UP2011 Cloud Conference

Impact of cloud on global economy, trends and developments in cloud computing for 2011-2012 is the theme for year end event in Mountain View, California in December 2011. The format has been developed for International UP 2011 Cloud Conference to provide a platform for users and providers to approach cloud from theoretical and practical standpoint. Keynote sessions, panel discussions will contribute to more precise understanding of the definition, adoption and development of cloud. Also, conference aims at enriching the dialogue between various users and providers from different industry verticals.

A 'common language' among cloud enablers and consumers has already been sought at first UP and Cloud Slam conferences that have provided a highly valuable input into the still emerging field of cloud computing. In Toronto 2009, San Francisco 2010 and Mountain View 2011(Spring), enterprise cloud adopters and major cloud providers came together to discuss various aspects related to the cloud. Different perspectives on the issue have been examined and the conferences provided important insights to the sub-themes of cloud. Nevertheless open questions remained: these questions deal with the general understanding of what benefits cloud computing brings for business and global economy in general. Conference participants urged to solve the ambiguities in the understanding of cloud computing and find better way to leverage cloud for their business goals.

UP 2011 conference adopts an interdisciplinary and international perspective aiming to approach the theme from an analytical and global point of view that also includes the discussion of appropriate methodology to analyse and measure effects and success of cloud computing.

For more details, refer at http://up-con.com/

Intel’s Cloud 2015 vision

Intel’s Cloud 2015 vision – which aims to achieve cloud federation, automation and device-awareness – is almost entirely in Intel’s court. Considering its prevalence in devices from servers to netbooks, Intel can almost singlehandedly accomplish all of the goals at the hardware level, although it still will need plenty of support from the software community. However, as certain antitrust allegations against Intel (sub req’d) illustrate (in which server makers Dell, HP and IBM allegedly abandoned planned AMD offerings at Intel’s behest), the company does have the cachet to affect product strategies. I’m not inferring any illegal activity, but rather pointing out that if anyone has the might to convince IT vendors, cloud providers and device makers to collaborate on standards and interoperability, it’s Intel.

Intel likes client-aware for two reasons. First, Intel wants to keep selling “fat” clients, because “fat client” equals “lots of transistors and performance.” About three years ago, Intel started talking trash about thin client in the context of the start of the ARM wars.

In the intervening years, Intel has toned down the anti-thin-client rhetoric just a bit, but the company is still looking to sell fully-featured clients—or “rich clients” as the chipmaker prefers to call them—of the kind that rival ARM can’t yet match.

Apart from the fact that Intel wants to see clients maintain a robust appetite for the transistors and features it supplies, there is another reason why Intel likes the client-aware cloud vision: lock-in.

Intel would love it if the most convenient and secure way for you to connect to an Intel-powered cloud is with an Intel-powered client. If Intel can build clouds that are vPro-aware and that work best with vPro-enabled clients, then you’ll have a real incentive to make sure that Intel—not ARM—is inside your smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

So, that’s the broad outline of Intel’s vision for the cloud in three years. What’s your take?

Amazon Elasticache

This week, my first cloud paper Cloud Programming Concepts based on few months effort (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/azure/CloudProgrammingConcept.aspx), got publised in cloud zone of CodeProject at http://www.codeproject.com/Zones/Cloud/

Recently, AWS has launched Amazon ElastiCache, a new service that makes it easy to add distributed in-memory caching to any application. Amazon ElastiCache handles the complexity of creating, scaling and managing an in-memory cache to free up brainpower for more differentiating activities. There are many success stories about the effectiveness of caching in many different scenarios; next to helping applications achieving fast and predictable performance, it often protects databases from requests bursts and brownouts under overload conditions. Systems that make extensive use of caching almost all report a significant reduction in the cost of their database tier. Given the widespread use of caching in many of the applications in the AWS Cloud, a caching service had been high on the request list of our customers.

Amazon ElastiCache is compliant with Memcached, which makes it easy for developers who are already familiar with that system to start using the service immediately. Existing applications, tools and libraries that are using a Memcached environment can simply switch over to using Amazon ElastiCache without much effort.

For more details on Amazon ElastiCache visit the detail page http://aws.amazon.com/elasticache

Cloud Logging

Last week, I noticed new buzz word 'Cloud Logging' at our architect Ambal desk. This blog is about that.

