RunAs Radio

Business Process Automation has been around a long time - what are the latest approaches? Richard talks to Ian Cooper about his work building BPA workflows in organizations - starting on paper or a whiteboard to make sense of the process before bringing tools into the equation. Ian talks about building repeatable workflows that are well-documented and source-controlled, typically through GitHub. As workflows get more complex, you'll need orchestration engines that can handle failures and provide telemetry to identify when and where things go wrong. And make sure you let users know how things are going - or they will worry!
Links
Kafka
Durable Functions
GitHub Actions
Temporal
Pulumi
OpenTelemetry
Recorded December 5, 2025

How do you get an idea to implementation in your organization? Richard chats with Amber Vanderburg about the work she's done helping teams understand the process of getting projects started and finished. Amber talks about defining a clear starting line, ending line, and dead line. While many projects are important, prioritization is the challenge. This means often other priorities have to be resolved before something new can be started - you need resources and time to be successful. Working through the process takes time, but the alternative is failure to meet expectations. It takes planning and clear communication to get things done!
Links
Pathwayz Group
Mythical Man Month
The Four Disciplines of Execution
Speed of Trust
The Culture Map
Recorded December 4, 2025

What's coming in 2026 for Azure? Richard chats with CVP and Chief Product Officer for Azure, Jeremy Winter, about the announcements at Ignite and what we can expect in Azure over the next year. Jeremy talks about new features for migrating workloads to Azure, creating more reliable application implementations, the vast array of AI-related technologies being released, and more! The conversation also digs into the new data centers being built all over the world, and how they are becoming more efficient with resources.
Links
Azure Copilot
Azure SRE Agent
Azure Resiliency Agent
Azure Migrate
Kubernetes Fleet
Azure HorizonDB
Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Azure Fairwater
Recorded December 3, 2025

AI tools continue to evolve - what can we do with them today? Richard chats with Cecilia Wirén about her experiences using the latest AI tools to support DevOps workflows, diagnostics, and the crafting of new scripts. Cecilia focuses on tools that can help admins who occasionally work on scripts, including getting into a GitHub workflow to track prompts and results generated by LLMs, so you can always revert and learn from various approaches to interact with these new tools. The tools continue to evolve; it's worth looking at the latest features and models!
Links
Azure SRE Agent
Microsoft Security Copilot
GitHub Copilot
Awesome Copilot
Copilot Extensions
Recorded December 3, 2025

A new year - and so much to do! To start 2026, Richard flies solo again to discuss the issues he's seen on sysadmins' minds as we head into the new year. Obviously, AI is eating up a lot of the conversation from many different angles: tools that can help us be more productive, security issues in our organizations due to misuse, and now, AI-driven hacking. Security still looms large, and not just from an AI perspective - the latest round of supply chain attacks has led to litigation, putting new emphasis on making sure you're secure. Windows has a new leader, things are changing there, and there's the ongoing migration to the cloud. Does it still make sense? There seems to be more concern about data sovereignty than ever, and some meaningful conversations to have. Happy New Year!
Links
Azure SRE Agents with Deepthi Chelupati
Microsoft Purview
The M365 Copilot Data Readiness Checklist with Nikki Chapple
Quering for Breaches with Mark Morowcyznski
Managing Vendor Incidents with Mandi Walls
Incident Management and the Crowdstrike event with Lieam Westley
Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Entra ID
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Entra ID Protection with Corissa Koopmans
Windows Server 2025
Upgrading to Windows Server 2025 with Robert Smit
Recorded December 20, 2025