On the heels of HP’s news of not-quite abandoning the Cloud, there is coverage of how AWS stole a march on Sun’s plans to provide compute-on-demand. The timeline for AWS starts late 2003 when an internal team in Amazon hatched a plan that among other things could offer virtual servers as a retail offering. Sun’s offering involved […]
Continuing from my last post where I hinted about the big distributed systems problem involved in managing a CloudStack Basic Zone. It helps to understand how CloudStack is architected at a high level. CloudStack is typically operated as a cluster of identical Java applications (called the “Management Server” or “MS”). There is a MySQL database that holds the desired […]
In my last post I argued that security groups eliminate the need for network security devices in certain parts of the datacenter. The trick that enables this is the network firewall in the hypervisor. Each hypervisor hosts dozens or hundreds of VMs — and provides a firewall per VM. The figure below shows a typical setup, with […]
The answer: not really, but the question needs examination. One of the causes of the financial crisis of 2008 was the flawed ratings of complex financial instruments by supposed experts (ratings bodies such as S&P). Instruments such as CDOs comingled mortgages of varying risk levels, yet managed to get the best (AAA) ratings. The math […]
Cloudier Than Thou 