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Following Google’s Lead on Security? Don’t Forget to Encrypt Cookies In the wake of Google’s revelation that its GMail service had been repeatedly attacked over the past year the search engine goliath announced it would be moving to HTTPS (HTTP over SSL) by default for all GMail connections. For users, nothing much changes except that all communication with GMail will be encrypted in transit using industry standard SSL, regardless of whether they ask for it by specifying HTTPS as a protocol or not. In the industry we generally refer to this as an HTTPS redirect, and it’s often implemented by automatically rewriting the URI using a load balancing /... posted @ Friday, January 15, 2010 3:10 AM | Feedback (5)

When Did Specialized Hardware Become a Dirty Word? If you’re just trading “specialized” hardware for “dedicated” hardware you’re losing more than you’re gaining.  Apparently I have not gotten the memo detailing why specialized hardware is a Very Bad Thing(TM) . I’ve looked for it, I really have, but I cannot find it anywhere. What I did find was any number of random press releases announcing how “virtual version X” of some network or application infrastructure solution was now virtualized and hey, you don’t specialized hardware to run it. These random press releases neglect, I might add, to mention that there's very little difference between the requirement... posted @ Monday, January 11, 2010 3:21 AM | Feedback (9)

Grokking the Goodness of MapReduce and SPDY Certainly no one would seriously argue that web applications are fast enough for everyone. SPDY is one suggested solution, but what if we combine MapReduce and SPDY? Could we develop an architectural solution that leverages the best of SPDY without requiring entire infrastructure changes to support a new protocol? More than a couple of people have mentioned Map/Reduce as a means to achieve workload-level distribution of applications in a cloud computing environment. I hadn’t looked into Map/Reduce but finally decided that if that many very smart people were thinking it was a solution, I should look into it.... posted @ Wednesday, December 02, 2009 3:14 AM | Feedback (0)

Google SPDY Protocol Would Require Mass Change in Infrastructure Google’s desire to speed up the web via a new protocol is laudable, but the SPDY protocol would require massive changes across networks to support ArsTechnica had an interesting article on one of Google’s latest projects, a new web protocol designed to replace HTTP called SPDY. SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection. This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without... posted @ Tuesday, November 17, 2009 4:20 AM | Feedback (2)

Virtualization Changes Application Deployment But Not Development Cloud computing management functionality and standards are right now laser-focused on virtual machines, and most APIs include the ability to stop,start,launch,etc…at that level of the infrastructure. This is because the application is still insulated by its virtualized environment. The “depth” of management and standards efforts today stops at the hard shell of the virtualization layer and leaves the soft, chewy application center alone. This means nothing is really all that different for developers. But it could, and some might argue should, be different.   The development of a web-application for a cloud computing environment today is really... posted @ Monday, November 09, 2009 3:57 AM | Feedback (3)

Meh. It’s Just Data. All the applause over Google’s Data Liberation Front announcement and blogs is making my head hurt. Or maybe that’s the lack of sleep. Either way, it’s disconcerting to me that so many bright people are choosing to make much of what is just a baby step – if that - toward a much larger, much more difficult goal. After all, data without an application to interpret and make use of it is about as useful as a Netbook without a network connection. There seems to suddenly be a lot of focus on “data” and the ability for... posted @ Tuesday, October 20, 2009 3:14 AM | Feedback (0)

Duty Calls: Data Portability in The Cloud is an Application Integration Problem, Not a Cloud Problem Spectacular “cloud” failures over the past few weeks have raised the hue and cry for portability and interoperability across clouds for data.The problem is that the cry is based on the false assumption that a “cloud service” is the same as an “application service.” Apparently Microsoft felt Google and Amazon were getting too much attention with their recent outages and decided to join the game. The absolute loss of data for thousands lots and lots of T-Mobile Sidekick users is regrettable and yes someone needs to address such issues but that someone is not a standards group or... posted @ Monday, October 12, 2009 9:06 AM | Feedback (2)

The Cloud Metastructure Hubub How Infrastructure 2.0 might leverage publish-subscribe technology like PubSubHubub to enable portability of applications across clouds and data centers Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. One of the topics surrounding cloud computing that continues to rear its ugly head is the problem of portability across clouds. Avoiding vendor lock-in has been problematic since the day the first line of proprietary code was written and cloud computing does nothing to address this. If anything, cloud makes this worse because one of its premises is that users (that’s you, IT staff) need not... posted @ Monday, September 14, 2009 3:45 AM | Feedback (1)

