We’re glad to see others are seeing the importance and worth in a distributed Web Application Firewall (dWAF); however, we wouldn’t call Akamai’s recent news the first WAF in the cloud.  The technology is a black list filter for requests.

Adrian Lane @ Jeremiah: in reference to Jeremiah’s point on white list vs. black list

…I am making the assumption that Akamai relieves their customers from specific ‘black list’ threats and the burden on web site WAFs, but does not relieve customers of the need to build their own ‘white list’ of policies.

Today’s WAF technology looks very different.  Black, white and gray listing is considered a basic functionality.  Proactive features like session protection, form field virtualization, learning and assisted security policy refinements are a must. Exchanging information with web application security related products, such as web application security vulnerability scanners or static code analysis tools, are a must-have.

For these reasons, art of defence launched the first fully fledged dWAF for their customers at RSA 2009.  More recently, we’ve made this service available to AWS customers or solution providers so they can protect their applications by applying hyperguard SaaS either as software plug-in to an existing web server Amazon Machine Image (AMI), or by using AoD’s custom AMI.  The technology behind this is going to be implemented at other various cloud service providers in the near future so they can offer a true dWAF (at least) in their cloud.

Follow the discussion on Twitter @hyperguard.

When Amazon (s AMZN) introduced its CloudFront CDN last year, one of the biggest knocks against the service was that it wasn’t primed for the delivery of video. That changed today, with the addition of video streaming capabilities in the form of Adobe’s (s ADBE) Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5.

While previously Amazon customers could theoretically use CloudFront to deliver video via progressive download, the addition of FMS 3.5 will enable streaming through Adobe’s proprietary RTMP streaming protocol. The ability to stream comes at no additional cost; customers can use the functionality at the same rates that Amazon had been charging for HTTP delivery, which start at 17 cents a GB and go as low as 5 cents a GB.

Since FMS 3.5 supports adaptive bitrate streaming, customers will now be able to encode their videos at multiple bit rates. The streaming server then adjusts the output to match the available bandwidth of the end user’s connection. Adding FMS 3.5 could also help Amazon’s customers better protect their video content, with copy protection and encryption enabled through Adobe’s (s adbe) RTMPT, RTMPE and RTMPTE protocols.

Since video streaming isn’t exactly child’s play, Amazon also announced that it’s been working with a number of third-party developers to make it easier for customers — mostly small- and medium-sized businesses, not the big media companies sought after by the other CDNs — to manage, encode and preview video distributions. Named third-party developers include BitsOnTheRun, Boto, Bucket Explorer, CloudBuddy, CloudBerry Explorer, Encoding.com and JetS3t.

Adding streaming could give a boost to Amazon’s CDN service, as some smaller customers get comfortable with using video as part of their marketing plans. The ability to stream could also add a bit of a revenue to Amazon’s Web Services, as it will be delivering more large video files via CloudFront. Customers will also be storing more and larger files in their Amazon S3 storage accounts, particularly if they decide to take advantage of the multi-bitrate streaming capabilities, which require multiple instances of the same video file.

Flash streaming will most likely make Amazon CloudFront more attractive to smaller customers that have been looking into video delivery, but the company’s self-service model — and the fact that the service is still technically in beta — isn’t likely to inspire a wholesale exodus from larger, more established CDNs like Akamai (s AKAM) and Limelight (s LLNW). But it could provide an alternative to some of the smaller CDN companies that have positioned themselves as friendly to SMBs.

Dec 03, 2009

Starting today, you can now choose to locate your AWS resources in our Northern California Region, which like other AWS Regions, contains multiple redundant Availability Zones. Utilizing this Region can reduce your data access latencies if you have customers or existing data centers in the Northern California area. This new Region is available for Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce. For Northern California Region pricing, please see the detail page for each service at aws.amazon.com/products.

For the full article, click here!

Cloud computing seems to be one of the big industry buzzwords.  But what’s all the buzz about?

Well, for one thing, $50/application and a potential $15K in prize money, thanks to Elance and Microsoft… but more on that later.  In addition to crafty gimmicks in which yours truly hopes to take part, cloud computing seems to be catching on in organizations and among professionals seeking to reduce time to market, equipment costs and service outages.  Several major players are on board, including Microsoft (Windows Azure), Amazon.com (Amazon Web Services), Google (Google Apps, AppEngine) and Salesforce.com (Force.com).  There are many other players and I’m not intentionally leaving any off the list – for the detail-oriented (and marketing managers), feel free to add a comment promoting your service of choice.  I don’t mind… really.

