Cloud Computing on keithrozario.com

My experience with AWS Certified Security - Specialty

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 08:49:08 +0000

Last week I took the AWS Certified Security - Specialty exam -- and I passed with a score of 930 (Woohoo!!)

In this post I cover why I took it, what I did to pass, my overall exam experience, and some tips I learnt along the way.

So let's go.

Why?

Why would anybody pay good money, subject themselves to hours of studying, only to end up sitting in a cold exam room for hours answering many multiple choice questions!

And the reward for that work is an unsigned PDF file claiming you're 'certified', and 'privilege' access to buy AWS branded notebooks and water bottles!! Unless those water bottles come with a reserved instance for Microsoft SQL server in Bahrain, I'm not interested.

But, jokes asides, I did this for fun and profit, and fortunately I really did enjoy the preparing for this exam. It exposed me to AWS services that I barely knew -- and forced me to level-up my skills even on those that I knew.

The exam has a massive focus on VPC, KMS, IAM, S3, EC2, Cloudtrail and Cloudwatch. While lightly touching Guardduty, Macie, Config, Inspector, Lambda, Cloudfront, WAF, System Manager and AWS Shield.

You need to catch you breath just reading through that list!

But for those diligently keeping count -- you'd notice that the majority of those services are serverless -- meaning the exam combined my two technological love-affairs ... security and serverless!

I wasn't lying when I said it was fun. So what about the profit.

I'm not sure how good this would be for my career (I literally got the cert last week), but for $300, it's is relatively cheap, with a tonne of practical value. So trying to get an ROI on this, isn't going to be hard.

For comparison, the CCSP certification cost nearly twice as much, is highly theoretical and requires professional experience.

The results also help me validate my past years of working on serverless projects, proving I wasn't just some rando posting useless hobby projects on GitHub. Instead, I'm now a certified AWS professional, posting useless hobby projects on GitHub (it's all about how you market it!)

So now that we've covered the why, let's move onto how.

Lambda functions in a VPC

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 21:57:07 +0000

In my honest (and truly humble) opinion, VPCs don't make much sense in a serverless architecture -- it's not that they don't add value, it's that the value the add isn't worth the complexity you incur.

After all, you can't log into a lambda function, there are no inward connections allowed. And it isn't a persistent environment, some functions may timeout after just 2-3 seconds. Sure, network level security is still worthy pursuit, but for serverless, tightly managing IAM roles and looking after your software supply chain for vulnerabilities would be better value for your money.

But if you've got a fleet of EC2s already deployed in a VPC, and your Lambda function needs access them. Then you have no choice but to deploy that function in a VPC as well. Or, if your org requires full network logging of all your workloads, then you'll also need VPC (and their flow logs) to comply with such requests.

Don't get me wrong, there is value in having your functions in a VPC, just probably not as much as you think.

Put that aside though, let's dive into the wonderful world of Lambda functions and VPCs

Working Example

First, imagine we deploy a simple VPC with 4 subnets.

A Public Subnet with a Nat Gateway inside it.
A Private Subnet which routes all traffic through that NAT Gateway
A Private Subnet without internet (only local routing)
A Private Subnet without internet but with a SSM VPCe inside it

Let's label these subnets (1), (2) ,(3) and (4) for simplicity.

Now we write some Lambda functions, and deploy each of them to each subnet. The functions have an attached security group that allows all outgoing connections, and similarly each subnet has very liberal NACLs that allow incoming and outgoing connections.

Then we create a gateway S3 VPC-endpoint (VPCe), and route subnet (4) to it.

Finally, we enable private DNS on the entire VPC. And then outside the subnet we create a bucket and an System Manager Parameter Store Parameter (AWS really need better terms for these things).

The final network looks like this:

Using Terraform and Serverless Framework

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 19:10:54 +0000

Image from wikicommons.

The Serverless framework (SF) is a fantastic tool for testing and deploying lambda functions, but it's reliance on cloudformation makes it clumsy for infrastructure like DynamoDB, S3 or SQS queues.

For example, if your serverless.yml file had 5 lambdas, you'd be able to sls deploy all day long. But add just one S3 bucket, and you'd first have to sls remove before you could deploy again. This different behavior in the framework, once you introduce 'infra' is clumsy. Sometimes I use deploy to add functions without wanting to remove existing resources.