Facepalm: Google Wave Choice of XMPP Not the Death of HTTP Google didn’t kill HTTP. Neither did Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum. In fact, HTTP is still very much alive. Okay, folks, it’s time to stop declaring the death of protocols/technologies prematurely. Please? Especially when such proclamations are clearly not representative of reality. From ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud In Google's announcement what I found most fascinating was the protocol they choose for the basis of their new realtime vision. It wasn't HTTP but instead XMPP was selected as the foundation for this decentralized and interoperable vision. What this means in... posted @ Tuesday, June 02, 2009 3:47 AM | Feedback (20)

Cloud outages don’t bother Stanley Cloud may change the definition of “business critical” applications Google outages are rapidly becoming as passé as earthquakes to native Californians; unless it’s a really big one, no one really pays much attention. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Google’s latest “crash” (caused by some interesting routing problems, apparently) evinced an attitude of nonchalance from Stanley. Who is Stanley? I don’t know, except that he was quite vocal about the outage and his opinion that he was “not really bothered by it.” Google Crashes Again on Friday Stanley Was wrote: Wednesday May 27 from around 8pm till shortly after midnight, I... posted @ Monday, June 01, 2009 5:32 AM | Feedback (0)

Can the Cloud survive regulation? One of the greatest strengths of the Cloud is that, like the Internet, it knows no boundaries. It crosses industry and international boundaries as if they do not exist. But as is often the case, your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. Take Google, for example, and it’s myriad Cloud-based application offerings. A new complaint made by Epic (Electronic Privacy Information Center) to the US Federal Trade Commission urges the regulatory agency to “consider shutting down Google’s services until it establishes safeguards for protecting confidential information.”  From a recent FT.com article: ... posted @ Thursday, March 26, 2009 5:47 AM | Feedback (0)

Cloud Fail: Who and How is more important than What and Where According to the definition of cloud computing used by Avanade for a recently released and often cited study on the use of cloud computing, I could claim to be a cloud computing provider. And so could you. Basically, so could just about everyone who happens to run web-based applications accessed over the Internet. From the summary of the report: In the midst of widespread economic turmoil, this global survey of C-level executives and IT decision-makers shows a clear, collective mandate: use technology to cut the cost of doing business. ... posted @ Tuesday, March 03, 2009 2:59 AM | Feedback (2)

The New, New Math of Cloud It’s been a long time since I had the (mis)fortune to sit in a math class, so bear with me while I figure this out. In order to determine my daily budget for the application I am hosting with Google’s App  Engine, I need to sum the results of the standard deviation of the derivative of yesterday’s CPU utilization, multiplied by the bandwidth used divided by pi and then multiple the whole thing by the number of e-mail messages sent by the application. Got that? Go. 5…4…3…2…1 Pencils down. What? Not finished yet? Okay, I’m being... posted @ Thursday, February 26, 2009 4:07 AM | Feedback (1)

Approaching cloud standards with end-user focus only is full of fail If you’re looking at standardization and interoperability efforts only as they relate to providers or end-users then you’re not thinking long term nor are you really considering the potential of cloud computing and virtualization to revolutionize data center architectures. In a nutshell, if you equate “cloud” with “providers like Amazon and Google” then you don’t really get the big picture. While the ultimate goal of cloud specifications and standards is to enable interoperability and ease of migration for the end-user, approaching the creation of such standards from the point of view of the end-user will result in a... posted @ Monday, February 23, 2009 4:06 AM | Feedback (4)

As a Service: The many faces of the cloud Last month I happened across this amusing, and ironic, poem describing the dichotomy that exists in trying to define cloud computing. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait, it's worth the time. Seriously. I am not going to define cloud computing again. I've done that already and the point of this discussion is not what is cloud computing but rather how the cloud is beginning to separate into distinct models, each serving a different set of needs. The common theme between these models is "as a service". Some "thing" traditionally relegated to the local IT data center is... posted @ Thursday, November 20, 2008 3:12 AM | Feedback (1)

Amazing Application Acceleration: Simultaneously improve productivity, efficiency, and performance As a general rule, we spend far more time worrying about external appearances than we do internal. We are more concerned with our external web applications and how they look - and perform - than we are likely to regarding our intranet or internal only applications. This blog post was interesting in that rather than encouraging folks to optimize web sites and improve end-user response time for web applications for the sake of the user experience, it focused on the relationship between page load time and impact on Google AdWords quality scores. Which is a bit different than... posted @ Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:36 AM | Feedback (0)

