O'Reilly News & Commentary

Cloud API Wars - Where is the security arsenal?

By Subra Kumaraswamy
September 11, 2009

Last week was an exciting week for the Virtualization and Cloud customers and potential adopters. During VMWorld 2009, a handful of announcements by the cloud computing "picks" and "shovel" providers marked the beginning of the "Cloud API War". Folks, what's at stake here is vendor-lock in (for provider) and interoperability and portability for customers. Cloud API standards when adopted by providers can also enable zero barrier to exit and allow customers to freely move their workloads across public (e.g. Amazon EC2) and private clouds (customer virtualized internal platform).

Using the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

By George Reese
April 13, 2009

Few companies have a solid disaster recovery plan and fewer companies actually verify their DR plans are working. One of the often missed benefits of cloud computing is that it makes rapid disaster recovery with minimal data loss extremely cost effective and enables the automation of those processes that can be tested often using automated tools.

Blame the Credit Card Franchise: Criminals on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

By Nitesh Dhanjani
March 11, 2009

Amazon EC2 is an extraordinarily powerful infrastructure available to anyone with a stolen credit card. Even if someone is able to use the EC2 platform for a few hours with a stolen credit card, he or she will be able to initiate a vicious cycle that may become impossible to halt.

Why the AWS Console is Good for Cloud Tool Vendors

By George Reese
January 9, 2009

The release of the Amazon Web Services console has had a number of people predicting doom for cloud tools providers. On the contrary, by removing a barrier to experimentation that has kept people out of the cloud, the Amazon Web Services console should bring more people in the cloud and benefit tools providers whose value propositions are beyond Amazon's core value proposition.

How I Ended Up in the Cloud

By George Reese
December 13, 2008

Like most of us, I have been in the cloud longer than I have thought about being "in the cloud". But it took the need for a significant capital investment in hardware to drive Valtira into cloud computing using Amazon Web Services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Our journey into the cloud began with a new product offering and an attempt to avoiding shelling out huge up-front cash on hardware. Today, we have a complex infrastructure that saves us money over other options and provides greater flexibility.

EUC2?

By M. David Peterson
December 10, 2008

Proving yet again that attempting to boil the ocean results in nothing more than a few dead fish, Amazon Web Services continues its "one customer at a time" assault on the utility computing marketplace, this go round bringing EC2 a little closer to home for customers based in Europe.

On Why I Don't Like Auto-Scaling in the Cloud

By George Reese
December 7, 2008

Cloud environments like Amazon EC2 have the ability to dynamically add and remove capacity based on your actual demand. Some tools extend this capability into auto-scaling. Auto-scaling, however, can be dangerous and often serves as a crutch for poor capacity planning.

Key Security Issues for the Amazon Cloud

By George Reese
December 1, 2008

This follow-on article to the Twenty Rules for Amazon Cloud Security examines six real security concerns that gave rise to the 20 rules.

Twenty Rules for Amazon Cloud Security

By George Reese
November 30, 2008

The Amazon EC2 cloud computing model introduces new classes of security concerns as you look to deploying web applications into the cloud. These twenty rules for Amazon Cloud security will help you protect the integrity of your cloud deployments from many different kinds of security threats.

Increasing Availability in the Amazon Cloud

By George Reese
November 10, 2008

If you have done any experimentation in the cloud, you have likely realized that virtual server instances in the Amazon cloud are much less reliable than their real world counterparts. How do you compare availability in the cloud to a physical infrastructure and leverage the cloud to increase overall availability?

The Economics of Cloud Computing

By George Reese
October 25, 2008

Cloud computing has been "the next cool thing" for at least the past 18 months. The current economic climate, however, may be the thing that accelerates the maturity of the technology and drives mainstream adoption in 2009.

Considerations in Building Web Applications for the Amazon Cloud

By George Reese
October 18, 2008

I have been helping several clients lately migrate part or all of their infrastructure over into the Amazon Cloud. The biggest concern I am seeing relates to whether or not their existing web applications will work OK in the cloud. You need to consider some things.

Amazon Preparing Content Delivery Network (CDN) For End Of Year Launch

By M. David Peterson
September 18, 2008

Proclaiming Amazon Web Services is "... Never Content" Jeff Barr recently announced the creation of what appears to be a content delivery network (CDN) scheduled for release at the end of this year.

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