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The top cloud and infrastructure conferences of 2017

Want to open up your eyes, expand your horizons, and learn from really smart people? Attend a conference or trade show. Get out there. Meet people. Have conversations. Network. Be inspired by keynotes. Take notes in classes that are delivering great material, and walk out of boring sessions and find something better.

I wrote an article about the upcoming 2017 conferences and trade shows about cloud computing and enterprise infrastructure. Think big and think outside the cubicle: Don’t go to only the events that are about the exact thing you do, and don’t attend only the sessions about the exact thing you do.

The list is organized alphabetically in “must attend,” worth attending,” and “worthy mentions” sections. Those are my subjective labels (though based on experience, having attended many of these conferences in the past decades), so read the descriptions carefully and make your own decisions. If you don’t use Amazon Web Services, then AWS re:Invent simply isn’t right for you. However, if you use or might use the company’s cloud services, then, yes, it’s a must-attend.

And oh, a word about the differences between conferences and trade shows (also known as expos). These can be subtle, and reasonable people might disagree in some edge cases. However, a conference’s main purpose is education: The focus is on speakers, panels, classes, and other sessions. While there might be an exhibit floor for vendors, it’s probably small and not very useful. In contrast, a trade show is designed to expose you to the greatest number of exhibitors, including vendors and trade associations. The biggest value is in walking the floor; while the trade show may offer classes, they are secondary and often (but not always) vendor fluff sessions “awarded” to big advertisers in return for their gold sponsorships.

So if you want to learn from classes, panels, and workshops, you probably want a conference. If you want to talk to vendors, kick the tires on products, and decide which solutions to buy or recommend, you want a trade show or an expo.

And now, on with the list: the most important events in cloud computing and enterprise infrastructure, compiled at the very beginning of 2017. Note that events can change their dates or cities without notice, or even be cancelled, so keep an eye on the websites. You can read the list here.

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A hit-and-run accident — literally

It was our first-ever perp walk! My wife and I were on the way home from a quick grocery errand, and we were witnesses to and first responders to a nasty car crash. A car ran a red light and hit a turning vehicle head-on.

As we pulled over to see if there were injuries, the young driver and passenger in the red-light runner got out of their vehicle… grabbed their backpacks… and ran. I got out our car and shouted at the kids to come back, and also managed to snap some quick cell-phone pictures.

We stayed behind at the accident scene to check out the victim (a nice but shaken woman). We also waited with her until the fire and then police arrived.

Other witnesses followed the perps, who ran into a supermarket and hid in the bathroom, and they called 9-1-1 about it. A few minutes later we learned “They got them!” — and the police officer at the accident scene asked us to drive to the supermarket parking lot and see if we could identify the runners.

So: I sat in the back of a car, and my wife hid behind a tree. The perps were taken one-at-a-time out of a patrol car to see if we could recognize them. The police were very careful to make sure the kids didn’t see us. They were indeed the runners — we could easily confirm that, and they clearly matched the photos on my phone.

After the ID, the police sent us home, with thanks. We’d like to commend Phoenix police and fire for their professionalism.

What a day, and what an adventure. While we hope that the kids had insurance (the woman’s car was totaled), we are especially grateful that nobody was injured, and that justice will be done.

And, I guess, once a first responder, always a first responder.

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How to take existing enterprise code to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform

The best way to have a butt-kicking cloud-native application is to write one from scratch. Leverage the languages, APIs, and architecture of the chosen cloud platform before exploiting its databases, analytics engines, and storage. As I wrote for Ars Technica, this will allow you to take advantage of the wealth of resources offered by companies like Microsoft, with their Azure PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offering or by Google Cloud Platform’s Google App Engine PaaS service.

Sometimes, however, that’s not the job. Sometimes, you have to take a native application running on a server in your local data center or colocation facility and make it run in the cloud. That means virtual machines.

Before we get into the details, let’s define “native application.” For the purposes of this exercise, it’s an application written in a high-level programming language, like C/C++, C#, or Java. It’s an application running directly on a machine talking to an operating system, like Linux or Windows, that you want to run on a cloud platform like Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

What we are not talking about is an application that has already been virtualized, such as already running within VMware’s ESXi or Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtual machine. Sure, moving an ESXi or Hyper-V application running on-premises into the cloud is an important migration that may improve performance and add elasticity while switching capital expenses to operational expenses. Important, yes, but not a challenge. All the virtual machine giants and cloud hosts have copious documentation to help you make the switch… which amounts to basically copying the virtual machine file onto a cloud server and turning it on.

Many possible scenarios exist for moving a native datacenter application into the cloud. They boil down to two main types of migrations, and there’s no clear reason to choose one over the other:

The first is to create a virtual server within your chosen cloud provider, perhaps running Windows Server or running a flavor of Linux. Once that virtual server has been created, you migrate the application from your on-prem server to the new virtual server—exactly as you would if you were moving from one of your servers to a new server. The benefits: the application migration is straightforward, and you have 100-percent control of the server, the application, and security. The downside: the application doesn’t take advantage of cloud APIs or other special servers. It’s simply a migration that gets a server out of your data center. When you do this, you are leveraging a type of cloud called Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). You are essentially treating the cloud like a colocation facility.