The Soft Risks of Social Networking Just about every large organization, a whole lot of startups, are trying to leverage the potential of social media in their marketing efforts. We all read great articles containing tips and tricks regarding how to use social media for business purposes, and how to gauge whether or not we are successful. The discussions often ignore the risks, especially the soft risks, of engaging the market and so-called citizen journalists at the Internet's watercoolers. Soft risks are always part of the equation of the return on investment for a product or piece of software. Soft risks are... posted @ Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:10 AM | Feedback (0)

Google claims analyst research firm site is an attack site, serving up malware I was reading an interesting article on the return on investment for WAN Optimization solutions as discussed by analyst research firm Aberdeen and decided to download the complimentary copy of the report. Reports are generally offered as PDF downloads, not displayed in Macromedia FlashPaper, so it was not easily obtainable for sharing with friends. However, there's a nice "e-mail to a friend" link so I clicked on it, thinking of many folks I know who might be interested in this report. The next thing I know my screen is screaming at me with a warning about malicious content... posted @ Friday, October 10, 2008 6:00 AM | Feedback (3)

Cloud computing conundrum causing confusion It seems that every time a new technology breaks through the surface a hundred "experts", vendors, and standards-bodies appear like moths to a flame attempting to define the term such that only "they" have the answer, the solution, the standard, or the product.  When my son mentioned a research paper he wrote on cloud computing (which you still haven't sent me, by the way) he did so while disagreeing with a previous post of mine on the subject. He was quite vehement that grid computing did not equal cloud computing, and seemed almost shocked that I would dare... posted @ Monday, September 29, 2008 11:07 AM | Feedback (0)

My application is not the next Twitter so why should I care about high availability? It often seems that load balancing and high availability are associated with only high traffic sites, like Twitter and Google. But load balancing and high availability isn't just for Web 2.0 phenomenons or web monsters; it can be an invaluable tool in your strategy to maintain service level agreements and customer satisfaction no matter how large or small your customer base - and data center - might be. ... posted @ Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:34 AM | Feedback (3)

Cloudware and information privacy: TANSTAAFL Ars Technica is reporting on a recent Pew study on cloud computing and privacy, specifically concerning remote data storage and the kind of data-mining performed on it by providers like Google, indicates that while consumers are concerned about the privacy of their data in the cloud, they still subject themselves to what many consider to be an invasion of privacy and misuse of data. 68 percent of... posted @ Monday, September 15, 2008 7:07 AM | Feedback (0)

Is the URL headed for the endangered technology list? Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Social Computing, Forrester Research, tweeted recently on the subject of Chrome, Google's new open source browser. Jeremiah postulates: Chrome is a nod to the future, the address bar is really a search bar.  URLs will be an anachronism. That's an interesting prediction, predicated on the ability of a browser translate search terms into destinations on the Internet. Farfetched? Not at all. After all, there already exists a layer of obfuscation between a URL and an Internet destination; one that translates host names into IP addresses,... posted @ Thursday, September 04, 2008 4:52 AM | Feedback (2)

Google Gmail: The Lawn Darts of the Internet This blog on the inadvertent sharing of Google docs led to an intense micro-conversation in the comments regarding the inadvertent sharing of e-mail. sensitive financial data, and a wealth of other private data that remained, well, not so private through that [cue scary music] deadly combination that makes security folks race for their torches and pitchforks: Google Apps and Gmail. [pause for laughter on my part. I can't say that without a straight face]   Here's part of the "issue" "discovered" by the author: Closer examination of the spreadsheets, along with some online... posted @ Friday, August 29, 2008 3:03 AM | Feedback (3)

Three Web Application Vulnerabilities You Need to Know Via Hacker News and Peteris Kumins' blog on programming, hacking, software reuse and stuff comes the latest Google tech talk, this one on web application vulnerabilities and "how cybercriminals steal money". While Peteris and Google are targeting web developers with this informative video talk, it's a great resource as well for security folks as well as network administrators tasked with understanding how to thwart web application attacks. Even if you've deployed a web application firewall to protect you from these kinds of vulnerabilities, it's still a great idea to watch this one and get a better... posted @ Friday, July 18, 2008 12:52 PM | Feedback (1)

Honey? Does this format make my data look fat? CNet is reporting that Google is ditching XML for a faster, more compact alternative known as ProtocolBuffers. I'm going to type this post really fast before Don finds out and starts laughing at me because he's always had this thing against XML, claiming it was too bloated and slow. Apparently Google, the 800-pound gorilla, is on Don's side of this argument, as it just blogged about its newest creation, ProtocolBuffers. From CNet's Blog PostGoogle thought of using XML as a lingua franca to send messages between its different servers. But XML can be complicated to work with... posted @ Wednesday, July 09, 2008 4:31 AM | Feedback (10)