What a show we have for you this week!
I'm Lars Klint and I have new certification exams,
a serious Linux vulnerability,
and an interview with the man behind the new cert. It's like something sweet,
something sour and something hot. Yeah.
That analogy totally works.
The last couple of years,
the certifications in Azure have been focused on the existing services in Azure,
such as with AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals, AZ-104
Azure Administrator and AZ-204 Azure Developer.
While that suits students and professionals that are in the cloud already,
what about the many,
many IT professionals that are still working with on-premises infrastructure and
are looking at the cloud as sort of an add-on? Recently, the AZ-600
exam addressed part of this area by covering the Azure Stack Hub hybrid
cloud products, and this week there's a new certification for you:
Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification...a bit of a
mouthful. But anyway, instead of me telling you all about it though,
I went straight to the source: Orin Thomas,
and to get his thoughts on it. I'm here with Orin Thomas, from Microsoft.
Thanks Orin for joining me and Orin is one of the people behind the new certs:
the AZ-800 and AZ-801 as it's called. So thanks Orin for joining me.
No worries Lars. Good to talk to you again.
Yeah, I know. Orin's actually not too far from me, but because of, you know,
we can't leave home restrictions, et cetera, we have to do it via Zoom.
Otherwise we'd do it in person. So maybe next time. But, first of all,
I want to know what are these two new certs and, or it's one cert, two exams.
I should be specific here. So 800 and 801. What are they?
Well,
what they are is that they are a certification that is
dealing very much for people who are implementing
hybrid technologies.
So what they're designed around is for people that, for example,
are responsible for managing very traditional Microsoft on-premises
types of networks,
but who are starting to reach up to the cloud and are starting to integrate
those existing on-premises network with the appropriate cloud
services such as Azure Arc, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery.
And so on.
And so, you know, on from that, why do we need two exams?
Because everything so far, it's sort of been, you know,
everything's been dwindled down essentially,
or boiled down to one exam except for the architecture one.
So the reason that we have two, and two is fairly pared down,
is that there are a vast variety of technologies
that someone who is an on-premises Windows Server Administrator,
or Windows Server Hybrid Administrator actually deals with.
And in the first exam we start off with the core,
what we call the core ones which are identity, storage,
management, networking, and compute.
What we're looking at there is your meat and potatoes roles,
all of the things that you would absolutely need to know.
And especially when we're covering things like storage and networking,
things that you need to know before you start moving into more complicated
topics. In the second exam, we're looking at security,
high availability, backup and recovery, troubleshooting,
monitoring, and then migrating on-premises workloads into Azure.
So the idea there with the second exam is that these are the topics that you
would hit once you had those foundational, or those core topics,
done.
Yeah. Right. So, I mean that all makes sense. And it sounds like it's a,
quite a large topic. So is, why did you choose to do it now?
Is this because the cert was ready or is there a specific, you know,
history behind why this is a good timing for it right now?
With this focus on role-based certifications,
what we don't want to do with a certification,
and what was certainly done 20 or 30 years ago, is 20 or 30 years ago,
certifications would be released.
And they would talk about things that were brand new,
that you would never have used. Whereas with a role-based certification,
it's really about a testing to stuff that you might be doing,
or that is within reach of you doing right now.
So with the hybrid story,
Aaure's hybrid technologies have now reached a level of maturity
where people are actually implementing them in the real world where we've seen
people start to use Azure Arc, start to connect their event logs into
Azure Security Center.
And we also had the bonus of
the approximately three year release cadence of Windows Server with Windows
Server 2022 being released. And we sat there and we thought, you know what,
Windows Server 2022,
one of the things we want to get across is how good this is in hybrid
situations. We've got these great hybrid technologies.
This would be a good time to come back to certification on Windows
Server, because we've got a good story here.
Whereas if we'd done it prior to now,
it still might've been a bit too biased into the Windows Server,
and there wasn't enough of a hybrid story.
