You. Hello and welcome to the let's Talk.
Azure Podcast with your hosts, Sam Foote and Alan Armstrong.
If you're new here, we're a pair of Azure and Microsoft three, six, five focused It security professionals. It's episode 26 of season four. Alan and I had a recent discussion around the season finale. We've been going for a year, the latest season, season four, and it's coming up to the holiday season. So Alan and I sat down and had a bit of a recap about the episodes, what we thought went well, the things we're looking to change into the next season, season five for next year, and also talk through a few of our stats as well. So, yeah, it's a great episode. So let's jump in. Hey, Alan, how are you this week?
Hey, Sam. Not doing too bad. How are you?
Yeah, good, thank you. It's very close to the end of the year, which means season finale. Very exciting.
Yeah. I can't believe we're here, to be honest. So doesn't feel like it.
In what way, Alan?
It doesn't feel like we've been doing this is the 26th episode. It doesn't feel like that at all.
No. Yeah. I think what's interesting about my week to week is as the numbers start to climb on the podcast episode numbers, we obviously start the year out new season, episode one, and you think there's lots to go through, lots of content to produce, and then time just sort of slips away, really, doesn't it? You know, and it just it just before you know it, it's into the autumn and then you're you're where we are now, right at the end of the year.
Yeah. We extended this season, didn't we? Because we have done two seasons this year. But this one, we normally do 20 episodes, isn't it? And we're now at, what, 26.
Yeah.
So we had to extend it to keep us going. We've had a nice long break, I suppose, but it's no good for our listeners at that point.
Yeah, definitely. So I'm probably just going to call out now that if you're here for any sort of technical content or to learn anything, it's not going to be this episode. This is just us sort of cruising into the holiday season as gently as we possibly can, basically. So, yeah, we're going to talk about what we thought went well this season, our favorite episodes, the ones we enjoyed sort of making the most. I'm going to talk through some of our stats and also we're going to talk about some potential plans and changes for next season, which is next year. So, Alan. Yeah. What do you think went well this season? What do you think worked?
We've well, we got some new equipment, didn't we, for this season? So I think that's helped with well, I say it helped you're the one that does the editing, but I think it helped you with the editing side of things. And generally our setup is a lot easier to get going, isn't it? So I think it's definitely helped us. Hopefully our audio is better for our listeners otherwise there may not be any point in us getting this new kit but yeah, I think that was a good part. Again, we kind of felt very organized from a sort of content perspective, I feel, from our side and getting that content out to the listeners and yeah, I think that's probably my sort of key area. I think some of the episodes actually this season we had some more organizational, sort of context side of things, more scenarios than just the technology specific technology as well.
Yeah, just to talk about your first point. Yeah, I don't know when did we buy the new microphones, Alan? At the start of this season, about six months ago.
Yeah, I think it was in the break.
Yeah was it? Yeah and what that's effectively allowed us to do is it takes a lot of post processing away because we try to strike a balance of efficiency and sort of perfectionism really in some respects. Right. So, yeah, our new microphones and also audio filters that we've got cleans up a lot of the noise and things like that. So it does make it a lot easier because I think one of the things that we really struggled with was time not necessarily to plan the episodes and to record them, because it's quite simple to jump on, record an episode, but it's all the work that has to go on in and around. It all the things you don't see. And personally, for me, it's not the most exciting thing listening to both of our voices just constantly over and over again whilst I edit it. So yeah, that's been really good and I think what we've started to do, we started to do this a few seasons ago but what we really tried to start to think about is to have sort of different levels of content as well. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to think about if you are approaching one of these topics, fresh, brand new, then we introduce enough technology to you or concepts to you so that you can get some value and follow along. Because sometimes, especially when it's topics that we know really closely because we do cover topics that we do day to day and then we also cover topics that we're just interested in or we're running in labs and playing around with. And when it's the former content that we know really well, we can sometimes, I feel, go too technical. And really the key points, especially on a podcast, because we can't visually show anything, the real key points are the value that it can bring if it's security, the posture that it can increase, the assurance or risk reduction that it have, or if it's a technology that can make your business more efficient, then we should highlight those values, not just how technically superior that technology is. And I think as well, because of the way that we now record, it's very consistent and we should probably just call out our sort of first across the pond podcast episode. That just seemed to go really well. It was no real different than Alan living, I don't know, what are you from, Alan, 8 miles away versus being a couple of thousand miles across the world.