Terraform though, keeps the state of your infrastructure, and can apply only the changes. It also has powerful commands like taint, that can re-deploy a single piece of infrastructure, for instance to wipe clean a DynamoDB.

In this post, I'll show how I got Terraform and Serverless to work together in deploying an application, using both frameworks strengths to complement each other.

**From here on, I'll refer to tool Serverless Framework as SF to avoid confusing it with the actual term serverless

Terraform and Serverless sitting on a tree

First some principles:

Use SF for Lambda & API Gateway
Use Terraform for everything else.
Use a tfvars file for Terraform variable
Use JSON for the tfvars file
Terraform deploys first followed by SF
Terraform will not depend on any output from SF
SF may depend on output from terraform
Use SSM Parameter Store to capture Terraform outputs
Import inputs into Serverless from SSM Parameter Store
Use workspaces in Terraform to manage different environments.
Use stages in Serverless to manage different environments.
stage.name == workspace.name

In the end the deployment will look like this:

This is how fast Amazon is in Singapore

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 17:01:05 +0000

This is how fast your connection on AWS in Singapore is when connecting to a Singaporean server. Not much different if you repeat it, but I was surprised the ping was still 2ms, I expected to be just 1 (or even less).

IBM vs. AWS the battle of the cloud providers

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 08:00:36 +0000

If you’re looking at implementing a large scale cloud offering, something where you measure capacity in chunks of 100TB, then you might want to weigh in on the pros and cons of each possible Cloud provider.

Or you could just read 79 page protest Amazon filed in a US court claiming it’s ‘successful’ bid on a CIA tender was legit, and IBM had no business going to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to get the CIA to re-tender.

Malaysia Data Center aspirations

Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:53 +0000

A bernama report a couple of days ago mentioned that Malaysia was ‘well-positioned’ to be a world class preferred hub for data centers:

KUALA LUMPUR, April 18 (Bernama) -- Malaysia is well-positioned to be a world-class preferred hub as a data center thanks largely to the government's liberal investment policies, solid infrastructure and a large supply of people with expertise on information technology.
Besides this, the country’s multilingual talents offer clear advantages for foreign investors, particularly in terms of disaster recovery and offshore relocation, Fumitoshi Imaizumi, the President and Chief Executive Officer of NTT MSC, said in a statement here Thursday.

The reality though is starkly different. Data centers consume huge amounts of power and huge amounts of space, so the two primary resources needed to operate a data center are electricity and real-estate. Of course you need skilled technicians and engineers to run it, but the scale of most data centers usually require a small-ish team to operate even the largest data-centers, as these things usually take care of themselves.

Undersea Cables in Malaysia : The Need for infrastructure

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:00:19 +0000

A good friend and regular reader (or so I hope) of this blog sent me this link last week. It’s a really nifty chart of all the undersea cables in the world. Now, for those who don’t know what undersea cables are, they’re basically the huge data cables that carry around the data we use for the internet. While modern satellites orbit overhead, the unfortunate truth is that satellites aren’t able to carry even a fraction of the bandwidth that undersea cables do, and chances are if you’re reading this now–at least some of this data has gone through an undersea cable before ending up on your screen.

If you look at the moment from an abstract level however, you begin to notice that these cables tend to ‘cluster’ around certain areas. We can see clear clusters in America, but more specifically in states like California, Florida, New Jersey and Oregon. Other places we see clusters are in Brazil, particularly Sao Paolo, and then we huge clusters in the UK (and zooming in you’ll see there’s huge connectivity to Ireland), Portugal and a large amount of cables going through the Suez Canal. In Asia, we see huge metropolis of these things in Japan, Korea, Shanghai and Taiwan, and finally much closer to home we see a huge clustering happening next door–in Singapore and a tiny bit of clustering happening in Sydney, Australia.

Cracking Passwords with the Cloud

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:56:34 +0000

I remember my computer security professor telling me that encryption doesn’t make it impossible to decrypt, but rather infeasible to decrypt. Nobody is going to buy a supercomputer to crack your final year thesis, simply because the data isn’t worth nearly as much as the cost to crack it–thereby making it infeasible.

With cloud computing, however, end-users and regular joes like us, have access to very very powerful machines for a fraction of their actual cost (since we’re only renting the machines). Couple that with the high scalability of the cloud , it means that what was previously infeasible, is now a very viable option. In fact what used to be only available to big corporations and governments, now has become available to anyone with a credit card and Amazon account.