I’ve personally dabbled with Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services.  It’s worth discussing both, as they represent fairly different service models.  Amazon Web Services encompasses a number of offerings within the AWS brand (like Mechanical Turk, my personal favorite), but is most well-known for EC2, the elastic compute cloud.  To put it as simply as possible, imagine an unlimited number of servers that you had access to whenever you needed to scale up or down your applications and services.  Essentially, that’s what Amazon offers with EC2.  It’s akin to an infinite supply of ready-to-use servers in a remote data center – you can access the machines remotely, set up software and services and be up and running.  This is often referred to as “infrastructure as a service.”  On the other end of the spectrum, you have Windows Azure, often described as “platform as a service.”  To be frank, I hear that most often from people who are not fond of Microsoft, so I’m not sure how far removed from Amazon’s service Azure truly is.  Many of the services available to users are mirrored; if Amazon has a data storage service, Microsoft’s is comparable, both in terms of functionality and price.  However, I have heard that the encapsulation of some functionality – you don’t create “from scratch” images in Windows Azure – makes it easier to get up and running, while limiting your overall flexibility.

For the past few months, I have been attending the recently organized Amazon Web Services Chicago Meet-up to learn more about AWS and cloud computing.  For those of you in the area, I encourage dropping in for the January meeting.  Everyone is very friendly, the breakfast hits the spot and lots of knowledge is served up.  On the other hand, if you are into Windows Azure, you might check out this promotion that Microsoft and Elance are offering (which I eluded to above… you were patient enough to read everything first, right?).  Yesterday night, I got an email from Elance inviting me to participate in a special project to create a Windows Azure application.  Every successful proposal would receive $50 on completion of a live project – it’s brilliant and everyone wins.  Microsoft has several new developers using and promoting Azure, Elance has a bunch of new professionals seeking projects (not to mention the publicity from this event) and I get $50 – sweet!

Stay tuned – once I get approved, I will share details of my Windows Azure application, which everyone will be welcome to beta test.

It’s great to be back on the road. One of the things I always enjoyed about my previous job was the travel — meeting new people, exploring new destinations. I’m glad that my work at Amazon Web Services continues in that vein.

I’ll be in New York and New Jersey later this week for customer meetings. I was invited to speak at the meeting of the New York IT Security User Group on Thursday evening, 10 December. I’ll give a general talk on cloud computing, followed by a more detailed talk on cloud security and AWS security. If you’re in the area, please come — the event is open to all.

Venue information
AXA Financial Building
1290 6th Avenue (nee Avenue of the Americas)
New York 10104
map

NYITSUG event details (no registration necessary, however)

Come to the Microsoft office on the 6th floor
We start at 6:00 PM

___________________
Presentation abstracts

Fear the cloud no more
Suddenly, it seems, the simple network diagram symbol for the Internet has become a major component for providing infrastructure platforms and service offerings. Unlike the application service provider days of the late 1990s, cloud computing is here to stay. It’s already gained much traction for specialty computing purposes, yet many IT shops remain wary. Moving compute and storage out of your own data center and into someone else’s, mingled among many others, seems daunting at first. Common questions arise around security, manageability, performance, and reliability. Think about it, though–these are the same concerns you’ve always had. Nothing about the cloud requires that you jettison everything you’ve learned during your career. The cloud is a logical next step in the evolution of computing, and when integrated with corporate IT removes much of the burden and allows a business to concentrate on its core functions. Steve Riley will explore common concerns, dispel several myths, and help you learn how your business can benefit from the cloud.

Security and compliance in the cloud
Moving to the cloud raises lots of questions, mostly about security. Providers worthy of your business should answer them clearly and honestly. Amazon Web Services has built an infrastructure and established processes to mitigate common vulnerabilities and offer a safe compute and storage environment. Steve Riley will discuss common cloud security concerns, show how AWS protects its infrastructure from internal and external attack, and explain how you can take advantage of the security features of AWS in your own applications as you extend your enterprise into the cloud.

It’s been a great pleasure working with Agile Technosys. Agile team has been consistently demonstrating their great problem-solving attitude/skill and helping us implement many requirements that were discovered during development.  I’ve worked with several U.S.-based web development companies in the past, and the most pleasant experience is with Agile given their reactive approach to our project challenges. We are delighted to Agile’s work, and as a result we gave the team bonus to show our appreciation.

