• Review SentinalOne's best practices for cloud security with your vCTO, managed services provider, or in-house IT staff.
• Shore up any vulnerable spots in your cloud-data defenses.
• Stay-tuned for my interview with Mike Jackson from Pendello Solutions.

Several months ago, I wrote about the importance of CEOs, presidents, and business owners being open to the concept of “hybrid cloud”–the utilization of one or more public cloud infrastructures in conjunction with a private cloud. Key to making this work is some form of “unified IT management,” allowing for administration of all your resources from a single tool.

Last week, I posted about an update to Datamation’s article comparing the leading public clouds, which called out Azure’s hybrid cloud advantage. In this case, the definition of “hybrid cloud” includes on-premise and remote resources running on bare-metal or in virtualization, as well resources running in a private cloud environment such as OpenStack or Nutanix.

Microsoft integrates these two environments by connecting Windows Admin Center to Azure hybrid services. This allows local resources to take advantage of Azure-based business continuity tools, such as Backup and Site Recovery, as well as storage functions like File Sync and Storage Management Service. On the flip-side, cloud-managed tools such as Security Center, Update Management, and Azure Arc become available everywhere.

While organizations relying heavily on non-Windows operating systems may want to explore other options, if your environment is Microsoft-centric, the combination of Windows Admin Center and Azure hybrid services looks hard to beat. You will want to give serious consideration to the efficiency gains of using a single tool to manage the majority of your resources (no matter where they reside) before you give the green light to a public cloud initiative that unnecessarily increases management overhead.

Since coming back from AWS re:Invent a couple of weeks ago, I have felt like the freed prisoner returning to Plato’s Cave.

If you took an intro to philosophy class in college, you may recall the Analogy of the Cave, from the Republic.

In this philosophical metaphor, a group of people have lived their entire lives as prisoners shackled up in a cave. For some reason, they are constrained in such a way they cannot turn their heads to the left or right — they can only stare straight ahead. As a result, they have never seen one another directly. They can only see their shadows, cast on the cave wall in front of them by a fire burning in the cave behind. There are a few additional details, such as a number of non-prisoners in the cave who continually hold up cut-outs of people and animals in front of the fire so shadows of these objects are also cast on the cave wall. This creates an entire shadow world for the prisoners. Because they have somehow been chained up in this cave since they were children, and because shadows are all they have ever seen, the prisoners believe the shadow world to be the real world.

Now, I know this all seems awkward and contrived, but remember — philosophical metaphor. As a bonus for putting up with Plato for a few minutes, you now know where the Warchowskis got the basic premise for The Matrix.

The key development in the Analogy of the Cave occurs when one of the prisoners — the Republic doesn’t give him a name, so we’ll just call him “Neo” — is freed from his shackles, shown the strange setup in the cave, and then forcibly dragged into the world above. At first Neo is stunned and disoriented by the experience of seeing objects directly, in the bright light of the sun, but he gradually becomes used to such an expanded view of the world. He is literally “enlightened”, and would never want to go back to believing shadows are real.

When Neo returns to the cave, however, he finds that his fellow prisoners don’t want to be similarly enlightened. They laugh and jeer at him for his stories of a bright, sunlit world. They would in fact kill him if they weren’t shackled up in a philosophical metaphor.

My experience coming back from AWS is very much like Neo’s return to the cave.

In my attempts to convince my colleagues there is a brighter, freer world just a few steps away, I typically encounter one of two responses. The first is an uncomprehending gaze, as the person to whom I am talking patiently waits for me to finish so he can return to whatever legacy support work he was doing prior to my interruption. The second is a conviction on the part of my conversationalist that he knows exactly what I am talking about, he has heard it all before, and he doesn’t have to pay much attention because AWS is no different from any other Cloud datacenter (and he knows all about datacenters.) Both responses are examples of a belief that the current way of doing things is the “right” way, and therefore comprises the “real” world of IT — or at least the only world that matters.

These responses are frustrating. I find myself wanting to grab people, break them free of their chains, and shout “Don’t you understand? Everything is changing! It’s happening right now. ‘The way we’ve always done it’ isn’t going to cut it anymore!” Then I want to write a Lambda function, create an RDS instance, upload a ton of data to RedShift, and ask them what server they are going to manage to make it all work.

I want to do this, but I don’t — because I have found that just providing more information is not a productive strategy for freeing people from the dark cave of legacy IT.