I’m not talking about complex mathematical approaches to breaking encryption either, I’m talking about the standard brute force method. Brute Force basically involves trying every single possible password until you eventually find the password that works. In the past brute force wasn’t considered a valid option since trying all those passwords which number in the hundreds of billions, would require a very powerful computer, and most people–not even criminals, had access to that sort of computing power. However, with the advent of cloud computing, powerful hardware is suddenly becoming more available to the general public for low-down prices. What use to cost tens of thousands of dollars per server now cost just 2.60 an hour to ‘rent’.

What if we could use the power of the cloud to crack the average level encryption we have on our zip or excel files? Well it turns out, we can, and it’s results are ridiculous!

MSC Cloud Initiative : Why it's a bridge too far

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 11:33:57 +0000

Why does Amazon–arguably the biggest cloud player in the world–choose to launch it’s Asia-Pacific Offering in Singapore rather than Malaysia? One would think that the prohibitively high prices of land in Singapore, coupled with it’s higher base cost and employee wages would make Singapore a terrible place to put up a Huge Datacenter comprising of thousands of Servers and HVAC units.

Just to compare Malaysia and Singapore, you can build data centers in Malaysia for a fraction of the cost, coupled with cheaper labor and support cost. Our subsidized power, also means that Amazon could benefit from lower electricity bills. Best of all, Malaysia and Singapore, aren’t really that far apart, so why setup shop in Singapore for something that relies on high volume and low cost? The answer is quite simple–Singapore is where the Internet is, or rather that’s where the data flows through. The internet is the information super highway, and just like any other highway the 3 most important criteria for setting up business on the internet is location, location,location.

When Lightning strikes the Cloud: Amazon Outage

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 04:00:43 +0000

Google recently announced their Amazon EC2 killer, the Google Compute Engine or GCE. Google wasn’t messing around and went straight for the Amazon jugular releasing 4 instance types all of which appear cheaper than their Amazon counterparts. That being said the price comparison was done solely on the basis on a on-demand Amazon instance types–Amazons most expensive prices, if you compare for the Reserved instances, then prices become more competitive.

It’s exciting to finally see a Juggernaut big enough to take on Amazon in terms of price and scale. This is all around good news for everyone, especially since this report from Cisco estimates that revenues from IaaS providers are not only high right now, but will continue to grow over the next 5 years. There’s a lot of room at the IaaS space, and Google just wants to wet their beak here as well.

So it must have come as a pleasant surprise to Google when they heard ‘hurricane-like’ thunderstorms ripped across the US east coast taking down power to 3.5 million–and the Amazon East Data center as well. I was personally affected by this phenomena when my access to Netflix was abruptly halted, as you can imagine I wasn’t a happy camper.

Skali Cloud: A review ultra-scalable skali Cloud

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:57:44 +0000

A couple of months back, I wrote a small article about the Skali Cloud and how I liked the niche approach they took to cloud computing. Skali offers a very unique ultra-scalable instances that can be attached to physical machines of variable performances and storage space. In normal English, that just means you can actually the processor speed, amount of RAM and even storage space of your machine (ok that wasn’t ’normal’ English).

In contrast, Amazon and every other cloud offering I know of, offer a specific number of machine types (usually 3 to 8) that come in fixed configurations with respect to processor speed, RAM and storage. The great thing about Skali is that if you have certain applications that would require high processing speed with minimum RAM, you can literally create a physical machine that fit your needs exactly. If you used Amazon for example, you’d have to acquire very large instance types on Amazon and usually pay a high premium for storage and memory that you really don’t need. Similarly for applications that don’t require high processing speed, but high amounts of memory instead could equally benefit from creating highly customized virtual machines to suit your performance needs.

A couple of weeks back, a commenter on my Skali cloud post and thanked me for the post, that commenter turned out to be Tengku Farith, the founder of Skali. So I wrote back requesting a small trial setup, and within a few days I manage to setup a trial account with Rm200 credit on the Skali cloud. (pretty awesome!) So I manage to wriggle a couple of hours to spend time toying around with the Skali cloud and here’s what I found:

Maxis Loker: A review

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 10:27:50 +0000

As you know, I’m not really happy with Maxis. I was utterly disappointed by their latest S3 launch, I don’t think their cloud offerings of ebook portal is anything to shout at, and the if my wifes office would get decent Digi coverage, I’d switch in a heartbeat.