Special thanks to Bhushan Gaikwad, Rahul Shinde and Tushar Chikane (alphabetically!). Without your extra miles of dedication and hard work, this project can never be done successfully. I really appreciate your help. I would strongly recommend Agile for any professionals/entrepreneurs looking to implement their ideas into a functional platform on spec and on budget.  I look forward to working with Agile again! Thank you, guys!

David Meskhi / Rebecca Chou (http://www.venture.ge/)

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————Venture.ge is developed by Agile Technosys,  a web development, software development, web design and web based application development company. Agile Technosys primarily focuses on the use of Open source technologies with LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql & PHP) and offers PHP development to clients world wide. To know more Visit: http://www.agiletechnosys.com———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The holiday season is upon us and the weight has potential to crush under-resourced e-commerce dependent companies. 100,000’s of visitors per day can turn into a mad rush of millions, bringing online sales crashing down. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and other cloud providers are preparing to provide overflow capacity for those in need.

The world is not all roses, however, and companies should understand that beyond their secure network perimeter lay security threats (ahem, OWASP’s new Top 10) targeting the application itself. Since it takes a company an average of 67 days to fix a common webapp issue such as Cross-site Scripting, the holiday season could spell trouble for these companies without adequate security measures in place to provide protection such as a ‘virtual patch’ (like a cloud-based WAF), until the real patch can be developed.

Just imagine all the lost revenue in the 67 days it would take to fix the problem at the code level without shoring up the vulnerability in the meantime.

Don’t agree with the 67-day estimate? Javed Ikbal of zSquad illustrated why this is common (even the possibility 67 aren’t enough!) in a painfully humorous way:

Day 1-10: Denial. We don’t have that problem
Day 11-20: Management: Must we do this? Why couldn’t you do it right the first time
Day 21-25: Finger-pointing phase. Who is going to pay for this? Is this funded? Who is the project manager?
Day 26-35: Project plan developed. Resource not allocated
Day 36-45: Pre-meetings and meetings. Project still not funded
Day 46: CTO chews out VP of software engineering
Day 47: Project is funded
Day 48-49: Research
Day 50: Vulnerability fixed
Day 51-55: Regression testing. The fix broke 10 other things.
Day 56-60: Fix the new items
Day 61-65: More regression testing
Day 66: Meeting where VP of engineering tries to take all credit
Day 67: Promoted to Production

Several of you have asked for copies of my presentations from the autumn 2009 Windows Connections. Because I’m using the online tool Prezi, I don’t have traditional slides to give you. I have, though, shared the presentation files for everyone to see. The links are below.

Thanks again for coming to the talks. And be sure to look for my Windows-related guidance for using Amazon Web Services. I’ll announce here and on the AWS blog when each paper is published.

• Fear the cloud no more
• Introduction to the AWS cloud
• Securing the AWS cloud
• Managing your AWS cloud

It’s been a busy week of announcements from cloud platform vendors.  Amazon announced RDS, their MySQL-based relational data service, lower pricing on their EC2 compute service, new new higher memory and capacity EC2 instances.  I see RDS as a welcome addition and very complimentary to Amazon’s SimpleDB service.

SimpleDB provides simplicity and infinite scalability (relatively), but that comes with some big compromises – the biggest being eventual consistency and no transactional integrity.  Eventual consistency means data updates are not reflected immediately – they propagate over time (usually under 5 mins), which can create some unique challenges for transactional applications.    Without transactional integrity, you can’t be guaranteed that a set of related updates are applied together, which creates the risk of data corruption.

RDS, on the other hand, provides all the advantages of a traditional relational database (MySQL, specifically), but comes with the cost of complexity and scalability.  Amazon does reduce a significant amount of the complexity and scalability issues with RDS.  They provide all the generic database administration services, including backups.  And they provide the ability to scale both CPU and storage capacity with simple API calls.   But there is a limit to how high an RDS instance can scale, at which point you have to manually resort to horizontal scaling techniques like clustering and partitioning – which are not automatically supported by RDS.   While both RDS and SimpleDB have limitations, used together they offer a very powerful and flexible solution.

Meanwhile, in an email to Windows Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview) participants, Microsoft announced plans to transition Windows Azure from a CTP to a commercial offering by February 1st, 2010.

