March 2010 AWSome Meeting - Cloud Security

Last night’s AWSome Atlanta meeting was about Virtualization and Cloud Security topics. Taylor Banks presented about 50 slides on the different things to pay attention to, first in a virtualized environment, then in a Cloud. He correctly pointed out that all the issues with virtualization are also present in a Cloud environment, so make sure you get them right the first time.

Taylor was a good presenter, though I do wonder when he managed to get a breath in. He talked a lot, but he wasn’t rambling. He was noticeably excited and involved in the materials he was presenting.

Very early on he presented an new acronym that I think I’ll start using : K.I.S.S.M.Y.A.S.S

Meaning:
Keep It Simple, Stupid Make Your Architecture Simpler to Secure

Yes he mentioned it a few more times during the presentation.

He also said something very profound:

Cloud Security is often more of a process than technology

Yes securing the servers and services is important, but aren’t you already doing that in your self-hosted environments? So Cloud Security is about making decisions about what data you are sharing, how important the data is, what formats you are protecting it in and who can access it.

Taylor also took a few shots at the pundits around Cloud Security and did a pretty funny impression of a DBA. He had a comical routine about how giving two different DBAs identical SQL Server instances in a VM, but only telling one that it was a VM. You can guess what he was making fun of ;-)

The presentation is here.

Taylor’s twitter handle is @TaylorBanks.

AWSome Atlanta February 2010

Last night’s AWSome Atlanta meeting was one of the best attended that I can remember. The main topic was the Chef configuration management tool for computer infrastructures. The crowd was a mix of the ‘usual suspects’ and quite a few new faces.

During the usual introduction from John Willis we learned there were a number of consultants, end users and a few academics in the crowd. Probably half indicated they were starting to learn about Cloud Computing.

Josh Timberman @jtimberman from Opscode presented about Chef, the concepts behind it and ways to use it in your environment. His presentation was good, but it took a few minutes to get a ‘big picture’ view of what he talked about. However once you understood the goal was to standup a new server (or upgrade an existing server) consistently the materials made a lot of sense.

One of the more interesting things I learned about Chef is they are in beta of a SaaS version where they (Opscode) will host the Chef server which can then be reached via a client within EC2, Rackspace etc. or within your own environment. This is interesting because it removes the need to have a server hosted someplace other than the IaaS provider for the Chef cookbooks and recipes. (Thus no need for IT resources.)

The 30 second overview of Chef: you create recipes and cookbooks for the applications and configurations you need to standup a server. So you can create an “apache 2, Tomcat 6, JDK 6.10 MySoftware 2.00” recipe that knows how to install and configure an exact copy of the environment you want. And do it repeatedly without any intervention or manual steps. (The full explanation took an hour, so there is a lot more to it though.)

Very useful when you are in the cloud and spinning up new instances, but also useful in an internal environment when you need to bring up a new server due to hardware failure (or faster boxes!) or when you want to quickly deploy a new version of software.

Consider building a new Chef recipe for the next release of your software. You create a new server, validate against QA then just change the configuration that defines the production locations/databases etc. No manual check lists, no forgetting about a new service or cron job.

After Josh’s presentation we had about an hour of open discussion. Lots of topics, including EC2, where the cloud is going to impact business, my views on the return of the ISV and a short religious discussion on Ruby ;-) (Sorry Keith)

I hope the new folks got enough out of the session to keep coming back.

Opscode can be found here.

AWSome Atlanta can be found here.

ControlTier Presentation At AWSome Atlanta

A co-worker of mine presented about how we are using ControlTier at AWSome Atlanta.

I missed the presentation due to a softball tournament for my daughter, but heard it was great. Watching/Listening to the video I have to agree!

AWSome Atlanta ControlTier Demo