Michael Sheehan

Cloud Expo on Ulitzer

I’m going to try something new here. Cloud Computing news breaks all of the time.

While in the past, I have focused mainly on GoGrid product announcements and lengthy commentary on articles that talk about Cloud Computing, I have realized that there is so much happening within the atmosphere that sometimes it is hard to keep up.

So, I’m going to try (emphasis on try) to scour the daily news and blogosphere for anything related to Cloud Computing that I see as relevant, timely and/or interesting post a link to the article and write my 2 cents (shots from the peanut gallery) about it.

I would appreciate getting any links of consolidated Cloud information.

Feel free to leave a comment or send me a tweet on either the GoGrid twitter account or my account.

Without further ado…onto the Cloud News!

• Open source: The money is in the cloud
  “For those entrepreneurs looking to make a living from open-source software, Index Ventures general partner Bernard Dallé has some advice: get thee to a cloud strategy. The cloud isn’t simply a clever way to provide social-networking services, either. As Dallé suggested in a phone interview on Wednesday, cloud computing may well be the best way to monetize enterprise-facing open-source software.” (source: cnet)
  • Commentary: I couldn’t agree more. There are so many fantastic OpenSource solutions in the market that you are hard pressed to go wrong. One thing you need to consider, though is the support around it. Many OpenSource companies do provide premium support for their products. When you couple OpenSource with the Cloud, you really enable your business to keep your spending lean and mean. This is one of the reasons, for example, that GoGrid has partnered with BitNami as they provide easy-to-deploy OpenSource software stacks that are baked into predefined GoGrid server images.
• Intel hopes 48-core chip will solve new challenges
  “Pushing several steps farther in the multicore direction, Intel on Wednesday demonstrated a fully programmable 48-core processor it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can. The 1.3-billion transistor processor, called Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is successor generation to the 80-core “Polaris” processor that Intel’s Tera-scale research project produced in 2007. Unlike that precursor, though, the second-generation model is able to run the standard software of Intel’s x86 chips such as its Pentium and Core models.” (source: cnet)
  • Commentary: Intel has really been pushing the envelop lately with advances in their various chipsets. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how GoGrid’s Cloud will be powered by the new Nehalem chipset. While neither the Nehalem nor this new 48-core chip will solve all of a Cloud hosting provider’s problems or bottlenecks, it is a dramatic step forward in terms of baking efficiency and power down to the lowest level of infrastructure as possible. I expect that as things get smaller, faster, more energy efficient and (hopefully) less expensive, there will be little or no difference between Cloud and Physical Infrastructures.

• Security Report Predicts Cloud Computing Attacks in 2010
  “M86 Security, a leading global provider of Web and messaging security products, released Predictions 2010, a report on its expectations for Web and messaging-based threats for the coming year. The report is based on M86 Security Lab’s extensive research into the current trends in threats over the past year and its views on the major vulnerabilities facing organizations. The report highlights the increasing sophistication of traditional threats such as botnets, scareware, compromised legitimate Web sites and blended threats. However, it also projects what the company sees are new threat vectors coming from open API’s in Web 2.0 applications, the increased use of shortened URLs and the advent of non-Latin based domain names.” (source: xml.sys-con.com)
  • Commentary: After reading this article, nothing here really jumps out at me as being surprising or “new” really. As IT sophistication increases, so does hacker sophistication. I have always said that any IT infrastructure or Application is only as secure as the effort that is put into securing it. If you don’t do it, you will get hacked. If you follow best IT practices with backups, hardening and security, your are less likely to be considered an “easy target.” One thing to think about though, with the cloud, and assuming you follow a careful backup routine, you can recover much faster. Think of it as “disposable IT” – just delete the server and spawn up an earlier copy or restore from a backup. Sure, the same could be said with physical hardware, but it takes much longer. Probably the 3 “newer” threats that I see in this article that should be concerning are: International Domain Name Abuse (a new rule), Attacking APIs and URL Shortening Services (but that is more on the consumer side). What other threats do you see coming through the clouds?

Any other stories grab you? Let me know!