>> Time flies when your head's in the Cloud in Azure specifically.
>> My head is always in the Cloud.
[FOREIGN]
Hi, welcome in the summary of episode 44.
In this episode, I was with Shannon Kuehn
and we talked about the Azure Storage.
Azure Storage is everywhere and is super important.
Shannon explained to us how while working on a project,
she learned the basics from doing
a REST API and then how SDK could really help you.
We'll also cover an excellent learn module to get
started and know how to pick
the good storage you need for your project.
But before we get into the root,
let's learn a little bit more about her.
How how did you start your journey in IT?
>> Sure, I was also not very typical,
my degree was in Communication Studies in English.
I had been speaking in front of people since high school,
so I did competitive debate, competitive speech.
Didn't really know what I wanted to be when I grow up,
I knew I needed a degree.
I sometimes I feel like we are forcing kids
to pick degrees a little too early in life.
I picked a degree that was very broad and generic,
it took me to Chicago,
I'm from Nebraska originally.
It took me to Chicago and landed me
a couple of jobs out here that
prepped me for my first technical job.
Because I had done everything from loan servicing to
database marketing to healthcare market research.
I literally didn't know what I wanted to do career-wise.
I came out to Chicago,
I was an administrative assistant but also backup help desk.
I got hired on by a real estate investment firm
out here in Chicago and they were small.
They didn't really have an IT person,
so I had come in and I guess I'd
gotten better with technology over the course of
time by way of being a DJ.
Way back when, I'm a DJ,
I actually have records and I know how to spin records.
>> It was very interesting hearing Shannon
explaining how she learned and how she get there.
I was curious, since her background is not developer,
what make a project exciting for her.
>> I was just talking about this with my boss,
so we'll give a shout out to Jeremiah, hi Jeremiah.
>> Hello.
>> Prior to being a Cloud advocate,
I was a Cloud Solution Architect and I
worked with a lot of different customers, helping them out.
One of the coolest projects I had a chance to work on,
was we transitioned a big customer
away from a vendor, I won't name it,
but it's a patching vendor,
OS patching, application patching, updating applications.
Move them away from their product into
Azure automation using Update Management
and then Azure automation runbooks.
We helped them transition
a very expensive vendor over to Azure 100 percent,
and I think they went from spending $150,000 a
year to a little over $2,000 a year.
We leaned on Azure Update Management,
I built a lot of custom PowerShell,
that was where I figured out that I
shouldn't do five for each loop,
just do one for each loop but five things.
>> That's awesome, yeah.
>> It was a super cool thing, so I was telling Jeremiah,
I have been looking for this awesome opportunity
to publicize what we did.
At the end and a bunch of
custom PowerShell to be able to group servers.
They had custom PowerShell to
help them schedule the actual updates,
they did Azure Automation runbook to
rollback patches in the event that it screwed up a server.
Then they had an Azure Automation runbook for
all their Windows servers to patch
third-party apps and update the apps.
It was a cool reality,
I felt like I had just very much so achievement unlocked.
I was like, "Oh, that's what I'm doing,
I wish there was a better way of understanding what I'm doing."
But whatever I had an aha moment,
I feel like it's time to probably give that story back to
our very broad community base
and hopefully somebody finds it interesting.
>> Okay, now it's time to jump into the demo.
In this particular one, Shannon,
will start by showing us the basics doing REST API call.
Then, after that will be a better position to
appreciate a good SDK.
Look.
>> When I was doing all of that work with that customer and
we were getting them off of their patching provider,
I had found this function.
It's the cached Access Token,
so it's a bearer token script.
You have to be logged into Microsoft before it works.
This is important when you're authenticating and
doing things against the Azure Service Fabric.
You're creating a storage account,
you're moving files around,
you are building out Azure Automation runbooks.
This becomes, I joke a lot,
this is like the poor man's version.
Technically what you probably should be doing
is a service principle,
but a lot of times you're just trying
to figure out if something works.
So when I run this,
you'll get the awesome bearer
token and I will now minimize it because,
well, actually I'll do this, I'll clear it out.
We'll see that the bearer token hits off of the fact
that I'm already logged in and I'm logged into remote PowerShell.
When I was working with the storage team,
they didn't want me to use PowerShell
to try and create a storage account at first,
because I think that's pretty straightforward
and I'll showcase script that creates a storage account.
They wanted me to try and interact with the REST API directly,
well it turns out you can do it,
but it's not a super straightforward reality,
and it took me a little bit here to get this working.
I just ran the bearer token as
the variable and then we have to prepare our header,
which needs that bearer token,
it needs to be the content type of application, we have JSON.
