I recently discovered when deploying a new VM for a customer the mention of Azure Edition on Windows Server 2022 and at the time glossed over what it really meant, hotpatch, reducing reboots oh that’s neat. But no, I missed the absolute cracker that is SMB over QUIC, effectively a VPN for SMB letting folks access traditional file shares without the need for a VPN.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/file-server/smb-over-quic
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using Azure Files as a means of having ‘internet facing’ traditional file shares (as a service), but sometimes that’s not an option so having a File Server in Azure becomes a painful necessity. SMB over QUIC helps reduce that pain… a LOT.
I’ve worked on several projects in the last year or so as organisations realise that traditional corporate IT is dead and those devices that used to live in the office, on-net, are now never coming to the office so we have to take the management to them. Modern management (Intune, Autopilot, etc) makes that reality easier to swallow than you might think, but whilst you can change the technology, and the approach, it’s hard to break the habits …. people still love their mapped drives….
That normally leads to a VPN requirement, and high user expectations, so an always-on VPN solution which in my mind creates a dependency upon the ‘office’ that we’d just broken free of.
Will SMB over QUIC buy time until OneDrive becomes less of a car crash at scale? We’ll see …. at the moment I see it as an opportunity to let people keep their mapped drives and traditional way of working for a bit longer … without having to bring a VPN to the party and create a dependency that didn’t want to be created.
A big thanks to Tony Cai at Nerdio for his post on LinkedIn where I spotted this and became rather excited!