We work in an industry with a lot of smart people, and with a lot of people who like to be right. No one appreciates someone telling them “you’re doing it wrong” — myself included. If people are going to change the way they do things, they want it to be their idea.

So how do we convey the nature of something like AWS — a new way of doing things which requires a great deal of specialized knowledge to understand and use it properly?

Fortunately, Plato gives us some direction here — still in the Republic, and just a few paragraphs after the Analogy of the Cave.

Education, he says, isn’t “putting true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if…inserting vision into blind eyes.” In other words, you can’t just dump a ton of new facts onto someone, and expect them to “get it.”

Instead, says Plato, we must assume the person whom we are trying to convince already has, on some level, the basic information needed to grasp the argument we are making. Our job isn’t to give others more and more facts, it is to help them use the facts they already possess to perhaps see their situation in a new way.

This is directly applicable to spreading the adoption of AWS. The economic drivers that make it so powerful didn’t come out of nowhere. They develop naturally and directly from challenges IT organizations face every day. IT administrators, managed service providers, business owners, and CEOs are intimately familiar with them.

The broad, straight road to AWS doesn’t run through a detailed comparison of features and benefits, an argument about on-site vs. hosted, or an impressive demonstration of serverless functionality.

It runs instead through evaluation of speed-to-market, recognition of total cost of ownership, and no nonsense cost-benefit analysis. The same criteria, in other words, by which all IT initiatives are assessed. Decision-makers are well-versed in using these tools to chart the course of successful organizations. What they need is someone who can explain the virtues of AWS in terms they already understand.

Going forward, I plan to focus on the compelling business case for AWS, more than on its cool services and features. The cave of legacy IT has sheltered administrators, CIOs and CTOs for a long time. I can’t fault them for wanting to see exactly how a new approach will advance their organization.

There will be plenty of time later to marvel at the splendor of living in the sun.

Brian S. Pauls has over 20 years of experience navigating the rapid pace of change in computers, networks, and the Internet. He has learned it’s more fun outside the cave if you take a few friends along.

If you ever choose to go to AWS re:Invent, I have two pieces of advice:

If you want to enjoy the conference in peace-of-mind, Item #2 is very important. There is just too much going on — too many great presentations, too many fascinating hands-on labs. Some of them are going to conflict, and despite the magic of the Cloud, you still can’t be in two places at once.

This was my situation at the end of November. I stood in line, waiting to get into a workshop where I would learn to build a device to access the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) using a Raspberry Pi. This being my first re:Invent, I hadn’t realized the importance of Item #1, above — I had not jumped on registration as soon as sessions were available. Consequently, I had been waitlisted for several presentations I really wanted to attend. This one was at the top of my list. I absolutely wanted to know how to make an “Echo” for myself.

While Amazon does reserve a certain number of seats for walkups, most seats go to pre-registered attendees. I had lucked-out the previous session and gotten into an AVS programming workshop by waiting in the walkup line. This time, however, I wasn’t so fortunate. The walkup line was long, I was further back, and the room filled to capacity before I got in.

This same session was on the schedule later in the week. I would have a couple more opportunities to chance the walkup line. Ultimately, however, I decided to pass. This was because I learned that the same subject matter (configuring AVS on a Raspberry Pi) was detailed online in both a YouTube video posted on the Raspberry Pi Website and a Github project published and maintained by Amazon.

There was a ton of great content vying for my attention at AWS. In the end, I couldn’t justify skipping one of those opportunities to possibly get into a session where I would learn how to do something I could teach myself at home, using online resources.

Of course, the trick to making a call like this is having the discipline to actually follow-through when you get home. I decided to set a deadline of Christmas — my gift to myself would be a homemade Echo, including everything I would learn about AVS while building it.

For anyone interested in doing the same, here’s how it went.

The Pieces

The Raspberry Pi section of the Github project linked above begins with a list of hardware you will need to complete the device. While I already owned several RPis, I did not have either the Pi 3 or the Pi 2 Model B required for this process. I decided to go with the Pi 3 because it features built-in WiFi, and I wanted the option to use this device in a variety of locations — perhaps not always conveniently situated near a network jack.

To get your Raspberry Pi up-and-running, you can purchase a variety of mini-SD cards with the NOOBS (New Out Of Box Software) setup program pre-installed. NOOBs will assist you in configuring the operating system on the Pi.