Trust is not only a cloud issue. Alan Murphy points out that to get the benefits of clouds, one has to trust the providers for certain things, but doing so continues a trend in technology

Clouds will need different audit models than do traditional data centers. The diagram shows physical servers onto which the virtual machine instances (VMI) may map. As each VMI generates a loggable event, typically using calls to syslog or snmp, the physical server inserts a time stamp from a trusted (i.e., cryptographically signed) network time protocol server, and then transmits multiple copies of the log events to distributed master logs within the provider infrastructure. At those locations, software and servers sort the log events by VMI and customer, and create viewable, secure logs that the customers can audit. This design is towards LaaS (Logging As A Service)

Alternatively, in a community cloud, independent auditors can apply suitable tests to the customer data extractors and certify them, perhaps for a given digitally signed version of the code. This design approach does assume that the VMI-hypervisor is trusted; there have been some experimental side channel attacks from one VMI to another. This is an area, especially when there are legal requirements to demonstrate due diligence, in which recognized expert help may be needed.

Apple iCloud

iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more at cloud. And wirelessly

pushes them to all your devices — automatically. It’s the easiest way to manage your content.

iCloud is so much more than a hard drive in the sky. It’s the effortless way to access just about everything on all your devices. iCloud stores your content so it’s always accessible from your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. It gives you instant access to your music, apps, latest photos, and more. And it keeps your email, contacts, and calendars up to date across all your devices. No syncing required. No management required. In fact, no anything required. iCloud does it all for you.

When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. And that’s plenty of room, because of the way iCloud stores your content. Your purchased music, apps, books, and TV shows, as well as your Photo Stream, don’t count against your free storage. Since your mail, documents, Camera Roll, account information, settings, and other app data don’t use as much space, you’ll find that 5GB goes a long way. And if you need more storage, you can easily purchase a storage upgrade right from your device.

Amazon Cloud Player

Interesting product from Amazon; itz nothing but Amazon Cloud Player. Amazon has made its entry into the music streaming world with Amazon Cloud Player. Rather than stream a library of predetermined music, Cloud Player lets you upload your existing music library and stream it from any computer or Android device.

Amazon Cloud Player is a browser based application that supports Mac and PC computers and iPad devices. Cloud Player is not optimized to run on some mobile phones or tablets including: iPhones, Blackberrys, and Windows Mobile devices. For Android phones and tablets, itz recommended to install the Amazon MP3 app for Android which includes Amazon Cloud Player for Android.

You can upload your existing music library to Amazon Cloud Drive so all of your music is stored in one place and accessible from anywhere. All Amazon accounts have access to 5GB of free Cloud Drive storage for uploading content. Additional storage is available for an annual fee.

Amazon has thrown down the gauntlet and set a high bar for cloud-based music streaming. Apple and Google, which are expected to launch their own cloud players sometime this year, will have to match Amazon on usability and price if they’re going to compete.

Amazon can’t rest on its laurels though; Apple will surely harness its control of the iPhone, iTunes and iOS to boost its own offering and give the shopping giant a run for its money.

Cloud Security

Cloud computing security (sometimes referred to simply as "cloud security") is an evolving sub-domain of computer security, network security, and, more broadly, information security. It refers to a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls deployed to protect data, applications, and the associated infrastructure of cloud computing. Cloud security is not to be confused with security software offerings that are "cloud-based" (a.k.a. security-as-a-service).

Many commercial software vendors have offerings such as cloud-based anti-virus or vulnerability management.Third-party cloud computing represents the promise of outsourcing as applied to computation. Services, such as Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s EC2, allow users to instantiate virtual machines (VMs) on demand and thus purchase precisely the capacity they require when they require it. In turn, the use of virtualization allows third-party cloud providers to maximize the utilization of their sunk capital costs by multiplexing many customer VMs across a shared physical infrastructure.

In the emerging cloud security space, Craig Balding laid the foundation for cloudsecurity.org (http://cloudsecurity.org/) This site is for people that want to learn more about cloud computing from an enterprise security perspective. Lot of interesting topic, discussion, blog are available and so the interested folks can fetch the benefit out of it