• At PDC 2009, on November 17th, 2009, a number of new features in Windows Azure will be made available for the first time. The CTP will remain open through December 31st, allowing you to experiment with the full feature platform and to give us any final feedback.
• Beginning January, 2010, new customers will have to sign up for an offer to access services on the Windows Azure platform. You’ll receive your first bill with a $0 balance, so you can see your exact usage while still enjoying free service.
• On February 1, 2010, we will begin charging customers for using the Windows Azure platform.

I’ve been surprised how long Microsoft held off the official release of the commercial Azure platform, meanwhile loosing market share to Amazon and others. I’ll be interested to see what is released in November and how their pricing compares to Amazon.

Software/service providers are a natural fit for a growing archival headache; for many organizations, the cloud looks like the best answer

Jim Ericson writes:

We are barely a generation past the day when a stack of ledgers and cabinets of contracts and correspondence best represented the paper trail of a corporate history.

The business information record of today looks much different than it did 20 years ago, but is no less bulky. The fruit of the Information Age is also a creaking attic of accumulation full of diverse records created by more people and systems than ever. From microfiche to punch cards to tape drives to hard disks to solid state, we have counted on technology to outpace our need to retain everything, even as those resources inevitably become strained and call for new solutions.

The largest businesses still manage their own archives, and there is no shortage of archival disk and tape drives in corporate back offices. Yet more organizations are colocating storage in data centers or calling on providers who bring software and private dedicated storage to assume the records chore for overtaxed IT departments. These services are not all equal and don’t always come with significant cost savings. While the trend of lower costs for storage devices may offset some of the growth of information, the human expense of managing archives is not going down.

Now, cloud computing can be added to the list of alternatives to do-it-yourself corporate record libraries. Through software/service vendors and their partnerships, cloud archival services have come to market with lower price points and “limitless” infrastructure, security, backup and analysis performance that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for small and midsized companies to deliver internally. While this market is immature and evolving, it is marching upstream with a paradigm that is likely to shift the long-term archival landscape once again.

Asset and Burden

The duality of information is that it is an asset in its existence and a liability in its maintenance, and the cost tradeoff has always been between time to access and persistence. Storage strategies already tier information across a lifecycle of access and assign seldom-used records to cheaper, slower storage. But with today’s regulatory rules and legal compliance for e-discovery, time to access is now important for more and more corporate information and is abetted by search, auditing and analysis to speed retrieval of records.

While any form of content is subject to scrutiny, email has glutted the corporate record more than any content to date. Petabytes worth of email records have landed at individual companies over a remarkably short span of time, and initial management concerns were more about operational continuity than e-discovery. “People started archiving email a few years ago but they weren’t doing it for compliance, they did it because their email servers would fail on some irregular basis,” says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst at CMS Watch.

As the digital tail grew, businesses struggled with how much information to keep for how long, well before legal mandates made some archiving decisions academic. But in certain industries, the uptime of the archive is now more important to administrators than the uptime of in-house mail servers. “If you are a broker/dealer and you are required to archive email and instant messaging, if your archive goes down but email and IM are still running, you’ve got content coming and going that’s not being archived,” says Michael Osterman of Osterman Research. “That kind of downtime is no fun in the course of a SEC audit.”

The risk associated with email and other forms of archiving has crossed the radar of more midsized as well as large businesses. A 2009 Osterman Research survey of IT decision-makers at different-sized organizations found that 46 percent have a need to handle routine e-discovery requests; 42 percent have end users that need to recover their own missing files; and 34 percent have a need to extract old electronic email and other content for regulatory audits.

Own or Offload

All the attention to archives has been good news to the storage, software as a service and hosting industries. The same Osterman study found that more than half of those surveyed had been ordered by a court or regulator to produce employee email or instant messaging and that 57 percent of midsized and large organizations indicated a need to manage email server storage more effectively by offloading it to less-expensive storage.

Competitors in the archive hosting arena come in all sizes and include HP, Proofpoint, Sun, EMC, Iron Mountain and a host of smaller vendors and startups. Competitive pressure and lower storage device costs have brought hosting prices down generally, depending on the services offered, but ongoing management issues and growing volumes of information have led many hosted vendors to develop their own cloud infrastructure models alongside in-house or offsite data centers.

The ubiquity of broadband connections that allow quicker Web access to cloud-based archives and the emergence of prominent cloud services, notably Amazon Web Services (AWS), have also brought early legitimacy to the cloud model. In a September Gartner Research paper, analyst Adam Couture identified large vendors specifically focused on building proprietary and/or private clouds, including Google, Microsoft and Dell, to name a few.

