A month has passed since my last update, so I have a lot to share. I’ll try to keep the run-on sentences to a minimum and go heavy on the linkage.
The security of cloud solutions has been very much on everyone’s mind of late. First off was a story from Mat Honan of WIRED magazine on how his online identity was stolen. Because of some failed security of two key entities, and the highly linked nature of his devices via cloud services, hackers quickly took control of his online persona. He details are a bit terrifying but also offer some good findings on how to protect yourself. This is further highlighted by an article from TechNewsWorld.com that discusses the issues with consumer facing services and the cloud.
But vendors work to address this with Amazon announcing it is joining the Cloud Security Alliance’s registry. Rightscale, the IaaS management provider also published an article on PCI guidance in the cloud. Microsoft also announced that it will to offer a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for Windows Azure’s core services , a key item for those that require HIPAA compliance.
As if security issues weren’t enough, we’ve also seen some could service disruptions. Windows Azure experienced an outage in its Western Europe region on July 26th. Google’s Talk service also had an outage about the same time but it was unrelated. Mind you that Google’s issue came just 3 days after it announced that its Compute Engine would help it avoid outages like those that affected Amazon earlier this year.
But in the face of these challenges, there is hope for the increased adoption of cloud technologies. The European Commission is finalizing its strategy in hopes of promoting the use of cloud for data storage. Given that data sovereignty issues in the EU are especially challenging, this is great news.
Amazon also released some compelling arguments for cloud computing with results of a study they commissioned showing a 626% ROI for cloud. This was a timely bit of news given the first ever Amazon Web Services global conference.
On a bit of a network geeky note, I did found an interesting article about Skype’s infrastructure and the concept of “supernodes”. There were some theory’s that the move of Skype’s infrastructure into Microsoft Datacenters may have been a move to monitor traffic. But this article points out that something like Skype can honestly benefit from having the bandwidth available to it that these massive cloud computing datacenters can provide.
And likely the biggest announcement of recent weeks is that Netflix has made good on their promise to open source their Chaos Monkey. I can’t wait to have time to dig into this piece of software. The more cloud software I get involved in, the more things like resilient, self-healing systems come into play. And this will be a great tool to help test those types of systems to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do.
Until next time!