The second is to see if your application code can be ported to run within the native execution engine provided by the cloud service. This is called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The benefits are that you can leverage a wealth of APIs and other services offered by the cloud provider. The downsides are that you have to ensure that your code can work on the service (which may require recoding or even redesign) in order to use those APIs or even to run at all. You also don’t have full control over the execution environment, which means that security is managed by the cloud provider, not by you.

And of course, there’s the third option mentioned at the beginning: Writing an entirely new application native for the cloud provider’s PaaS. That’s still the best option, if you can do it. But our task today is to focus on migrating an existing application.

Let’s look into this more closely, via my recent article for Ars Technica, “Great app migration takes enterprise “on-prem” applications to the Cloud.”

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Artificial Intelligence gets smart at CES 2017

Las Vegas, January 2017 — “Alexa, secure the enterprise against ransomware.” Artificial intelligence is making tremendous headway, as seen at this year’s huge Consumer Electronics Show (CES). We’re seeing advances that leverage AI in everything from speech recognition to the Internet of Things (IoT) to robotics to home entertainment.

Not sure what type of music to play? Don’t worry, the AI engine in your cloud-based music service knows your taste better than you do. Want to read a book whilst driving to the office? Self-driving cars are here today in limited applications, and we’ll see a lot more of them in 2017.

Want to make brushing your teeth more fun, all while promoting good dental health? The Ara is the “1st toothbrush with Artificial Intelligence,” claims Kolibree, a French company that introduced the product at CES 2017.

Gadgets dominate CES. While crowds are lining up to see the AI-powered televisions, cookers and robots, the real power of AI is hidden, behind the scenes, and not part of the consumer context. Unknown to happy shoppers exploring AI-based barbecues, artificial intelligence is keeping our networks safe, detecting ransomware, helping improve the efficiency of advertising and marketing, streamlining business efficiencies, diagnosing telecommunication faults in undersea cables, detecting fraud in banking and stock-marketing transactions, and even helping doctors track the spread of infectious diseases.

Medical applications capture the popular imagination because they’re so fast and effective. The IBM Watson AI-enabled supercomputer, for example, can read 200 million pages of text in three seconds — and understand what it reads. An oncology application running on Watson analyzes a patient’s medical records, and then combines attributes from the patient’s file with clinical expertise, external research, and data. Based on that information, Watson for Oncology identifies potential treatment plans for a patient. This means doctors can consider the treatment options provided by Watson when making decisions for individual patients. Watson even offers supporting evidence in the form of administration information, as well as warnings and toxicities for each drug.

Doctor AI Can Cure Cybersecurity Ills

Moving beyond medicine, AI is proving essential for protecting computer networks — and their users against intrusion. The traditional non-AI-based anti-virus and anti-malware products can’t protect against advanced threats, and that’s where companies like Cylance come in. They can use neural networks and other machine-learning techniques to study millions of malicious files, from executables to documents to PDFs to images. Using pattern recognition, Cylance have developed a revolutionary machine learning platform that can identify suspicious files that might be seen on websites or as email attachments, even if it’s never seen that particular type of malware before. Nothing but AI can get the job done, not in an era when over a million new pieces of malware, ranging from phishing to ransomware, appear every single day.

Menlo Security is another network-protection company that leverages artificial intelligence. The Menlo Security Isolation Platform uses AI to prevent Internet-based malware from ever reaching an endpoint, such as a desktop or mobile device, because email and websites are accessed inside the cloud — not on the client’s computer. Only safe, malware-free rendering information is sent to the user’s endpoint, eliminating the possibility of malware reaching the user’s device. An artificial intelligence engine constantly scans the Internet session to provide protection against spear-phishing and other email attacks.

What if a machine does become compromised? It’s unlikely, but it can happen — and the price of a single breech can be incredible, especially if a hacker can take full control of the compromised device and use it to attack other assets within the enterprise, such as servers, routers or executives’ computers. If a breach does occur, that’s when the AI technology of Javelin Networks leaps into action, detecting that the attack is in progress, alerting security teams, isolating the device from the network — while simultaneously tricking the attackers into believing they’ve succeeded in their attack, therefore keeping them “on the line” while real-time forensics gather information needed to identify the attacker and help shut them down for good.

Socializing Artificial Intelligence

There’s a lot more to enterprise-scale AI than medicine and computer security, of course. QSocialNow, an incredibly innovative company in Argentina, uses AI-based Big Data and Predictive Analytics to watch an organization’s social media account — and empower them to not only analyze trends, but respond in mere seconds in the case of an unexpected event, such as a rise in customer complaints, the emergence of a social protest, even a physical disaster like an earthquake or tornado. Yes, humans can watch Twitter, Facebook and other networks, but they can’t act as fast as AI — or spot subtle trends that only advanced machine learning can observe through mathematics.

Robots can be powerful helpers for humanity, and AI-based toothbrushes can help us and our kids keep our teeth healthy. While the jury may be out on the implications of self-driving cars on our city streets, there’s no doubt that AI is keeping us — and our businesses — safe and secure. Let’s celebrate the consumer devices unveiled at CES, and the artificial intelligence working behind the scenes, far from the Las Vegas Strip, for our own benefit.