These and many other vendors, Couture says, are offering hybrid models consisting of on-premise and cloud archiving products.

Still other startups, he notes, such as Clearpace, Moonwalk and Sonian are offering their own software as a service linked directly to the cloud, but assigning infrastructure duties to AWS or other providers in a partnership model.

Multi-Vendor Models

Sonian may have been the first vendor to arise directly from the cloud partnership model and in August secured an additional $5.6 million round of funding based on early success. Greg Arnette, the company’s founder and CTO, says a straight-to-cloud business model and architecture is a natural fit for archival management – with the additional benefit of quick scaling and unlimited CPU access. “One advantage of cloud computing infrastructure is the ability to pick and choose the requirements for a system that meets the requirements for our audience. As a subscription service, our job is to please customers with one-off expectations.”

Sonian’s SA2 archive stack runs on top of AWS and serves a target audience of midsized organizations with 500 to 5,000 employees in public, government, health care and professional services. Email is the most popular archive service, though the company also hosts documents, messaging, social media, wikis and other content.

Cuyahoga County, Ohio, is a Sonian client, where Joe Hernandez works as a security analyst in the county’s Information Services Center, which serves between 3,500 and 4,500 employees at public-facing agencies. The county presently stores and accesses about three terabytes of email on Sonian SA2. Hernandez says the cost of storage and onsite management led the county to look for a cheaper solution, but one that could be trusted.

“The first thing we wanted was integrity of the data being archived offsite for litigation, investigative purposes or incident response so we were sure we were managing our legal liability,” Hernandez says. “The other thing we came across in our diligence was the cost-effectiveness of cloud computing, the guaranteed backup, the ease of archive requests and the support, which in my view has been excellent.”

Sonian offers services on a flat fee or schedule, and because they were on the government purchasing schedule, came to Cuyahoga County at what Hernandez says was a discount. In fairness, he says he’s not sure how the county’s pricing and cost savings compares to public customers, but he’s currently exploring Sonian and other hosted services for ways he might offload other IT duties that have become a burden on his department.

A prominent value-add for Sonian customers is reporting and analysis services, which arise from another vendor partnership with Vertica, a provider of columnar-based database software. Vertica’s deployment options include AWS, where query and reporting deliver fast search and standard reporting to Sonian customers through a Web interface or an exposed application programming interface, where advanced users can build their own reports and views.

“You see this attraction of companies that get the cloud, and Vertica was there with this really high-performance database,” says Arnette. “So when we work with Amazon, Vertica and others, the model supports more than just managing data. Customers want to mine and unlock the dark data that comes from analyzing communications from different perspectives, everything from social graphing to themes and project experts.”

Customers don’t see Vertica branding in the Sonian Web interface, but they get the benefits at the interface in the form of exports, PDFs and reports Hernandez calls “pretty remarkable.”

Service level agreements are guaranteed directly by Sonian and promise service levels with 99.99 percent availability and even greater information durability.

For its part, Amazon Web Services doesn’t comment specifically on partnerships but surely benefits from startups leveraging AWS to sell software and services. AWS spokesperson Kay Kinton will say that the company is seeing fast-changing demands and listening carefully to customers. “The bulk of what we’ve released today in terms of additional features and services came directly from feedback from our developer customers,” Kinton says.

Good Enough for Now

While the small and midsized path to hosted cloud archiving may be paved, in-house and dedicated hosted archiving still has a respectable future, even as large businesses are likely to be experimenting with their own “private” internal clouds.

Nonetheless, there’s no clear impetus yet for very large businesses to hand the task to cloud-based providers as long as archiving has internal scale with many advocates and vested careers. “Small businesses, yes, but larger enterprises are so ingrained and embedded that it’s going to take a long time to shift the psychology,” says Pelz-Sharpe. “Cloud computing is still scary to a lot of people.”

There’s also no guarantee that cloud-based solutions are ready to meet the rigors large companies have established for internal use. “Cloud vendors using Web interfaces will be trying to shave milliseconds here and there with the software they are building,” says Michael Coté, an analyst at RedMonk. “With on-premise apps by comparison, you can be a lot more sloppy with the performance of your application; it doesn’t factor as much on your network.”