That being said, this is one of the times I think Maxis has done a decent job on their Loker offering. It is quite well executed, and if I do say so myself, getting 25GB of free online storage space when you purchase an S3 from Maxis is quite an enticing offer.

So what is Loker?

Loker is a simple online storage area for Maxis customers to store their online files. Free registration comes with 5GB of free storage, which you can upgrade all the way to 25GB of storage space coupled with (as far as I can tell) unlimited downloads and uploads.

It’s also important to note that Maxis is offering the full 25GB to anyone who signs up for the Samsung Galaxy S3 package, which to me is a great value adding tool.

The service however, is only available to Maxis customers, and you need a Maxis phone number to register.

REALLY cheap Cloud Storage

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:24:37 +0000

Cloud Storage seems to the in thing these days. With the launch of Google Drive, my previous post on how to create a site to share large files seem a bit irrelevant, and with the even hotter news that Google and Microsoft may launch their own IaaS initiatives to compete with Amazon it looks a foregone conclusion that cloud storage will become ridiculously cheap in the years to come. So cheap in fact, it may make the large Hard Disk in your home seem as irrelevant as my post.

Now, although Cloud Storage is cheap and can only get cheaper, I am – by all accounts– the cheapest cheap skate I know, and I’m always ready to try a new deal even when the new deal is just $0.03 less than the old deal.

MacinCloud: Develop iPad / iPhone apps on Windows

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:10:53 +0000

So you want to develop an iOS application for your iPhone or iPad.

Thinking of being the next big app to hit the appstore.

Only one problem, developing applications for the iPhone and iPad require a Mac or more specifically a machine running Mac OS X. It could be you actually own a Mac, you could go and buy yourself an RM1800 Mac Mini, or you could try a hackintosh, although just creating a hackintosh would be a small project in itself.

Now Hackintosh is actually way beyond the scope of this article, so rest assured I’m not asking you to do anything ridiculously technical or suspiciously illegal. (although those are my favorite type of things to do)

If you’re reading this though, chances are you have a windows PC at home, or even Ubuntu, that’s quite standard and sufficient if you wish to develop Android apps, and they rake in money too.

iOS apps however, are a different beast all together and require a Mac OS X device, which is pretty easy to purchase in Malaysia, but they don’t come cheap. You may want to think hard before plunking down an extra 2-3 thousand ringgit just to ’try’ your hand at app development. Just like you wouldn’t want to buy 3 year subscription to your neighborhood gym only to go 5 times in the first month – and then never again!

Design your perfect server with Skali Cloud

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:18:38 +0000

After doing some research on Malaysian Cloud offerings particularly the IaaS offerings, I noticed something rather interesting from Skali. Now I always remembered Skali as an early web startup some time back in the 90s trying to ride the internet wave but failing all along the way, this however has some promise.

Skali takes cloud scalability to a whole different level with their cloud offerings, unlike other IaaS providers who offer a fixed number of machine types Skali offers a fully scalable machine that you can add processing power, Memory and Disk independently. In essence near unlimited amounts of options in terms of machine type compared to just 3 from Maxis Cloud.

The pricing still seems high, but it can go toe-to-toe with Maxis although it would depend on the specific requirements. From just the high level you can sense that these IaaS providers are going to compete for Malaysian customers but they’re competing with very niche offerings. Maxis ace up it’s sleeve would be the unlimited data transfer, which Skali charges at a mind-blowing Rm2/GB. Skali on the other hand offers an entire range of machine types (possibly in the hundreds), while Maxis offers just 3.

The choice between Maxis or Skali would be a simple one that would come down to how much data transfer or scalability you need in your application. That being said, let’s take a look at some other offerings from Skali Cloud.

MaxisCloud : A silver lining in terms of data transfer

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:41:00 +0000

A couple of weeks back I wrote a long post on the Maxis Cloud comparing it to other IaaS providers like Amazon and rackspace. That post wasn’t too kind to Maxis, and I did mention that there was no reason to use it…unless the data transfer was free.

As it turns out, data transfer on the Maxis IS FREE!!

This is a good step in the right direction for 2 reasons. Firstly, it means for high end cloud computing users that require lots and lots of data transfers, you’re looking at one of a IaaS provider that gives you unlimited data transfer inward and outward. Secondly, it means that there is a IaaS provider in Malaysia, that offers something that can be considered reasonably price, particularly if you’re hoping to be dealing with a lot of data transfer.