Yeah, well, especially when we didn't know, or I didn't know what sort of Internet connection I was going to have, the room I was in, what audio mayhem that might have caused you and that sort of stuff, and whether actually we got it was successful and it did work out really well. Timing actual the time we did it like late at night and you early in the morning maybe wasn't the greatest. But yeah, recording it was absolutely fine. So I think that was good. It's good to know so that if we are around the country, around the world, we can still create an episode. I think that's great.
Yeah, definitely. So, Alan, do you want to jump into some of your favorite episodes?
Yeah, so some of my favorite episodes recording was definitely around Microsoft Defender for Cloud Security posture Management. It's been popping up in my day to day work generally is kind of a key focus, getting visibility of what your environment looks like. I think that's very key. So it's definitely a good episode to do. And that's season four, episode four. Another one was talking around how to secure your bring your own devices. Again, that being one of those sort of scenario ones there where we can use Microsoft technology to make users more productive while still being secure and controlling that balance there without incurring costs of bringing having two mobile phones, a corporate one and a personal one and things like that. And that was around, what was it? Season four, episode two, I think. And I think we did one on Windows device management as well, which was season four, episode 16. Another one, which was very recent, I think was the sort of Enter ID. So what was previously Azure ID. I think it was good to kind of just like I said, I don't think out of all our episodes or seasons, we actually talked about Enter ID as a concept, as a cloud identity and what it's there for. So I think that was really good to sort of bring go back to basics, kind of like you said, let's start from the beginning and do that. And then I guess the last one I thought was good is the one that you did around Azure DevOps and how it can help with CI CD processes as well as the boards, in effect, some of that project management side of so that's my sort of top, was it? Top five or six episodes in a quick sort of talk. What about you, Sam? What were some of your favorite ones?
Yeah, I suppose the first one that sort of sprang to mind was Azure Chaos Studio. I would say it's quite a niche offering because I think it caters more to a certain maybe site reliability engineer. It's quite a specialized field, really. But it's interesting because when we do our list of the episodes that we want to cover and we plan them out, chaos Studio sort of popped up, and I spent some time playing with it, and I was like, this is actually really valuable. And it's also fun to intentionally break things that are going to make things more resilient in the future. So, yeah, definitely a big one for me. That's season four, episode eleven, Azure Container Apps, which is a very recent one. I'm a big fan of containerized applications and I do really like Microsoft's offering with Azure Container apps. Personally, I think it's a good balance. It gets you in the door with Containerization, but without the overhead of managing like a Kubernetes cluster, you've got a good amount of flexibility and configuration there as well. So it's not so extrapolated and simplified and dumbed down that you can't do everything you need to with it. So that's why I really like it. It can be very cost effective. I'm going to say with Container Apps, timer, jobs, fractional, CPU, orchestration, there's a lot that you can do there. Yeah. And I also just wanted to call out your Defender for Cloud CSPM, season four, episode four. Again, Defender for Cloud to me is a no brainer, especially the free offering. I think it's probably one of Microsoft's most what's the best word to describe it? It's probably the most feature rich free service, I think, that they offer, because you do get a lot of free tiers with Microsoft. You soon exhaust those free tiers. But the value that you get out of Foundational CSPM and how simple it is to configure, especially for Azure and if you're in those other clouds, AWS or GCP, you know how to configure the links in and do the connections. So I think for the fact that you just effectively switch on and you get value out of it. Yeah, okay. If you want to do other workloads, that's going to cost you extra. And some of those workloads can become very expensive very quickly. But there is a lot that you can gain for either no cost or very minimal cost as well, because some of the workloads are ridiculously cheap, especially if you're not, because they're sort of consumption based. If you're not a heavy consumer, then you're going to get really good value because even if you're not a large consumer, it doesn't mean that you're not storing sensitive information. We also see so much development with Defender for Cloud in the security space that it's constantly evolving, constantly changing, and we could almost make an episode on Defender for Cloud every month, it seems. I think that just shows how important is to Microsoft as well. The only other thing I just wanted to call out as well is the amount of change in investment I think we've seen in terms of product development in and around Azure. Obviously we see it from the security side, but we almost can't keep up with the rate of change in Azure Office 365. It's quite staggering the amount of new development that we see. And now we've got AI, and AI isn't going anywhere from what I can see. It's being layered in absolutely everywhere. We've almost got a completely new area and Shift in focus as well. So, yeah, hats off to all the product teams at Microsoft. We get good feedback from them as well. They're very great people to work with. So, yeah, no fair play. The amount of new IP and developments that they kick out.