Then you have to formulate the body,
here I'm calling out the SKU and then you
specify the kind and we talked about this in the last stream.
There's a handful of kinds here,
and I call them out in the script up here,
we can tie it to eastus,
and then you plug in your tags,
you're converting all of this to JSON,
and then this is the actual REST API call itself.
If you look at it, I was just shocked at the level of
code and maybe what I do here is I
go over here to the Create Storage Account just as a reference.
It's much smaller, I'm like,
"Oh, I get it,
this is why you want to lean on an SDK,
or this is why you want to lean on PowerShell or the ASI,
CLI, or an ARM Template."
The idea here it's clear more succinct,
it's not squirrely, you don't have to lean on a bearer token.
>> We then have fun with
the audience playing and we were showing how you could
use a SAS token to give
temporary access to different user
and we did a lot of test with that.
>> We'll change the public access level
to public access for containers and blobs,
and then I'll upload a quick picture.
[MUSIC]
I'll pick one of my cat pictures,
I'll do the human eye request assistance, we'll upload it,
takes a second here,
and once it's there, you can right-click on
the object and grab the URL.
Frank, I'm going to pass this URL to you
because it'll be publicly accessible.
If I go inside here and I.
>> I'm assuming you want me to put it in the chat, right?
>> Yes.
>> Because that's what I did.
>> Yeah, correct.
Human eye request assistance.
I think we were trying to think of fun,
unique things to do with the audience too.
Again, this is a publicly accessible storage account
I set or to the Blob container itself.
>> Let me know if you can see that image chat.
>> Yeah, and it'll just be this one right here,
the human I request your assistance.
>> Yeah. I can see it on my side.
>> Okay. Perfect.
>> It was working, we have responses in the chat that there
was working and then now it's locked,
I'm assuming it will only work with that new URL.
>> With the SAS token. Yeah, grab the full URI,
everything question mark on that's the SAS token itself.
>> That's what I did.
>> That declares the permission that declares how long it's valid,
so if you access that four hours from now,
you won't see that file anymore.
>> If you are interested to see the full demo,
it will be available at the link displayed in the screen,
but now let's learn more.
How can you pick the good storage for your project?
In this next section,
Shannon and I are talking about
the learn module that teach you exactly that.
>> Right, and it talks about the fact that,
I think this is the hardest thing for most companies.
Figuring out what they have and why they have it and
where it lives, what tends to happen,
especially in the on-premises world,
your data just sprawls,
especially if there's unstructured data.
What this talks about
is building out what that's going to look like,
building out classification models,
building out how the data is going to be used.
Because you need like a data governance strategy,
if you're going to move into Azure,
because weird things like Cosmos DB,
that was the one I can think of.
You get storage as part of it and you
can always hook things into that,
and you can think about Azure Search
and pull that data out of there.
You need to know where that data lives, because yeah,
you can backup your Cosmos DB,
but what if somebody pull all that data out into Azure Search?
Do you have something that
guides what users of that solution can do?
This really encourages folks to realize,
you probably need some structure in
terms of figuring out where everything lives,
figuring out if it's structured, semi-structured or unstructured.
Structured is just SQL, relational database,
semi-structured would be something like Cosmos DB,
maybe JSON ASC type table structure.
Unstructured would just be like photos,
like my cat picture would be an unstructured data type,
that's where this interest starts.
This comes down here and gives you some scenarios,
it walks you through product catalog data,
walks you through photos and videos.
>> I really like that approach because
I think in real life situation,
sometime it's part of your optimization process,
because picking the good storage type
for your project, would it be,
we're building it, or would it be I want to optimize it,
it's already there and now you want to break down and stuff?
Having the good storage is one of the key to have
a low hanging fruit in
optimization or cost optimization will help a lot.
I like that approach where it says,
"If you have this type of data or you're thinking
about doing this type of query on your data,
you should go this type of data,
structure classification, data classification."
>> Right. I think matching it to examples also helps.
I think folks have been around in this technical world
regardless of your in IT yet or you've been in IT for a while.
I think we've all seen something like product catalog data,
we've all seen something like photos and videos, business data.
I think we've been exposed to this one way or
another in our myriad of
different experiences in this life that we live.
Having it be that guide
really solidifies the learning objectives for this specific unit.
I think that's what they're calling these little
mini sections of the module.
>> If you like this video,
give it a thumbs up and leave a comment.
Tell us what you would like to see next or how
can we make those summary more efficient for you.
If you want to see the full version of the interview, the demo,
or the learn module,
don't forget all the link are in the description.
I'm Frank Boucher,
and I see you in the next one.