Maxis Cloud : Too Late, Too expensive and Too Restrictive

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:51:01 +0000

Maxis recently launched their new IaaS offering in the form called the Maxis Cloud. According to Lowyat.net the Maxis Cloud is said to be the " the most advanced on-demand, real-time, fully managed cloud service in Malaysia, Maxis Cloud allows businesses to scale their cloud computing infrastructure according to their needs at any time through its self-service portal."

That’s basically calling yourself Jaguh Kampung. Pardon the sarcasm, but the Maxis Cloud does seem a tad bit expensive for a such a late entry into the game. You’d expect new IaaS providers that show up this late in the cloud game throw everything including the kitchen sink to get new subscribers. That however, has been lacking and a marketing strategy that seems more intent on selling IaaS to non-believers as oppose to selling the Maxis Cloud itself isn’t helping their case.

I’d loved to be rooting for Maxis, but most of it’s offerings just don’t add up, and there’s a whole bunch of questions about it’s bandwidth charges, support availability and API specifications that aren’t clear enough to me to make any sort of comparison or even recommendation. Plus the fact that its self service portal had a ’technical issue’ when I logged on didn’t really bode well for my experience.

That being said, while analyzing I noticed that there is one thing Maxis could offer that could tilt the tables in its favor, Maxis is a communications company after all (unlike Amazon or Rackspace) and I think there just might be a chance it could offer something niche that would make it stand out. But first, let’s take a look at some key concepts:

Original Microsoft Office for just Rm18/month

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:32:28 +0000

Yeap, you read that right. Microsoft office is the bane of all small business owners, they need it to generate documents and spreadsheets, but it cost a bomb to own. The standard Microsoft Office suite runs well over Rm600, and according to this pricelist from software exchange, Microsoft Office 2010 cost a whooping Rm643. Now Rm643 may not seem like much, but when a laptop/desktop cost just Rm2000, that’s nearly 30% more cash upfront for your software needs.

How is this possible, well Microsoft is offering Office365 worldwide and has even partnered with TM to sell their cloud offerings locally in Malaysia. Office365 is a cloud based version of the Microsoft Office, and it even includes things like email, collaboration and project management software. All of this for just Rm18/month is a pretty sweet deal in comparison to putting down Rm600 per user as a initial capital expense.

Adobe releasing Creative Cloud for $49.99 soon!

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:48:48 +0000

Adobe is looking to release a cloud version of their creative applications online called creativecloud. From what I gather from their website it looks to be like a office365 version for creatives. This is probably a step in the right direction, Adobe software usually run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, and buying the licenses for that software usually incur a huge capital expenditure for startups looking use these applications.

UC Berkeley says it: Google Apps beats Office365, but not by much

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:08:48 +0000

UC Berkeley is easily one of the most recognized institutions of learning with 70 Nobel Laureates to their name, so when they say something about tech you’d better listen up. This time however, it’s that big battle in the cloud between Google Apps and Office365 or as I would call it – The Battle for the Doc Cloud. The question is Who Will be the Last Cloud Standing?

As more people start to use cloud based applications, it’s getting more apparent that this little space in the cloud is about to see a boom pretty soon. Now consider this, the Microsoft Business Division unit is the largest revenue contributor to Microsoft, bringing in a total of $5.62 billion in the first quarter of 2011 (that’s the quarter ending sept. 2011). That trumps the Windows division with just $4.87 billion in revenue, now the difference doesn’t look like much (and probably doesn’t to Microsoft), but what that means is that the Business Division (with things like office, lync, sharepoint and exchange) brings in nearly $4 billion dollars of revenue MORE than Windows. Say it with me now people – WHAT THE #$%^.

That’s just one division of one company.

Ge.tt gets 350,000 Euros to make your file sharing better

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:21:08 +0000

File Sharing seems to be the next big thing , with email servers hitting maximum attachment sizes of 50MB pretty often, a lot of professionals are opting for web-based file sharing services. I previously wrote about how much I loved the interface at ge.tt, plus I absolutely adore it’s name. With more and more competition out there to share your files, what’s a poor danish company to do?