Yeah, for my role, keeping up with what's probably a sin of myself, keeping up with all of the try to keep up with all the security technology across the whole Microsoft plane or ecosystem is hard enough to keep up with, let alone, like you said, all those just Azure and Microsoft three, six, five, productivity and everything. There's no way there's no way you can keep up with the amount of innovation that's there.
Yeah, which is great. It's great for us because it's got a lot to talk about. So I'll take it, should we go through some stats? Because they're always quite exciting.
Yeah.
Okay. So top locations, I think this was the same last time. I don't know, third and fourth might have been duking it out last time, I think, but by far hello to our listeners in the United States, by far and away our biggest country for listenership. And then in second place is the UK. I was going to say not very far behind, but it is actually quite far behind, to be fair. Then Australia and Canada. So thank you to everybody that's listened to our episodes and especially around the world, because listening to Alan and I babble on about Azure, usually an hour a week, thank you for listening. Spotify has now taken the top spot for listens, which has slowly been creeping up. It's undeniable the amount of listenership that we have on Spotify. So thank you to Spotify's algorithm for doing that for us because all we do is submit to Spotify. We don't do anything else whatsoever. And then secondly is Apple podcasts. What's interesting is after you, Apple podcasts and Spotify are very similar. And then the next sort of application or platform that users listen from is minuscule in comparison. There's just lots of other applications, basically, but Spotify and Apple Podcasts are just massive. That's good. Unfortunately for Alan, iOS is for operating systems. iOS is by far dominant. So shout out to all my iOS listeners out there, but weirdly, we have massively skewed stats towards iOS. I don't know what that says about people that are interested in listening about Azure, but maybe those stats are wrong. I don't know. So, yeah, our most popular episodes from this year, azure Functions, entraid, App Service, and Ignite as well. It's really interesting to see Ignite sort of so high because it's well, all of those episodes actually aren't particularly that old, I don't think. I think Azure Functions might be an older one, potentially, but they're all pretty recent, aren't they? I believe so. It's really interesting to see and I think that's really driven from our increase in listenership since the start of this year. We had to double check this number because it was pretty insane. We've had a 525% increase in weekly listeners since this time last year. So in theory, that's two seasons, I suppose. But it just goes to show the growth that we've had with the podcast because if you think we had two seasons before that and a very long break in between, was it season one and season two? I think.
It was eight years or something, wasn't it?
Yeah. So, yeah, our graph is looking really it gives us a lot of confidence. It looks like the hockey stick graph that you want to see absolutely no listenership for a long time and then a big spike upwards. So, yeah, we're very thankful for everybody that's listening. Subscribing. We get messages on LinkedIn, email, contact form, people from Microsoft contacting us. So, yeah, thank you ever so much to everybody listening. It's amazing.
Alongside that, our content must be reasonably okay listeners to say.
You sound too confident to say that, Alan. No, but no, as long as there are people listening, that will drive us to produce content every week. So, yeah, that's what we're doing, as we know, because it's the 26th episode. Yeah. 26 episodes in this season. How many episodes do we have in last season, Alan?
21.
Okay.
47 episodes this year.
Okay. 47 episodes. Okay. So, yeah, that's not too bad. To be fair. I think the consistency, we've got nailed. I think we haven't missed one, actually. No, that's a little bit of a fib because we were about 40 minutes late for the Ignite episode, but that was pretty extreme. Time zones.
Yeah, we're literally recording at the time. Yeah, we could have almost done a live episode, but not been able to submit it to the podcast side yet.
So some cool stats coming out of what we get access to. So, yeah, I'm not sure we'll be able to do a 525% increase this time next year, but yeah, we'll just see what we can do.
Yeah, there's some great stats. I think it's good. Yeah, like you said, it makes me want to continue. I want to continue, but continue creating content.
Yeah, exactly. There was a long time that we had very little growth and we still enjoyed learning about new technology. And I think we just sort of go back to the reason why we started the podcast is that we would spend evenings just talking about different technology until stupid o'clock in the morning and we just thought, well, should we just start recording that? So for me, it's no real different to those times because I learn a lot out of my own episodes when I've got to prepare for them, but out of your episodes as well. So everybody wins, I think, basically, yeah, definitely. So, Alan, what are our plans for the next season?