The Raspberry Pi will run a number of operating systems, including (among others) Windows IOT Core and various flavors of Linux. When you create your AVS device, however, you will want to make sure your RPi is running Raspbian Jessie, the latest version of the Linux distribution officially supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. If you happen to receive a pre-loaded mini-SD card with an older version of NOOBs, it may not be current enough to setup Jessie on your device. In this case, you will need to download the latest version of NOOBS. I wanted to polish my skills setting up an RPi from scratch, so I decided to get a blank 16 GB SD card.

I had an old pair of speakers laying around, so I decided to repurpose those instead of dropping $15 on a new speaker just for this project.

I like my devices to look finished, so I added a case for the RPi, as well.

The Github list includes links to Amazon (of course) where you can conveniently order everything you need. I loaded up a cart and ordered a batch of parts for delivery a couple days before Christmas. Everything had arrived by Friday, which meant Saturday morning (Christmas Eve) was Homemade Echo Day!

The Project

The first step, once you have collected the various pieces of your device, is to assemble your Raspberry Pi and get it working with Raspbian Jessie.

For me, everything went together pretty smoothly. BTW-the Official Raspberry Pi 3 Case, is awesome, with a solid feel and a brilliant break-apart, easy-to-re-assemble design.

The only hiccup I had here was caused by my lack of familiarity with the Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspbian Jessie. My WiFi connectivity didn’t work immediately following installation, even though NOOBs had me identify the SSID and enter the password. I immediately started troubleshooting by going to the Web and finding forum posts that pointed me to various configuration files. After spending about an hour on this, however, I discovered that these were out-of-date posts referring to a previous version of Raspbian. It appears Raspbian Jessie has moved things around a bit in the OS, and has also included a WiFi icon in the upper-right-hand corner of the Pixel GUI. Despite my preference for doing everything in Linux from the command line, I clicked a couple of times, re-entered my WiFi password, and everything was good-to-go.

If you are like most people, you probably thought something like this the first time you encountered Amazon Web Services (AWS):

“Wow. A completely virtualized data center in the Cloud? How cool is that?”

And then, you may have crunched the numbers, compared them to the cost of your on-premise servers or your legacy (physical) data center downtown, and thought:

“Whoa! I’m going to be paying how much to host my virtualized Windows servers at AWS? I can buy a physical server a lot cheaper for a one-time cost, and the data center will lease me a whole rack for a fixed monthly price, where I can host all the servers I will ever need. No thank you!”

I have known a number of intelligent, well-informed, and highly technical people who have thought the same thing. If this was you, then you would be in good company. You would also be wrong.

Please don’t be offended. I thought the same thing. If you try to do a straight apples-to-apples comparison between your legacy servers and AWS, then AWS does appear to be more expensive.

The reason I was wrong (and you are too) is that you can’t do a straight apples-to-apples comparison. AWS is not your legacy server farm, or your legacy data center. It doesn’t function like your physical servers, and you can’t price it the same way. Well you can, but if you do, you will miss the point — and probably cost yourself a lot of money in the long run.

Let me try to provide a helpful analogy. Some of you reading this may be old enough to remember when “spreadsheets” weren’t computer programs — they were rows and columns of numbers literally “spread” across the facing pages of an accounting ledger. There were obvious advantages to taking these bulky, awkward, physical artifacts and virtualizing them as digital representations which could be stored on a portable disk. Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Excel, however, knows that a modern spreadsheet is much more than this. With the advent of computer spreadsheets, users were able to embed into the sheets mathematical formulae they were previously required to solve themselves. Eventually, users were able to cross-link different spreadsheets with one another. These advances automated much of the repetitive calculation that went into an accounting ledger. This made computer spreadsheets an exponential, not a linear, advance over paper. Today, we can use spreadsheets to perform tasks that were impossible — not just impractical — before computers. The spreadsheet didn’t just make accounting operations more efficient — it completely changed the accounting landscape.

This is the scale of the change AWS is bringing to the IT industry. AWS is not a datacenter — or rather, AWS is not just a data center. You can make the argument that EC2, the AWS service for hosting server instances, is a virtual data-center — but that argument still misses the point. EC2 instances are powerful, not because they are in the Cloud, but because (in the words of a friend of mine) these servers are code. They are ephemeral, to be created for a particular purpose and destroyed as needed when that purpose has been fulfilled. This is so far beyond the capabilities of a traditional data center it makes the move from accounting ledgers to computer spreadsheets appear trivial by comparison.