Venturebeat today reported that Ge.tt just got 350,000 euros of funding from skype founder Niklas Zennström, with dropbox currently valued at $5 Billion and box.net being used by about 75% of Fortune 500 companies, is there place for one more file sharing service. I think there’s place for a whole lot more.

All these file sharing services have pros and cons attached to them, and file sharing has it’s nuanced differences. Freelance photographers sharing photos with clients have different requirements from friends sharing videos or documents with each other, file sharing is a diverse business, and the differences between free, premium and even free-mium means there’s a lot of place for everyone to play. I think Ge.tt is filling in some niches that neither dropbox or box.net is hoping to go to. In terms of security, usability, price and scalability, (these are just some of the metrics people use to decide which service to use), there’s a lot of untapped markets to be found and exploited!

Cloud Computing: Turning IT into a utility

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:27:20 +0000

Cloud computing is already lowering the barrier to entry for new startups to essentially $0 hardware cost. Of course the cost itself isn’t zero, but what cloud computing has done is turn that cost from a Capital Expenditure to a Operating Expenditure. So instead of buying expensive servers, switches, racks and house them in expensive data centers, you can instead rent these devices …with no money down, and in most cases a lot cheaper than if you rented the actual physical hardware yourself.

So what’s the catch?

Large Corporations usually have service providers that provide services to us that we otherwise ‘would prefer not to run’. These services are core components of our business and critical for business operations…but it’s just that we’d rather not invest money/resources and expertise running the servers and software. We’d prefer someone else to do it for us.

Amazon releases new icons for AWS

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:55:37 +0000

Amazon Web Services has formed the IAAS backbone of many corporations IT infrastructure, through it’s various tools and offerings you can do almost everything under the sun on the cloud. You can spin EC2 instances till they merge together to become one giant super-computer, you can host webpages on their Simple Storage Solution (S3) platform which offers nearly limitless storage, you can even host that data on edge servers via CloudFront to reduce load times, and the list of offerings go on and on.

Cloud investment: Is Cisco the next big thing?

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:01:43 +0000

Well technically Cisco is a big thing already, a company that by itself is defining the internet as we speak with mind-blowing efficiency. Sure, Huawei thinks they’re catching up, but the truth is Cisco is in a league of it’s own, literally.

Today, I bumped through 2 articles I thought were pretty interesting. Cloudbeat, a blog I just recently subscribed to, reported that Cisco thinks “that global traffic generated by cloud computing services will increase a staggering 12 times by 2015 compared to cloud traffic in 2010, while data center traffic will increase at a less-showy-but-still-impressive four times by 2015”. Now that’s a whole bunch load of traffic the internet is going to have to contend with, more interestingly though I was surprised that it was Cisco who did the study, not Amazon or Microsoft or Rackspace, not any traditional cloud computing company? Why would Cisco be so interested in checking out cloud traffic?

IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS: What do they mean?

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:18:55 +0000

With the advent of cloud computing came the dawn of new terms for acronym savvy geeks to drool over, one of the most famous groups of these acronyms are the ‘aaS’ acronyms. These are the acronym that start with a letter or two and then end with an ‘aaS’.

Cloud computing isn’t fully defined right now, formal definitions usually naturally evolve once adoption rates reach a certain threshold. At the moment that threshold isn’t yet reached, so we don’t yet have a fully agreed upon definition. However, it’s a common understanding that the cloud comes in various flavors, 3 ‘major’ flavors to be exact. Iaas, Paas and Saas.

The ‘aaS’ stands for ‘as a Service’ , and it means that whatever it was that preceded it now can be treated as a service, and before we begin to move into that, it’s important to define what exactly a service is and why is everybody offering stuff as a service.

In the realm of selling stuff, the general categorization of ’things you can sell’ is basically products or services. No matter what you sell, regardless of where and when you’re selling it, everything you sell is either a product (an actual tangible ’thing’) or a service (less tangible but requiring effort). So basically every business revolves around the sale of either a product or a service or both.

Security on the Cloud: Does PCI compliance matter

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:33:19 +0000

The main concern companies have in migrating to the cloud is security. That in one sentence covers cloud computing greatest hurdle, as more and more companies are beginning to see the benefits (economically) of moving their infrastructure and data to the cloud, the major turn-off is control. In essence, the greatest advantage of cloud computing is also it’s biggest detractor. Companies (especially non-IT companies) are really interested in letting someone else run their IT infrastructure, but their uncomfortable letting someone else run the IT infrastructure due to the security concerns.