So I know that we're going to at least do we're going to change it to one season a year, aren't we?
Yes.
And that we're going to go from the first week of January till sometime in December. So we're looking at at least I mean, we did 47 episodes last this year, but at least 48 episodes for season five. Quite seems weird calling it season five. So, yeah, that's a change. So it's not going to be a break. Was it like May June time? I think we did a couple of week break. I think we kind of thought, well, we must just done those other two episodes, I guess, just kept so that's definitely a small change to it. What else are we going to do, Sam? Are we going to tempt, maybe see if we can work out guests?
Yeah, we've had at least a couple of people ask us if we're going to start doing guests. Technically, we have the technology to do it. It's definitely something that we have thought about previously. So I think what we're probably going to do, and this is not set in stone, because we've got all Christmas to eat, drink and think about the podcast, but I think the plan is to slot in maybe extra episodes with guests in and along the other content, basically, and see what the reaction is to that. I want to make sure that we get out of the episode as much information as we possibly can from that guest and really have a reason to have that conversation, if that makes sense, because we're very fortunate that we do know some really interesting people, a lot more interesting than we are. And it would be good for everybody to listen to what they have to say. So, yeah, no, we're at least going to try it, aren't we, Alan? See how we go.
Yeah, definitely. Like you said, we've got the technology, it's just logistics and everything else, the stuff in the background to make it a good episode. And like you said, also the content and the tract that will come out of it to you, the listeners.
Yeah, exactly. The only other thing that I just wanted to sort of talk about as well for next year is I think we're going to do more event coverage or news coverage, I think, as well. I don't know whether we slot in, say, a monthly or fortnightly news episode, but what we have seen is when we have sort of recaps like we did, our recap of Ignite, the response from that was really good. And what's great about a podcast is that we can concisely summarize. We aren't generative AI, but we can concisely no, we can't even say concisely, can we? We can rabble on about things that happen. So I just want to make sure that we're covering as much because with a lot of Azure and any technology really, there's always rapid change, there's always new things that are coming out. And for me personally, sometimes it's just getting the visibility of new ideas and technology. We'll see a blog post that's shared from somebody at Microsoft about technology that we use day to day and we didn't even know that that change was coming. Maybe we weren't part of the private preview or maybe it didn't go through that sort of validation testing. Right. There's always things that you miss. So sometimes it's just good to have people giving you updates, making things front of mind, basically. So we used to do the news every week back in season one, season two, maybe something like that. We removed it because we felt that it sort of slowed down the start of the episode. You sort of had to get through the news to get to what we were actually talking about. Or we put news at the end and we thought that somebody's just listened to us for 40 minutes rambling about something. The news is probably the last thing that they want to hear.
And I think as well, because we're doing episode a week, maybe there isn't much there may not be much news to talk about. So it kind of then becomes inconsistent, doesn't it, with the news sort of part of a episode? So I think, like you said, if we're doing maybe monthly, maybe every other month, maybe, I don't know, it depends on how much we see from announcements, generally from technology coming out, but also from the events, like you said. Yeah, it's probably worth getting that stuff out. So yeah, we'll definitely try and do some of that next season.
Yeah, definitely. That's pretty much it from me, I think. Alan, anything else you want to cover from season four?
No, I don't think there's anything about season four. The only thing I'd probably say is we've kind of said about it. But, you know, thanking you, the listeners, for being here and listening to us ramble on about technology to try and get good points over to yourselves and yeah, it's great to know that there's people listening and we want to continue as much as we can.
Yeah, no. So thanks ever so much, everybody, for listening to all of our episodes and our content. Thank you to you, Alan, for pushing both of us as well to make content each week and just from us. I hope everybody has a great holiday season. Hopefully you get chance to wind down, relax and yeah, we'll catch you next year.
Probably one thing to say, when are we coming back?
I think it's the oh, that's a good question, actually. Fifth?
No, fifth or the twelveTH. I can't remember what we said. Is it the first week or just the second week in?
Well, you're not going to hit your 48 episodes then, are you? Al? You got to think about yeah, we.
Do the fifth then. We're doing the fifth. Start early.
Cool. Right, thanks everyone, for listening. We'll catch you on the 5 January 2024.
Yeah, thanks.
All bye.