But now we feel we've got a really good story and a realistic
story for what people are doing so that people who,
and everybody's on a different, at a different stage in their hybrid journey.
So that makes sense,
and you said you know people are different parts of this journey within hybrid.
And I totally agree with that because, you know,
I've done a few presentations on multi-cloud and the hybrid and how that relates
to each other and yada yada yada, and it's just people everywhere.
So who is your target audience for these two exams and this one cert?
Out of the bat,
it's obviously people that work with Windows Server on a daily basis
and are starting to use, or already use,
Microsoft cloud technologies,
or at least interested in starting to use the Microsoft cloud technologies.
We're going to create a course on this certification without a doubt.
When I don't know, sort of out of my hands,
but right now I'm assuming you can take the exam right now in beta?
I think that's right? But where do I go to study for it?
What is the best path to actually get some knowledge on this area?
Okay. So actually you can't take the exam in beta and the beta won't actually be
available until December. So,
what I'll do,
there'll be a link on the bottom of the screen to a blog post that I wrote
that actually then links out to two study guides.
And what those study guides have is that they have a list of the
exam objectives,
and they have a list of relevant docs.microsoft.com articles
and MS Learn modules.
So that's one place where you could start.
So one of the reasons we wanted to get, when we announced the certification,
put up some study guides as well,
was to not only prime the pump for students who were thinking of taking the beta
in a couple of months time, because studying for a certification, as you know,
can take several months. So if you've got the material there,
but also priming the pump for content creators,
or third-party ancillary content creators,
to start creating their own stuff so that they're not standing there going, wow,
this exam gets released next week,
we've got to start creating content.
But that by the time the exams are released in beta in December,
and then sometime, probably in the new year, when the exams go live,
by the time the exams go live,
the hope is that there will be a whole lot of third party content that people
who want to take the exam can consume to help them prepare.
Yep. Yep. No, that makes sense. Thanks very much, Orin.
I'm looking forward to see what happens with it.
This is not exactly my ballpark. As you said developers, that's me,
but it is interesting because there's been very little sort of official
Microsoft stuff around, especially Arc.
And some of the more hybrid technologies. So thanks for putting this together.
You and the team, of course. And, well yeah,
I look forward to see where it goes.
Fantastic. Great to talk to you Lars.
If you'd like to learn more about getting cloud certified,
check out ACGs free plan.
Gives you access to free courses and quizzes,
plus learning paths and original series content,
and you don't need a credit card to sign up.
We'll be sure to include a link in the description below.
Do you use Linux on Azure?
Chances are that you probably do as more than 50% of VMs on Azure are
running Linux. Well pay attention now.
Four security flaws allowing remote code execution and
privilege escalation, were found in the Open Management Infrastructure, or OMI,
software agent silently installed on more than half of Azure
instances. Yeah, silently, as in you didn't know it was happening.
Oh my God, OMIGOD, O M I G O D. Whatever it's called.
That's the name given to the vulnerability by the cool kids.
It affects Azure VMs that use Linux management solutions with services such as
Azure Automation, Azure Automatic Update, Azure Operations Management Suite
(OMS), Azure Log Analytics, Azure Configuration Management,
or Azure Diagnostics.
Successful exploitation enables attackers to escalate privileges
and execute code remotely, on compromised Linux VMs.
Now there are already reports of the vulnerability being used for...any guesses?
Yup. Crypto mining of course.
Microsoft has no mechanism available to auto update vulnerable agents on all
impacted Azure Linux machines though.
So they've asked urgently everyone to manually update their VMs,
including you. Yes. Go quick. Go patch that Linux VM, come on!
Details are in the description for this episode.
What do you think of the new certification or the Linux vulnerability?
Why not head over to our Discord server and join the conversation?
Link is in the description.
As we say on the A Cloud Guru team when there is yet
another Azure certification that we have just only finished getting our head
around the last one,
"Seek and you shall cloud." So see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud
Gurus.