When it comes to information security, AWS offers a kind of partitioning that can isolate silos of customer data, but it’s not yet clear how that compares to contemporary definitions of compliance.

“The concern people always have with the cloud business model is that a lot of users are going to be accessing something concurrently or accessing your service at the same time,” Coté says. “It’s still a little fuzzy in how that is being managed and explained.”

The same can be said for regulators who write mandates, place the burden of timely compliance on the respondent and later deal with companies at different stages of the archiving technology curve. From the enforcement side, the definition of what constitutes compliance will not be fully clear until judges and regulators have a better track record and case history to dictate what is expected and reasonable.

Cleaning House

In the interim, companies can do a much better job of deciding what they archive and why. If more racks and more labor to maintain archives is not a sustainable model, neither is the practice of archiving all the content that exists. Even with a data lifecycle, organizations are surely going to be storing more data, not less.

Arnette is hopeful that even the (relatively) slow pipes of the broadband Internet will keep up with information archiving and prove that a Web portal is a more efficient use of bandwidth for managing data than direct online storage. “Right now it makes more sense to me than the data center where you’re reading and writing the same file 10 times over,” he figures. “The management picture is going to sort out over time.”

To Pelz-Sharpe, the more important point is that as people confront the growing glut, they are becoming savvy to the fact that most of what they store is redundant or duplicate. “Storing junk is not a regulation,” says the analyst. “It’s only now dawning on IT that they can reduce archive volumes by 80 percent by housekeeping. Any good records manager will tell you the art of archiving is getting rid of stuff.”

Unlike building an addition, maintaining and cleaning house is seldom a welcome exercise, and for business, the attic awaits.

Excellent presentation this morning on the value of using virtualization software to create a sandbox for software testing and development. The speakers spoke about VMWare, BitNami, and JumpBox and the pros and cons of each. I was particularly intrigued with running BitNami and JumpBox stacks under Amazon’s Web Services. The presenter showed an example of a Drupal installation that he had created in five minutes using a BitNami stack and Amazon Web Services. Very neat.

Notes:
So what is a “sandbox”?
- A place to test code that is isolated from your production environment
- Software development model used to test new products
- Also, as a “wiki” model where people can gather to learn new technical skills

Who should be using a sandbox?
- Public service librarians who teach technology to the public
- Those wanting to be on the cutting edge of library technology

Sandbox must be a safe place
- Not going to affect your production environment

If you have to wait for IT to setup this environment it may lead to lost time

If you are evaluating software you want to test its features before you commit to storage and server space

Sandbox rules
- Place nice together

How do I do this?
- Three approaches:
○ VMWare
§ Virtual Appliance Marketplace — preconfigured machines to use with VMWare
□ Very little investment, you can start machines up when you need them
§ VMWare working on virtual desktop that would be suitable for public access terminals
□ Not quite fully developed
○ BitNami
§ Most focused towards web services
§ Installed as a stack (web server, Linux distro, MySQL)
§ Have packages for Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, lots of others
§ Not really designed for a production environment
○ JumpBox
§ Geared towards development environments
§ Have a distribution for Dspace
§ Must be run under VMWare or Virtual PC
§ Has a nice administrative panel

Amazon Web Services
- You can install all of these services in the cloud
- Can spin up a new server in about 5 minutes
- Have partnerships with BitNami and JumpBox

Librarysandbox.info for more information

Preparing your library sandbox for disasters
- Do you have a Plan B?
- Do you have support in the event of a disaster?
○ Administrative support?

By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 27, 2009, 6:07 PM

“Come November 1, Amazon’s Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a “quadruple extra-large” AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).”

“The new high-end instances won’t come cheap — they’ll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called “extra large,” had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.”

“However, revenue from the new super-high-end will help drive down prices for everyone else, starting November 1. At that time, the per-hour price for the smallest and cheapest instance available, running generic Linux, will be reduced by 15% to $0.085 per hour. Windows Server instances will be trimmed a bit, but not by as much percentage-wise — the “extra large” price, for instance, will drop only 4¢ to $0.96 per hour.”

Amazon’s (s amzn) web services division (AWS), in a move clearly aimed at wooing enterprise customers, says it will launch a new relational database as a service called Amazon RDS. It will also cut prices of its EC2 on-demand compute service by 15 percent, starting Nov. 1st. Charges for Linux-based EC2 instances will now cost just 8.5 cents per hour, compared to the previous price of 10 cents per hour.

