Super Computer 10, AWS SC10

Amazon Web service super computer 10 (AWS SC10), is a nice service added by Amazon along with its long list of great features that it has to offer its clients, this feature has been built to fulfil the researchers and people needs for high performance computing resources.... For more information about SC10 visit: http://aws.amazon.com/sc10/

You can also have a look on this nice video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnOGzKP4Vdc

I didn't try it yet, but will give it a shot soon isA :) ...

Another Cloud Day on the road :)

Last Saturday, we had another cloud day, it was amazing, I was so happy and satisfied with the level of awareness we are getting in Egypt about the cloud computing different topics and technologies.

We had different topics, presented by very knowledgeable speakers, who excelled in presenting and rallying their sessions in a very effective way, I was pleased to have them and work with them for this day.

What really disappointed us in the Egypt Cloud Forum Team, that we were trying our best managing attendees number since registration to the event was closed, and we tried to get more spaces, after all this, many of registered people did not show up, we felt bad as we knew others were waiting for any sign of spaces, we tried to call as many as we could from the waiting list, but generally this let us feel sad, why we don't really take a professional commitment in our life, we need this for better results, and better Egypt.

I hope we get to be better in all life aspects, we need this in the coming period, we really need to be sincere and committed, and work hard, each in his field.

My first visit to the Egyptian Cloud Computing Center in Assuit..An Experiment to our New Upper Egypt

Last week, I had a great opportunity to lecture in the ITI cloud computing center in Assuit, it was an amazing experience, I met students studying the cloud computing track their Assuit branch, instructors, cloud engineers at the cloud center itself.

Well, the trip was for two days after an agreement between my company Intel, and the ITI in the context of the cooperation protocol and framework to exchange the cloud industry experience and the cloud development for the ITI graduates.

In the first day I’ve introduced to the students an overview about cloud computing and its related technologies and the second day I went through some aspects of the cloud security…

People were enthusiastic, thrilled and eager to know about the topic and honestly I didn’t hesitate to tell them all what I know about the topic and reply all of their questions …

I went to the cloud data center, though not yet complete or production-ready, but was impressed, they are on the right track, and the engineers who are working and operating the center are very good and young who are willing to know more about the technology behind this cloud data center.. i felt like i'm not in upper Egypt as we've always stereotyped.

I went through different sessions; with the whole team or on an individual-basis meeting to discuss each one issue individually… and was happy to see their responses and how well-educated and passionate about what they are doing, i missed this feeling lately, and after revolution i wanted so much to feel it out

Students at Assuit ITI are different, they are still featured or recognized with the virginity and purity of the country people … I liked talking with them all … I believe these people with some coaching and mentoring will rock it all around! :)

I left with great hope in our people, IT ones, and non-IT from all people I've met in this short visit, with promises to see them again, and hope to see many like them, I hope we sharpen the saw well, our minds are hungry for science and achievement, our hearts are awaiting for more happiness after our Great Egyptian revolution!

Database.com -- The cloud database service

Salesforce.com has launched Database.com, an enterprise cloud database designed for building the next generation of cloud, mobile and social applications. Database.com is an open database that will offer numerous benefits to users by providing automatic scalability, backups and upgrades, along with some additional features such as prebuilt social data model.

This service will be available by 2011 and will be offered for free for three users with up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions per month. Beyond this, users will have to pay $10 a month for each set of 100,000 records, and an additional $10 a month for each set of $150,000 transactions. you can check the pricing here, http://www.database.com/pricing

One important thing related to this innovative service is the security concerns, and for this the company said that service has received ISO 27001, SAS 70 Type II and SysTrust as security certifications. It also offers SSL, single sign-on, identity confirmation, and anti-phishing tools. Secure access is also strengthened by the user and role-based security and row-level data security.

I'm looking forwards to try this service ...!

Amazon and Wikileaks

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is on longer hosting WikiLeaks (250,000+ classified State Department documents and cables that include disclosures about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, candid comments from world leaders and numerous other revelations of confidential matters. Amazon states that it terms of use ... and this is raises a flag about cloud vendors and their governance of users data hosted at their infrastructure!

I've found and interesting article about Amazon kicking off wikileaks site from EC2 cloud instances, and liked to share it with you ...

Skills needed to shift to the cloud

Many people asked me about the skills needed when they want to shift to the cloud computing ?!



Interesting question actually, and I'll try to write down my thoughts about this ...

Well, Cloud computing won’t run without people. IT experts will still need to supply core business functions and applications ..

As most companies will run some of their technology inside the cloud (adopt to the cloud) and others will run outside the cloud (on premises or I'll call it in their private cloud setup). Such models will require strong service management between these internal and external setups.

Example for this is some organizations will still need to use networked systems and some integration services and network engineers will still have to solve routing and management problems and challenges. All of these skills of an IT person and IT needs won't disappear by adopting to the cloud.

A new mindset will be needed to adapt to the change as well, by learning new cloud management tools (hypervisor and infrastructure management tools), the deployment models, the development platforms and the way the application is being deployed to any cloud provider.

This is on the technical side of the issue.

On the management side the manager who manages a project or business deployed into the cloud will need to learn some skills like:

• Negotiation skills, in order to negotiate on service SLA with his/her clients and also to resolve conflicts.
• Process management, every manager will need to have some skills related to the process management, configuration management, change management, release management etc.
• Cloud market is rapidly changing and evolving ... so business owners and managers should cope with the market needs with the agility and velocity needed to cope with these changes.
• Innovation, as the cloud market is full of new opportunities.
  

So, generally speaking, shifting to cloud needs a very flexible and open-minded kind of personality ...

Hope this can help in answering this frequent question ...

A new rootkit-detection system for Virtualized environment

A new rootkit-detection system has been developed by IBM, and it has been implemented facilitate the detection of malicious attacks on virtualized environment.

IBM call it 'IBM Virtual Protection System', and it operates outside the virtual machine and it is able to identify malicious software when it is installed in any of the guest virtual machines hosted on the physical server.

Being outside of the virtual machine's operating system it can detect hard-to-identify problems such as rootkits.

It also gives the administrators a single security product to run across virtual machines, said JR Rao, a senior manager with IBM security research. "I don't want to have 10 copies of antivirus running there," he said. "If one firewall can protect 10 of these virtual machines, that's what I want to do."

The big blue put a nice efforts towards cloud and virtualization security by this system.