Episode 175 – File Shares for Clients in the Cloud with Azure Files

In Episode 175, Ben and Scott talk about using Azure Files as a remote file share in the cloud for client devices and the things you'll want to think about to get everything up and running. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 175 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on April 24, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott discuss Azure file shares for client devices, domain controllers, Azure AD networking and other cloud services and how they all fit together. - The thunder is never done, all the tornadoes rolling through. It was nasty last night. - You know what? I did not hear a thing. I may or may not have been up until like, 2:30 the night before working on stuff and then I crawled in bed at like 12:30 last night. I was so tired, I passed out and I woke up when one of my kids came in our bedroom at some time, 4:00 a.m. and my wife was like, "Did the thunder wake them up?" I was like, "Was it thundering?" I never heard a thing. - Man, corona times have not been kind to my sleep schedule. It's turned into like, aah, let's watch a movie and then the movies over and it's aah, maybe I would like just one TV show or let me read this book for a little while or whatever it happens to be. So I think last night, I was up until... Last night, I was late, it was 3:00 a.m., hence, my coffee brewing slowly this morning. So I heard that whole storm all through and the whole thing. I was sitting in my kitchen, it was awesome coming through, it was a good one. I like a good storm. - So I woke up and I was actually bummed it didn't wake me up 'cause I'm the same way, I love a good thunderstorm, especially at night. For whatever reason, those night thunderstorms and the lightning lights up the whole house and the thunder just rolls. I don't know, it's cathartic for some strange reason, as long as there's not a tornado blowing my house down. - Yeah, well, there's that whole thing, but it was definitely a good thunder and lightning storm and it was tornadoes and stuff farther to the north, but not so much for us. So, it was just a good rain event. - Yes, I will say not growing up in Jacksonville, I have been impressed with the geographic surrounding of Jacksonville and how it seems to deter most storms from hitting us. Like we never really seem to get tornadoes or really bad storms from the west because of the river and because we're sitting just down low enough. I think the Gulf of Mexico messes up a lot of them and then the way Jacksonville's kind of set in on the coast if you're going up the Florida coast and up in the Georgia and South Carolina, it seems to deter any hurricanes from really having a direct hit on Jacksonville. - Yes, it is the farthest point west on the East Coast. Like when you think about that dip in, so it's not just Florida to Georgia and all that, like pull out a map and look all the way up, it is the farthest point west, from Maine all the way down to us. - What about the Keys? Don't the Keys loop back into the west? - They do, but they're sitting actually like-- - They're just sitting in the middle of the ocean. - They are, right? But they're all the way down at that eastern tip of Florida is, think about like going down to Miami and you're pretty much a straight line down to the Keys from there. So they are still farther east than we are, but as a chain of islands, they stretch pretty far over, but at that point, they're underwater anyway . - Got it. - So as a landmass with too big bodies of water like you talked about, between the ocean and the river, being a pretty substantial river, but at least nice and wide, it's good enough to pick up a lot of the weather that comes through here. - I remember that growing up in Michigan too. I mean, like Michigan is significantly bigger than the river but Michigan was spared at least a lot of the bad thunderstorms and tornadoes and all of that because of like Michigan. They would hit Wisconsin, the lake would break it all up before it hit Michigan. I went and spent a week in Wisconsin. It was like tornadoes every day. Don't go to Wisconsin. - Don't go to-- - Sorry to anybody that's from Wisconsin that's listening. I much prefer Michigan to Wisconsin. - You're gonna start a fight or something. - Probably. I have some good stories about Wisconsin and Michigan, but we don't need to talk about those today. - As IT professionals in the cloud era, sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or Teams Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information, sifting through cluttered CSVs and a complex mess of metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend. ShareGate Overcast lets you group resources into meaningful cost tabs and map them to real world business scenarios. This way you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure, whether it's by product, business unit, team or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs and it's only available in ShareGates Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/itpro. - Should we talk about what I was staying up late playing with today? - Yeah, it sounds like you were staying up late doing things that I was not. While I was watching, crappy movies and contributing to Netflix viewing hours, you were doing real work, supposedly. - Well, so supposedly 'cause it all started with a client question which led to me playing with this, with my own domain and Azure tenants 'cause I don't wanna break anything. So, to set this up, Azure Files with... So Azure Files has been able to do SMB for a while. You can use the like storage account name and the private key to actually map a network drive to Azure Files, all of this. They have recently and I think it's still certain aspects of this are still in preview. - Yes, they are. - They rolled out the ability to do Azure Files over SMB, leveraging either Active Directory or Active Directory Domain Services to authenticate users to the file shares, rather than using a storage name and a key so that all of those NTFS type permissions can be used or supported through a mapped Azure file share. But there are a ton of restrictions and requirements and prerequisites around doing that, which could lead to the question that we were actually debating before we started recording of should you actually do this and if you do this, what all do you need to think about? Because this has led me down a massive rabbit hole of VNets and DNS and AD and AD DS and all of that. - Yes and you're leveraging preview services, which is even, well preview functionality I guess, which makes it even more interesting. So, when you initially came and you had asked me the question of, okay, I'm trying to stand up a file share and I'm doing the domain authentication thing and it's really a pain and in the back of my head, I'm thinking isn't that relatively new and probably in preview and my first question back would be, well, why do the preview functionality, right? Especially, if it's for a customer. Like typically, we don't wanna take customers into preview stuff, even if it's public preview, because if we just consider Azure life cycle, there's no guarantee that a preview service ever actually goes GA'd. So obviously, Azure Files is GA'd and all that kind of stuff and it's sitting there ready to go, but Microsoft could look at this feature where they're doing SMB file shares with AD, with Azure AD rather, and with on-prem AD and they can say like, "Yeah, I don't wanna do on-prem AD anymore, "I'm only gonna do AD "because that's an easier scenario to support." - Well, but it's not just AAD, it's AAD DS. It doesn't support AAD. - Yeah. - Remember? We gotta clarify these two. - I get my storage confused because there actually are parts of storage, like blobs and containers which do support Azure Active Directory for role based access controls and things. So you can totally do AAD authentication there. Anybody who thinks Azure Storage isn't a confusing service being that it's a storage account, but it's not just a storage, it's blobs, its files, it's tables, its queues, its disks, it's-- - Right, it's got sub services. - It's static websites, it's like 10 other different things, it's amazing. - Azure Files are gonna be like the Teams of Office 365 or everything's just gonna get sucked into the storage fortex. - Well, if you think about it, storage is kind of important, right? In the grand scheme of things and the overall fabric because what is Azure? It's a bunch of hosts who are running hypervisors and it's a bunch of file servers that are pulling configuration off of storage controllers and things like that, right? So, at the end of the day, storage is what makes-- - Storage is important. - It makes the world go round. - Which is digressing. So, this whole storage authentication thing, I'm not gonna say it's just Azure AD DS. Should I go through the prerequisites and what I found and then we can keep talking through this scenario? - Sure, just to lay out the scenario, what you're trying to do is you're trying to stand up a file share in Azure that is available to clients, not to other servers that exist out there. - Yeah, so you're not going to a server. - But to individual clients and you require per user authentication from each of those clients to the file share, right? Okay. - Right. So,...