The price cuts may be significant as Amazon typically doesn’t lose money on its products (yes, even Amazon Prime Shipping breaks even), which could indicate the pressure from other vendors is forcing Amazon to accept smaller margins, or that it’s figured out a way to improve its back-end infrastructure and offer compute cycles for less. The relational database move, however, is big. Relational databases are hard to maintain, and doing so eats up a lot of corporations’ time. Nor do they scale easily, which means that Amazon may have built a compelling product for enterprise customers seeking to move to the cloud. From the company release announcing the move:

Amazon RDS provides a fully featured MySQL database, so the code, applications, and tools that developers use today with their existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. The service automatically handles common database administration tasks such as setup and provisioning, patch management, and backup – storing the backups for a user-defined retention period.

On his blog, Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, writes:

Structured data management systems are traditionally served by relational databases but these sophisticated systems have their limitations, especially when it comes to scale and reliability. Often they also require tremendous expertise to operate efficiently and reliably especially when scaling up. Amazon RDS handles all the “muck” of relational database management freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business.

In addition, the company announced that it is launching a new family of high-memory instances for Amazon EC2. High-memory instances are designed to be used with memory-intensive workloads such as databases, caching, and rendering, and are optimized for low-latency, high-throughput performance. This will support the Amazon RDS launch.

On the AWS Blog, Amazon VP Jeff Barr offers up more details:

…we are introducing a new family of memory-heavy EC2 instances with the Double and Quadruple Extra Large High-Memory instance types. Here are the specs (note that an ECU is an EC2 compute unit, equivalent in CPU power to a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007-era AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processor):

• Double Extra Large – 34.2 GB of RAM, and 13 ECU (4 virtual cores with 3.25 ECU each), 64-bit platform.
• Quadruple Extra Large – 68.4 GB of RAM, and 26 ECU (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECU each), 64-bit platform.

These new instance types are available now in multiple Availability Zones of both EC2 regions (US and Europe). Double Extra Large instances cost $1.20 per instance hour and the Quadruple Extra Large instances cost $2.40 per instance hour (these prices are for Linux instances in the US region). These new instances use the most recent generation of processor and platform architectures.

These three moves are Amazon’s way of wooing corporate customers with specialized needs, and may be an answer to Microsoft’s (s msft) upcoming Azure platform, which features its own relational database as a service.  The push for high-memory instances can open up Amazon to further business from genomics and drug discovery companies. Amazon’s cloud is continuing to grow up, and it’s doing so ahead of those offered by the rest of the traditional IT vendors.

This past weekend I attended the first BarCampCharleston.  I must say, this event was as fun and enlightening as I thought it would be.  Thanks to all that put the event together.  And special thanks to the Lowcountry Innovation Center for hosting the event.  If I ever do a startup, I’ll be looking there for space.

One thing I discovered was, it really sucks that you can’t be in two places at once.  While I enjoyed all the sessions I attended, I regret missing a couple of the other cool ones.  I think my high school drum skills would have helped me in the Rock Band Challenge. Also, there were a few times that  I thought, “what the @*&% are they talking about?”  I really need to do a lot of tech reading in my spare time.  Apparently, there is a lot I need to learn about Github and Amazon Web Services.

In another session, I finally got to see how @jaredwsmith does his weather tracking magic.  Who knew there were so many free tools to track weather?  Also, thanks goes to @bank_daddy for sending the Google Wave invite.  Now I feel like a hip techie.

BaconCamp, the last session I attended, was a bacon lover’s dream.  Ted, from Ted’s Butcher Block brought in a couple hundred samples of bacon.  Let me tell you, that stuff you get at your local grocery store does not compare.  I still have applewood bacon flashbacks.

Now that I’ve attended a BarCamp, I can really see the need for BarCampBank.  I don’t know if we can get 130+ attendees, but I’d sure like to try.  So what do you think, BarCampBankCharleston in February 2010?

HRchitect featured Saba in our May 2008 release of The Suite Life of Integrated Talent Management and also includes them in our list of top Talent Management Systems and top Learning Management Systems vendors that businesses should consider. Saba participated in the Learning Management Systems panel on June 10, 2009 as part of theHRshow. A.G. Lambert, the VP of Marketing with Saba appeared on the HRchitect WebMingle on August 14, 2009.

If you are looking for a new Talent Management System, or any HR system, talk to HRchitect first. We have unparalleled knowledge of the HR and Talent Management vendor community and can save you time and money in selection and implementation.

