Hey, it's Matt.

I was recently over in not-so-sunny California at Cloud Field Day 19, where I met a bunch of awesome people, some of which I've worked with online for a number of years, some of which are new friends! It was a really awesome week, I learned a lot, really enjoyed the presentations, and as usual the Field Day team put on an amazing event.

For my followers who may still be in the private or hybrid cloud environments, I've been hard at work updating the content at Pluralsight around the VCP-DCV certification, with my latest course vSphere 8 Data Center Virtualization: Installation and configuration being released at the start of the month. There's one more course required to finish the learning path, and then hopefully it'll be on to a bit of GitHub content around their certifications!

Have an awesome week, and talk soon.

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Sudo on ... Windows?

If you're a Windows user, there no doubt has been and will continue to be many times where you've wanted to run a command that required elevated privileges, only to realise you need to fire up a new elevated console session, and then run your command again.

This week Microsoft announced the release of Sudo for Windows, coming first in a Windows 11 Insider Preview build. Those who have touched a Linux based system will be familiar with Sudo, which can be prefixed to any command to tell if you want to run the command with elevated privileges.

I also need to shout out to Gerardo Grignoli, the creator of gsudo, who recently wrote a post titled "Comparison between gsudo and Microsoft sudo", which is well worth a read.

GitHub Certifications - Price Reduction

In the last episode I shared information about the newly released GitHub certifications, being GitHub Foundations, GitHub Actions, GitHub Advanced Security, and GitHub Administration.

GitHub were fantastic at listening to community feedback around the pricing of these exams, which has since been lowered to $99USD! In addition, the foundations exam is currently 50% off until the end of March, so don't wait and go ahead and book in your foundations certification.

Andrew Brown has a full course on Free Code Camp's YouTube channel covering the foundations content.

Cloud Field Day 19

As mentioned in the intro, at the end of January I attended Cloud Field Day 19, where we heard from a number of presenters and had an amazing gathering of delegates. Once again it was a fantastic event put on by the team, and I enjoyed learning a lot from Camberly Bates and Steven Dickens of The Futurum Group.

Platform9 showcased their Elastic Machine Pool (EMP), a solution that optimises AWS EKS utilization and cost. EMP integrates seamlessly with existing EKS environments, promising up to 50% savings in compute costs without disrupting applications.

NeuroBlade introduced their SQL Processing Unit (SPU), designed to enhance data analytics by integrating directly into existing servers and analytics software. This innovation aims to significantly boost performance for handling large data sets.

SoftIron presented HyperCloud, a 'True Private Cloud' solution, which simplifies private cloud implementation. Their approach integrates storage, networking, and compute into a minimal footprint, tailored for regulated environments.

Dell highlighted their APEX solutions, focusing on multi-cloud storage management and private cloud deployment. The APEX Block Storage enhances multi-cloud environments' performance, while the APEX Cloud Platform streamlines on-premises private cloud deployment, emphasizing ease of administration and integration.

GitHub Advanced Security Code Scanning Autofix

I'm loving a lot of what GitHub is doing, especially in the security space. And, because of course, leveraging AI to support developing and shipping more secure code by default.

​GitHub's blog post introduces AI-powered features in GitHub Advanced Security aimed at enhancing application security testing. These features include an autofix capability in code scanning, leveraging AI for quicker and more accurate vulnerability fixes directly in pull requests. They also introduced AI-powered secret scanning to detect hard-to-find passwords and an AI-driven tool for generating regular expressions for custom pattern detection. Additionally, a new security overview dashboard offers insights into an organisation's security posture, facilitating better collaboration between developers and security teams.

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Podcast Recommendation

To stick a little with the "Field Day" theme, my podcast recommendation this edition goes to the On-premise IT Podcast by Gestalt IT, where every episode there's a great group of guests discussing anything from platform engineering, AI, cyber security, networking, and everything in between!

No matter your background and IT interest, I'm sure you'll find something in the deep library of episodes already released, with new editions dropping weekly. Click on the image below to hit the landing page!

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