In my work, I often deal with PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), which is a benchmark of sorts on how secure your servers are. In the banking world, any application,system or vendor hoping to store, transmit or process credit card information needs to be PCI-DSS compliant. If you thought pronouncing the acronym was difficult, adhering to and complying to the standard is even more so. In fact, the direction now is to use certain ’tricks’ to avoid having to be PCI-DSS compliant, including implementing point-2-point encryption (thereby disregarding the need for PCI-DSS compliance on all intermediary systems) or using tokenazation (to replace the card number with a token that can redeemed from a secure vault). The main direction is clear, compliance to security standards is mandatory and non-negotiable, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming, and anything that can help reduce the effort and cost is really taking off (just ask shift4).

What the Jetsons can teach us about predicting the future

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:43:26 +0000

Day 3 of my 30 challenge to blog everyday, and I’m already running of ideas and places to blog. I’m now in the waiting room of a my car workshop waiting as the foreman changes the tyres on my car. A couple of years ago, working in these environments would be unthinkable, you could either go to the workshop or work from the office, you couldn’t do both, but now…I can.

A couple of years before that, everyone was bunkered down with wired connection that made silly noises when connecting, in the good ol’ days we used to call that dial-up, rewind just a tad-bit more and you’d reach a age where you had to wired up to make a phone call. No cellphones and if you wanted to contact someone you’d have to have their 7 digit phone number and a pay phone to make that call from. Sounds a lot different from what we have today, but it’s true.

Amazon Cloud Player

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:33:01 +0000

Who says the cloud can’t be fun? Amazons new cloud player combines my love for the cloud with my love for AC/DC all in one box, and I’m loving every bit of it.

Those who know me, know that I’m a huge fan of Amazon, but an even bigger fan of AC/DC (the greatest rock band of ALL time.). Today, I tried to setup my google music account and as many of you know google has just launched a new cloud music player to compete with Apple and Amazon. However, I couldn’t get it to install, it kept hanging during the “connecting to internet” phase. I suspect it’s something to do with my VPN, eventually though I gave up on Google Music but not on the cloud, and so I turned to the indisputable champion of cloud technology…Amazon.

Create a torrent file to share with Amazon S3

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:09:10 +0000

As the final part of my series on stuff you can do with Amazon, I’ve already blogged about how you can share files using amazon S3 and hosting a static website on amazon S3. Now as a final part on what you can do with your FREE amazon web services account is to host a torrent file. A torrent file would allow you to share stuff online, and not pay for the full bandwidth cost of doing it, provided your leechers share the burden as well.

The concept is really simple, Amazon S3 can act as a torrent tracker as well as a storage facility, so it’s an all in one package that ensures that your torrent is tracking and there will be at least 1 tracker :)

Sharing Files using Amazon S3

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:43:46 +0000

There are a couple of ways you can share files on the web for free, for instance you can create a website to share your files (although that depends on whether you have a hosting plan) or you use websites like minus.com to share it (but they have limits to the file size etc etc). For sharing large files like your wedding photos, may require you fork out a bit of cash to truly have unlimited downloads and good connectivity.

If you’ve got a large 1GB file for example you’re hoping to send out to a bunch of friends and colleagues, your best bet may be Amazons Simple Storage Service (S3). The reason why I like S3, is that just like everything else with Amazon it’s a pay as you use model, which means there are no monthly fix fees and the moment your files stop becoming the flavor of the month, you’ll stop paying bandwidth for it. Plus I’m applying for a job at Amazon and hopefully this scores me some points :)

Wordpress on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:50:14 +0000

A couple of days ago, I met some guys from Amazon web services strutting their stuff out in a brilliant presentation about cloud computing. Now I must admit I haven’t been the most ardent cloud computing follower (I wasn’t really sure what it meant) , but I was ‘converted’ by these guys….to the point where I wanted to dive in and learn about the cloud.

And in keeping with my belief that the best way to learn is to do, I decided to host a website on Amazon Web Services and see if it really could be setup in minutes (as promised by Amazon). Amazon also promised year long free trial of their EC2 platform, basically you get a very small virtual machine hosted on Amazon for free (for a whole year), which was too damn ridiculous to turn down. So if Amazon was spot on their promises you could setup a wordpress site on Amazon in minutes AND it would cost you nothing for the first year…now that IS interesting.