Fubaredness Is Contagious

In computer science, according to Wikipedia, abstraction is a “mechanism to reduce and factor out details so that one can focus on a few concepts at a time.”
When you hear about abstraction in the context of virtualization-based IaaS cloud computing, the most well known abstraction is computing resources themselves (encapsulation is at play here as [...]

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In December 2009, Amazon Web Services team introduced yet another innovation – spot pricing for EC2 instances. Several sites were created shortly to track spot price history by creating price charts. But price charts are relatively boring – juicy meat is in the dynamics hidden inside series of numbers which represent the price history. Let’s [...]

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As most of you probably know, I work at CohesiveFT where I focus on VPN-Cubed product. In short, it’s a solution to build overlay networks in third-party clouds. Overlay networks in this case are based on redundant encrypted point-to-point connections from your regular servers to your VPN-Cubed servers called “managers” (that you run in the [...]

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This past Thursday I had a chance to attend CloudCamp Boston that took place in Microsoft research center in Cambridge, as a representative of CohesiveFT. The event was very well attended, and I was able to meet a lot of smart interesting people working in cloud computing space.
The lightning talks section started with Microsoft representative [...]

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I have recently noticed that costs were no longer always touted as the main driver for cloud computing – some have been advocating agility as the primary reason (for example, see here). It’s one thing when this theme gets mentioned in a talk at a technology conference where a company is sharing their experiences. But [...]

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Disclaimer 1: Despite its possibly ominous name, this is NOT a network vulnerability or an attack that could lead to unauthorized access. UDP hole punching requires cooperation between two hosts, and hence can’t be easily used as an attack by itself (in other words, in order to run it, you most likely must already  have [...]

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Most of you have probably heard about a recent outage at BitBucket. In a nutshell, their systems hosted at AWS came under a UDP flood DDoS attack, which led to significantly increased traffic, which led to saturation of their local network interface, which led to their being unable to connect to their data stored on [...]

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Having been developing software to run on Amazon EC2 for over a year now, I find security groups to be among its least understood and appreciated features.
Basic Usage
In short, EC2 security group (SG) is a set of ACCEPT firewall rules for incoming packets that can apply to TCP, UDP or ICMP.  When an instance is [...]

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I left this comment on today’s post by Randy Bias titled VMWare vs Amazon… ROUND ONE… FIGHT!:
Functionality is more important, imho. As a hypothetical example, say there exists an EC2-like cloud where security groups span all regions (in EC2, as we all know, security groups are confined to a single region). Switching between EC2 and [...]

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In the stream of non-stop cloud computing chatter that was surrounding VMWorld 2009 that wrapped up last week, I noticed a pattern – folks were paying disproportionate amount of attention to API, API portability and API standardization, as opposed to actual technology concepts and constructs that are going to power new clouds.
API indeed is important [...]

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