If you follow the latest developments in the Entra space, you have no doubt come across Merill Fernando. In this episode Merill joins us for a great discussion as we geek out about Entra and authentication in general. Why is it called Entra (RIP AAD!)? Merill sheds some light on the name change, we talk about AD FS and its relevance today, discuss the deprecation of AzureAD and MSOnline PowerShell modules and introduce some of the great tools and resources he's developed for the community.

Merill Fernando is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and Senior member of the "Customer Success Team" engaging with Microsoft Entra customers and guiding them through deployments, planning, debugging and driving feedback into the feature teams. Merill has a weekly newsletter on all things Microsoft Entra and is the creator of cmd.ms & idPowerToys.com. You can connect with Merill on Twitter (https://twitter.com/merill) or on YouTube (https://youtube.com/@merillx)

Here are some links to Merill's work:

* Entra Newsletter - https://entra.news

* Merill's site - https://merill.net

Here are the links the Identity Architecture Series discussed in the episode:

* Azure Active Directory Core Store: Data centers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8ZPjSxNte0

* Azure Active Directory Core Store: Scale units - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcKO44GtHh8

* Azure Active Directory Core Store: Read and write replicas - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeLDtcpKc-U

Are you interested in learning from others in the community? Give these folks a follow:

* Nathan McNulty - https://twitter.com/NathanMcNulty

* Eric Mannon - https://www.linkedin.com/in/emannon

* Dr. Nestori Syynimaa - https://twitter.com/DrAzureAD

* Rod Trent - https://twitter.com/rodtrent