The flexibility and power of EC2, however, is just the tip of the AWS iceberg. EC2 is only one of dozens of AWS services, most of which have nothing to do with hosting server instances, and which cannot be compared in any way to a data center:

This is just a small sampling of the AWS ecosystem. These services can tie-into one another, leveraging their various capabilities to produce immensely powerful operational environments. Some services eliminate the need for entire classes of server — reducing (or potentially even eliminating) the need for your datacenter, rather than just moving it into the Cloud.

It’s provocative to say “Everything you know about AWS is wrong.” This is obviously an exaggeration. Perhaps, however, the way you are thinking about AWS is wrong. The words “paradigm shift” get thrown around too readily, but they are the simple truth in this case. AWS is positioned to eliminate datacenters, and even servers, at the level of the individual organization. It provides companies of all sizes with capabilities that were formerly available to only the largest enterprises — or in some cases weren’t available at all, because those capabilities didn’t exist.

The sooner we recognize the IT landscape has completely changed, the sooner we can take advantage of what the new IT world has to offer.

Or we could just keep doing our calculations on paper…

This past week I had the privilege of attending the Amazon Web Services re:Invent convention in Las Vegas. I walked away with a ton of new knowledge and three strong impressions:

1. Amazon is reframing information technology in a way that doesn’t require the use of the Microsoft Windows operating system, PCs, or even servers.
2. This new infrastructure is already here, enabling the services of othercompanies you know and use every day.
3. Most people have no idea it’s happening.
4. 
   

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been an important part of the Cloud-computing scene since 2006, when the online retailer launched s3 (a file-storage service) and EC2 (a service offering hosted virtual server instances.)

Since then, AWS has deployed scores of additional services, including:

• Relational Database Service (RDS): allowing customers to host enterprise-class databases in the Cloud using formats such as MS-SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, without maintaining their own physical or virtual database server.
• Lambda: giving customers the ability to run code using an engine hosted and managed by AWS, instead of on their own server.
• Lex: artificial intelligence running as a hosted service, making it possible for customers to include automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding in their software applications and devices.
• 
  

These are just a few from an array of services AWS has created (and continues to create) to support its Cloud infrastructure. You may notice a common characteristic across the three services I have described — none of them requires the customer to build, deploy or maintain a server.

AWS regularly utilizes a particular term for this: “serverless architecture” — and customers appear to be embracing it.

If there was a common refrain at re:Invent, it was “Data centers are a pain. Data centers are expensive. We were so happy the day we shut down our datacenter.”

Datacenters, however, aren’t the only source of pain. Taking care of servers is painful, as well. All throughout the convention we heard from AWS customers who have rewritten their business-critical applications to utilize the hosted compute services at AWS. These customers aren’t just moving their servers into the Cloud — they are getting rid of many of their servers entirely.

This process may herald an end to the long-established dependence of the business community on Microsoft Windows and the PC. When developers rewrite applications, they often recreate them for the browser, not for a particular computer operating system. When they do write for an OS, it’s likely to be iOS or Android, rather than Windows. For those who need to stay within the Windows fold, AWS offers the WorkSpaces and AppStreamservices, giving the customers the option of moving their workstations and applications into the Cloud.

How does this affect you? Many consumer services you already use are powered by this new infrastructure. I heard presentations, among many others, from Netflix, Johnson & Johnson, and McDonalds — all describing their deep integration with the Cloud environment at AWS.

Most of the sessions I attended also touched in some way on the Amazon Echo and the Alexa Voice Service behind it. The presenters made it clear that Amazon doesn’t consider the Echo a consumer novelty. Rather it is a “reference device”, showing other manufacturers how to design for a new user interface to tap into the computing resources at AWS.

The most interesting take-away from the convention was the disconnect between what was happening there and the perspective of those who don’t realize the extent to which AWS is changing the game. I spent a week with thousands of people representing hundreds of companies all working very hard to make the current computing environment obsolete.

When I told non-attendees I was in town “for the Amazon convention,” they typically wanted to know if it was a conference for product vendors who sell on the retail site. Most of them had never heard of Amazon Web Services. What was happening at re:Invent was going on “behind-the-scenes”, and it may be some time before the scale of change becomes obvious to those outside the tech industry.

The effects, however, are already becoming apparent. My Uber driver asked several questions, curious what I meant when I referred to AWS. I motioned to the phone mounted on his dash and told him “You’re using it right now.” That may be all of us soon.