Saba (NASDAQ: SABA), the premier people management software and services provider, today announced Saba People Management Cloud, an edition of Saba’s people management solutions to be delivered on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

By enabling Saba’s award-winning products for the Amazon cloud, large and mid-sized enterprises will be able to easily unify, engage, mobilize, and foster collaboration across their value chain while simultaneously reducing overall project implementation costs.  Amazon Web Services has become a leader in cloud computing services and provides a proven, trusted, robust, and highly scalable platform to support Saba’s On Premise and OnDemand services.

The Saba People Management Cloud will give companies the elasticity to use as few or as many of Saba’s services as they need, while paying only for what they use, with no up-front expenses. Both OnDemand and OnPremise customers will be able to take advantage of the Saba People Management Cloud as business needs dictate.

“Saba’s goal is to change the ROI equation for people management solutions by delivering a people management cloud that enables value-added services to reduce costs and increase efficiencies” said Bobby Yazdani, chairman and CEO of Saba. “The AWS cloud platform will allow customers to re-configure business processes to gain significant efficiencies in logistics, commerce, distribution, and other third-party services.”

For more information on Saba, please visit www.saba.com

 
Matt Lafata, HRchitect

This Saturday, 24 October, CloudCamp is coming to Phoenix. CloudCamp follows a unique format, I’m pretty excited to participate. It starts with several five-minute “lightning talks”; the Phoenix event will have five, and I’ll deliver a rapid overview of cloud security in Amazon Web Services. After the lightning talks is a panel, followed by two breakout “unsessions.” The unsessions are attendee-driven; I’ll focus on general cloud security/compliance and AWS specifics, so come prepared with your toughest questions. Hope to see you there!

CloudCamp information
CloudCamp Phoenix details
Register for CloudCamp Phoenix

Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Parallels, Oracle Sun, Virtual Iron, VMware, vSphere, KVM, Redhat, VMlogix, Veeam, Vizioncore, Amazon Web Services, EC2, S3, Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine

One of the coolest new features of AWS is Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. With Amazon VPC you can securely extend your corporate network into the cloud. You can maintain ownership and control of the information, you can provide the IP address range, you can control access and security using your existing tools and products. An IPsec tunnel-mode security association protects the data communications between your network and your Amazon VPC cloud. You can join your Amazon EC2 Windows instances to your domain and manage them with System Center.

I’ve written a paper that describes several scenarios that fit well with Amazon VPC. Please give it a read. And if you’ve not yet tried AWS, perhaps this will give you a few ideas of projects that fit with your IT plans.

Whitepaper: Extend your IT infrastructure with Amazon VPC

Amazon Web Services is coming to Los Angeles and New York with half-day afternoon events especially for enterprises. I’ll be there, speaking about security and concluding with some remarks on how the cloud is changing delivery of IT services. Click on one of the links below to register. The events are free — hope to see you there!

Los Angeles – Thursday 15 October – Sofitel Hotel, 8555 Beverly Blvd, 90048
New York – Monday 19 October – Marriott Downtown, 85 West St at Albany St, 10006

Reasons to attend

• Gain a deeper understanding of Amazon Web Services, including best practices for architecting and securing applications in the cloud
• Learn how AWS can help you quickly and cost-efficiently scale IT infrastructure capacity to meet growing business needs without incurring resource costs when demand is low
• Hear enterprise customers talk about their experiences and successes with Amazon Web Services

Who should attend

• Technology and business stakeholders of enterprise companies, including CTOs, CIOs, VPs, directors, program and product managers, architects, administrators, lead engineers, and IT managers

Agenda

12:30pm – 1:30pm: Doors open; partner and solutions expo
1:30pm – 1:40pm: Opening statements
1:40pm – 2:20pm: AWS overview by Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO
2:20pm – 3:20pm: Customer presentations and Q&A
10 minute break
3:30pm – 4:00pm: Security in the AWS cloud
4:00pm – 4:40pm: Architecting enterprise applications in the cloud
4:40pm – 5:00pm: Getting started with the AWS cloud
5:00pm – 7:00pm: Networking and cocktail reception

HostedFTP is currently using Amazons EC2 and S3 hosting technology.

So we feel that providing our users with a better understanding of EC2 and S3 and how it works would be
beneficial to your business.

Analysts predict that Cloud Computing and SaaS will be a $160 Billion dollar industry by the year 2015.