I had run into GapMinder some time ago, but was reminded of it when I encountered this talk that Ola Rosling[1] gave at Gov 2.0 Summit[2] that really makes it clear how the visualization of data — especially visualizing data over time — can give us valuable insights into trends in the physical and social world(s). Their Trendalyzer software is used by Google…as you’ll see in this presentation. [Read more…]
Security in the Cloud – Matey, there be challenges ahead
Being a user of and a promoter of cloud computing, I am also aware of challenges to the security of cloud computing environments. Cloud computing suppliers come in several flavors. I’ll address two of them here: 1) those who provide virtual hosts; and 2) those who provide automatically-scalable hosting solutions without distinguishable hosts.
A virtual host looks like an actual server. You (or your programmer/sysadmin) can use it as if it were your own dedicated server. In fact, however, it is only a portion of a much larger server. Rackspace/Mosso, and Slicehost are two I’ve discussed and actually use. The focus is on the virtual server.
An automatically-scalable hosting solution is a service or set of services which are hosted on one or more computers, and you can’t actually tell how big the server is or for that matter, whether it’s a whole array of servers. The focus is on the virtual service (not the server itself).
What’s good: Virtual servers are a more secure environment than shared servers because you are only dependent on your own security efforts. (On a shared server, if another user picks a poor password, or doesn’t upgrade their PHP software when security upgrades are released, you can be hacked if their account is compromised.) Automatically-scalable hosts may also be secure in this same way if accounts are adequately protected from each other.
What’s bad: A root compromise of a virtual server may be possible. In fact, it’s probably inevitable that such things will happen. And if you don’t update your underlying software (like WordPress, for instance), they you’re likely to be in trouble anyway. So ultimately any server can be compromised.
“Cloud-clobbering” (talk – is cheap)— cloud servers may become a target for hackers.at the 7th Hack in The Box Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur.
I’ve written about “economic denial-of-sustainability” attacks, in which an attacker causes a cloud user to so scale up their server usage that it becomes economically impossible for the defender to survive. These wouldn’t be possible if there were no cloud computing.
Is the Sidekick failure a cloud failure?
When all data for Sidekicks got lost recently [read this article in the Wall Street Journal] was it a cloud failure or was it a single system failure?[1] [also New York Times article]
In the sense that data was being stored somewhere and the customer didn’t know where it was, then yes it was a cloud failure. But I contend that it was also a failure caused by the existence of a single-point-of-failure. (As system developers, this is our constant nightmare.) The product/service was set up to use a single data service with (apparently) inadequate backup. That created the possibility of this single-point-of-failure. The real failure was that T-Mobile didn’t provide the option to back up your data in a location under your control, so that you could later on restore it if the central service went down. [Read more…]
Slicehost- Tomcat installation on a tiny virtual server
Geek alert! This article is for Slicehost geeks only.
Talk about playing on the edge, I almost fell off this time. I have eight slices (virtual servers, that is) on Slicehost (which is now owned by Rackspace) and believe me they are tiny![1] But they can serve low-volume to medium-volume web sites pretty well. For instance, Shaping Youth (several thousand visitors a day) and GirlsHorseClub are on these little servers and they serve up pretty rapidly.[2] Nice thing about Slicehost is that any host can be scaled up from the tiny size to 16x that size, and because it’s cloud computing, you can also bring up multiple instances of any server and have them share load. This allows me to implement the traditional three-tiered architecture (web/application/database) quite well without having to worry about whether my servers will be able to handle the load because I can scale ’em up whenever I need to.
But, the catch is that when you start with the tiniest slice (256MB RAM) you really have to fine-tune your operating system and applications in order to get good performance out of them. [Read more…]
All those watches! All that bandwidth?
Being on the road mid-summer, and having to watch my use of bandwidth, I noticed an uptick in the number of spam messages encouraging me to buy cheap watches; or more watches; or fabulous watches; well, you get the drift. Since I already have enough watches, I would like to ignore these messages, but rather than cause me to look at other folks’ wrists, they have caused me to look at the ticking clock of my broadband network usage.
The issue is the use of bandwidth by these messages, and for that matter, the use of bandwidth by everything else. Bandwidth, in spite of our living in the Internet age, was a recurring theme for the entire Traveling Geeks crew. We were on BT Mobile Broadband, which for the most part was reliable. I’d say that we varied between a high of 2.5mbps (mega bits per second) and a low of 4kbps (4k, yes), but if you disregard speed, we seemed to have access almost everywhere in London and Cambridge. Service winked out for a few minutes on the road between London and Cambridge, but regardless of that, there were several geeks online using their laptop computers during the entire bus journey that morning. And I used BTOpenZones, which is a commercial service provided via wi-fi in public places, cafes and hotels. We were given complementary service by BT[1] and I can see that an average (non-business) user is going to get pretty good service for £10 to £15 a month, but heavy users are going to be bumping against the account limitations and the issue for the geeks is really how much data we are pushing into the cloud. I uploaded a couple of really large videos one day, and overstepped the 4GB cap on my account without knowing it. So BT “topped-up” the account for me, but several of the geeks seem to have hit their limit more than once.
Although I travel a fair amount, I’m seeing that bandwidth is hard to find. Even with wi-fi access, I’m getting top speeds in the 100kbps to 200kbps range. I’m gathering that it is because I’m sharing the connection with others, and yes it does seem that speeds are best in the early morning when few people would be online – and that they can be pretty low when another geek in the same hotel is uploading video – so perhaps shared bandwidth is the real issue.
[1] Disclosures: BT Corporate gave the Traveling Geeks free wi-fi and broadband modem access during our trip to the UK.
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