share it with that community, you could absolutely do that through GitHub and things like that. Yeah. I may have to do that. Maybe I have to get involved in writing some new tests for Maestro and playing with some of that, submitting some of that up there because

I agree. If I'm gonna do this, I might as well submit it so everybody else can take advantage of it as well. If you are an m 365 admin, arguably an Azure admin, like, you're dependent on Azure Active Directory, I would totally give this one a spin. Spin it up, see what it does. It doesn't take you long to do. You should be able to carve out an hour and

do this end to end Yep. Especially if you're running in, like, deity mode or you have the ability to elevate yourself into, like, global admin or something for a limited amount of time just to make your life a little bit easier for that first run to see, like, where you really stand in the world, and then you can just go from there. Awesome. Thanks, Scott. I'm now 5 minutes late for my next meeting, but it will be okay.

Worth it. We will survive. Yes. So maybe we'll have some updates later with changes we've made, fill you in on what Maestro tests I've gotten written lately. But I'm with you. Like, these tools, the work Merrill has done on this is and others, we should say. It is not just Merrill. He has collaborated with us on a few others as well. So he is just the one that we first heard about it from, but they have done an outstanding job on this this platform, this framework, this

tool, so absolutely go check it out. Yeah. I highly recommend it. Alright. Well, that's Scott. Enjoy your weekend. Don't work too hard. The weather is actually starting to be nice out. Maybe go outside, enjoy some weather in the eighties. Yeah. I was gonna say, I was outside the other day, and I was like, it actually feels decent out. And I got in the car, and I'm like, it's still 85. I guess that means I'm getting used to Florida. Only took a couple decades, but you're making

it. Yeah. I'm getting there eventually. Alright. Sounds good. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Scott. We'll talk to you later. 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 365 and 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.

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Episode 386 – Exploring DevOps Tools: Maester, Pester, and SCUBA | Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast